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I leave because that’s what I’m supposed to do. But… she? She has an idea?
No. That was my idea.
I’m totally a team player. I’m not a credit whore at all.
But…
She’s stealing my idea.
CHAPTER FOUR – ANDREW
“Pierce? Mr. Hawthorne is here.”
Pierce nods at Myrtle and waves me into his private office. Pierce’s office looks like someone took a French castle, whittled it down to fit into twenty-five hundred square feet, and then plopped it onto the top floor of this glass and steel monolith in the middle of the Colorado mountains. The artist in me wants to believe that he did this as an artistic choice. Like, he was making some conscious commentary on the contrast between the man-made and the nature-made. The glory of the natural world versus the grandeur of human design. The contradicting aesthetic between the new, the old, and the ancient.
But the realist in me knows that he just likes having nicer, cooler shit than everyone else.
Myrtle holds the door open for me, and as I pass by her into the space, I’m pretty sure she lets her hand graze my dick when she turns away. She’s kind of the perfect assistant for Pierce, I decide.
“Derek, I’m telling you, we are going to find out who this bitch is, and we’re going to sue her until she dies!”
He’s marching around the space, swinging a golf club in circles like it’s a weapon. Which I suppose it could be. I hate golf, so it’s torture for me either way.
“Pierce, calm down,” comes the voice from the speaker phone. The voice I assume belongs to Derek.
“Fuck you, Derek!” he yells at Derek and hangs up on him.
“Who was that?” I ask, plopping down on the Victorian-era loveseat that my friend, the editor-in-chief of Le Man magazine, keeps in his office. (Asshole. You gotta love him.)
“Goddamn attorney,” he kind of growls, still swinging his golf club around.
“Mon ami? Could you put that down before you hit something with it? Notably, me?” He throws the club to the ground, flopping down in the throne (literally—a throne) across from the loveseat. “Dude… What’s going on? Why are you so upset?”
“You heard the bitch on the radio.”
“I did.”
“Someone is trying to sabotage me!”
“Sabotage you? You don’t think that’s a little…looking for the word…hold on…oh, got it…fucking paranoid and insane? Realize that’s four words, but…”
“I’ll bet it’s one of my enemies,” he says, ignoring my question. Which is fine. It was rhetorical anyway.
“Your enemies, huh? OK, man. I’ll play. Let’s assume for a second that you’re right, and that this woman on the radio is trying to undermine your grand Sexpert idea by doing it first. What makes you think it’s one of your enemies?”
There’s a long pause as he looks out the window. Finally, he says, “Our quarterly reports came in today.”
Doesn’t feel like an answer to my question, but I go with it anyway. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Do you know how much money this magazine lost last quarter?”
“I very much do not know.”
“Seventeen percent over the same quarter last year.”
“Wow, that’s—”
“Yeah, it’s a fucking lot.”
“K. That sucks. So?”
“Man, all of our publications are taking a hit. Everything. All the newspapers. The magazines. Even the goddamn TV stations. Everything. Know why?”
“Because people don’t read or watch TV anymore?”
“Give Andrew a gold star!” He leaps to his feet, grabs up the discarded golf club, and once again, I feel like it’s only a matter of moments before I catch a nine-iron to the dome.
“So…” I start. Cautiously. “And I just want to make sure I’m tracking this… So, you’re assuming that someone who’s got a grudge against your publishing empire—”
“It’s my dad’s empire. I only run this part of the kingdom.”
“Fine. So, you think someone who’s got a grudge against your fiefdom is trying to take it down by launching a—from what I heard this morning—lightly viewed vlog about sex that happens to share the same name as an idea you had for some branded online content about sex tips. Is that what I’m hearing you say? Because that is what I’m hearing you say.”
He points the golf club at me in a way that says, J’accuse! “You got it, man.”
“OK,” I say. I don’t say the other things that are in my head. Things like, You’ve gone round the bend. Or, Not to be a dick, but it’s possible you’re just kind of bad at running a magazine and looking for reasons to explain why it’s coming undone. Or, What do you want me to do about it? Instead, I just listen.
He goes running behind his desk. “Have you seen her?”
“Seen her? No. I didn’t even know about her until you told me to turn the radio on.”
“C’mere.” He hits some keys on his computer and waves me over. “Check this shit out.”
I swing around behind his desk, pushing the golf club away from my head as I do. What I see, looking at his monitor, are two of the—and I don’t think this casually—most perfect-looking breasts I have ever seen. They’re not even naked. They’re covered by a V-neck tank-top kind of a thing. But even so. They. Are. Perfect. Holy shit. I don’t know if it’s possible for tits to have a personality, but these do. So I guess it is possible. They seem to say, Hi. We’re friendly but dangerous. And we will fucking end you, dude. I’m momentarily transported somewhere, imagining what the rest of the human who is attached to these breasts might look like.
