“What am I going to do, Ayako? I can’t jeopardize this project, and I honestly have no clue how to handle this. What if this guy wants to turn me into his sex toy? Or tries to fuck with me because he has all the leverage?”
Ayako’s face got serious then. “Melissa wouldneverlet that happen, she’d tell him to take his money and fuck off if he tried anything like that.” She held up her hand, probably guessing that I was too deep in my spiral to be reasonable. “But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s not jump to conclusions. He didn’t say anything about Friday at the meeting, and you said he tried to put you at ease. I mean you’re both adults; these things happen. You can work together; it’s not like you were involved with him or anything. It was a one-time thing.”
A lot of what she was saying made sense, but I was still coiled up in knots. Tom Hughes was too much of a temptation to underestimate the possibility of disaster.
“From what we know from this guy so far, he seems to be a decent person, who’s extremely invested in giving awaya lotof money to causes you care about.”
That was true.
So far, the one thing I knew for sure about Tom was that he was a very generous man who cared about things which were very important to me. He also had an enormous dick I’d been dreaming about since the party on Friday, but I digressed.
“We need to take this whole thing to Dr. Google,” Ayako snapped, bringing me out of my thoughts.
“Here,” she said as she pivoted her desktop monitor so I could see it. “Let’s look him up.”
I gave her his full name, and as soon as she typed it in, we saw there was atonof information about Tom on the internet. Ayako clicked on a link to aForbesmagazine article, and we both started to read in silence. After a couple of minutes Ayako whistled.
“Damn, Camilo, this dude is a legit zillionaire. Holy fuck.”
Apparently, Thomas Hughes, age forty-one, was a legend in the entrepreneurial world. Thirteen years ago, when he was twenty-eight, he’d started his company, Nuntius, while attending business school at MIT. Tom and his two best friends from the program created a service through which immigrants living overseas could pay their families’ bills back home.
If you lived in New York City and needed to pay your mom’s rent and electric bill in the Dominican Republic, you could go to the Nuntius website and for a fee, have a messenger service go take care of the payments without wiring money or having a relative lift a finger on the other side. You could do anything: payfor school or medical fees, even pay their groceries. It was like Postmates, but for bills, and it worked all over the world.
It wasbrilliant.
They initially piloted the model in the trio’s hometowns: Santo Domingo, New Delhi, and Addis Ababa. Within five years of them starting the company, smartphones made their way around the world and the Nuntius app blew up. By year six, they were operating in more than sixty countries and booming. The article Ayako and I read was written three years ago when Tom and his partners sold Nuntius forjustover a billion dollars.
I let out the long breath I’d been holding after reading the sum of money for the third time, still unable to make words. Ayako looked up from the screen and flinched when she saw my face.
“Okay this is pretty intense, and I can tell from how stiff you are right now that you’re freaking out.ButI just want to point out a couple of things before you do or say something over the top.” I just stared at her in silence, because the screaming inside my head was too loud for me to speak.
She held up a finger.
“One: Even on Friday when we knew nothing about him, we both thought he was charming and very low-key.” Another finger joined the first one. “Two: It seems this guy made his moneyworking.Also, I don’t know about you, but I think this whole story is amazing. Three immigrant kids starting a company in grad school and selling it for a billion dollars. You have to admit it’s pretty great.” I nodded slowly at that because she was right, this was the kind of story I loved. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of this guy before.
My mom didn’t really have any family left in Cuba, so we didn’t send money there. But I was sure my best friends Nesto and Patrice who had family back in DR and Haiti had probably heard of Nuntius.
I held up my hands in defeat. “Okay fine, he’s a gorgeous, smart, and generous guy who started a billion-dollar company in his twenties.” I covered my face with my hands. “I should just tell Melissa, so she can deal with him herself.”
I heard teeth sucking from the direction where Ayako was sitting and even though I couldn’t see her, I could tell she was losing her patience with my whining.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Camilo, but I would at least give him the benefit of the doubt and go to the first meeting.” Exasperation was quickly edging the sympathetic tone from earlier. “You already said you would do it. If he ends up getting an email from Melissa saying you’re bailing, it’sreallygoing to get awkward. Especially since even if you don’t meet with him regularly, you’ll still have to be in touch. It’syourproject.”
She was right, making a thing out of it was just going to make it worse. Tom had handled things like an adult, and I could, too.
I exhaled and stared at the ceiling again.
“Fine. I’ll just have to make sure to stay off his dick the next time.”
Ayako gave me her best “I have faith in you” face and squeezed my hand.
“You got this, babe.”
I was glad at least one of us thought so.
Tom
“How was the meeting?” Priya asked with enthusiasm as she munched on a graham cracker. After her snack, we’d sat Libe down for thirty minutes of TV, so Sanjay, Priya, and I finally had a moment to chat. “I’m so excited to hear about it! I was telling my colleague Anne at the hospital what you were doing, and sheraved about New Beginning. She said her friend volunteered for them and they do amazing work.”
