Page 51 of The Session

Mark glanced down at his hamburger.

“I don’t know if it makes me feel any better to think this shared a flight with a liver transplant,” he replied.

“It didn’t,” the concierge said. “We just tell that to some people who are uncomfortable about the amount of effort put in.”

Mark hung up and went back to work on his burger. Shortly after he finished, there was a knock at the door. He walked over to the entrance and glanced at the video monitor. On the other side stood Blaise Cutler.

“Are you bored yet?” Blaise asked as Mark opened the door and let him in.

“I don’t think that’s the word for it. What can I do for you, Blaise?” Mark asked.

“I thought I might answer all the questions Tru deftly avoided answering for you. And also find out what kind of debauchery you’re into,” he added with a smile.

“Any bar with beer and a bunch of screens showing ball games,” Mark said.

“I think I have a place in mind, but to be honest, the Russian hookers in the car are going to be a little disappointed.”

“There aren’t hookers in the car . . . are there?”

Blaise held out his hands. “I don’t know. Would you like there to be?”

“I think a beer and some curly fries is my speed right now.”

“You sure? Have you ever tried eating curly fries off the body of a hooker?”

“No, Blaise. Nobody has, because that’s terrible and disgusting.”

“I don’t know. I’m sure somebody has an Arby’s kink somewhere, but point taken. A sports bar it is.”

Magic

Mark wasn’t surprised Blaise wanted to meet with him one-on-one. He just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. From their first encounter, it was clear the other man was trying to scope him out. Ironically, Blaise had known exactly who Mark was long before Mark found out.

Although Blaise had ordered a whiskey sour, he barely touched it and was already on his second glass of water. Mark was about to ask, then decided to keep the question to himself, preserving Blaise’s reputation as a party boy and a shark at sales. Maybe this was a sales strategy—how Blaise kept his edge when hanging with hard-partying whales.

“So what do you think of our little organization?” he asked.

“It’s a lot to wrap my head around. I met a lot of faces, and I’m not sure I know any more now than I did yesterday,” Mark admitted.

“It’s kind of like a flea market—we have a bunch of people selling different things, and everybody pays rent to the same person,” Blaise replied.

“Yeah, a lot of . . . what’s the word they called that in business class? Intrapreneurship?” Mark asked.

“You could say that. What was the most interesting thing you saw?”

“Besides my name and image plastered across every TV screen in the lobby?”

“There’s love-bombing, and then there’s strategic surgical strikes. We excel at that. My first was on my sixteenth birthday. By then, I’d become a pretty good recruiter for the tutoring program. I had reached a million dollars in sales. That sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing here. I got picked up from school in a helicopter. Granted, it was our private school and not like having it land on one of the public high school fields. But it was still pretty cool. It impressed the right people,” Blaise explained.

“That does sound pretty cool.”

“For my twenty-first birthday, I got to take a bunch of friends and race Lamborghinis in Dubai, although I had to pay for part of it.”

“Also pretty cool. For my twenty-first birthday, my friends got me drunk and left me on a golf course in my underwear,” Mark told him.

“How did they pull that one off?”

“I thought we were going to swim across the lake and avoid the alligator. Joke was on me.”