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“Oh, no,” Marge says as she disapprovingly wiggles her index finger at me. “You won't be using me as a shield.”
“What? Can't I just spend some time catching up with my favorite assistant ever?”
“I know your game,” she stares me down as she says, “I know all your games.”
“I'm offended. Truly.”
“You're like a little kid watching a horror movie. You get scared, so you cover your eyes,” she says as she stands up. “But then your imagination runs wild, and you imagine something even scarier than what's happening on screen.”
She grabs my arm, pulling me off her desk.
“Uncover your eyes and face whatever horror is waiting for you,” she says as she leads me a few steps towards the conference room until I start walking on my own.
As soon as I walk into the room, everyone stops talking and looks my way. This is not a good sign, but I refuse to let them see that I'm rattled. Instead, I walk over to the sideboard and take my time pouring a coffee and adding just the right ratio of sugar to cream.
When I finally have it stirred just right, I sit down across the table from everyone else and prop up my feet on the table's surface. They hired a cocky CEO, so they're getting a cocky CEO. Present crisis be damned.
“Tanner, the campaign is going great,” Greg, my chairman, says.
“So we're calling it a campaign now?” I ask.
“It's going well,” Ned interjects, “but it could be better.”
“Better?” I ask, “What do you expect us to do, fuck in the middle of the stock exchange floor?”
The board members exchange uncomfortable glances. I impatiently wait for one of them to have the guts to just say what they came here to say.
“In a way—,” another board member says. Jesus, I don't even know his name. I sit straight up and lean across the table towards them.
“What the fuck does that mean, Greg?” If I'm about to be ordered to do something I can already tell I'll hate, I want it to be my chairman that gives me the command.
“We need this to end now,” he says.
“It's great that retailers aren’t bailing anymore and the stock price is leveling off,” No-name says, “but we're not increasing our order sizes. We need to do that to make up for the losses of the last few weeks.”
“Your losses,” Ned clarifies. As if I needed to be reminded that this is my doing.
“What do I have to do?” I respond. “I took my competition with Elsa a tad too far, but now I'm taking steps to rectify it. You won't be happy until you finally nail me to your cross.”
“Tanner,” Greg says, “we have a solution that will speed this up so you can get back to your life. Just hear us out.”
Back to my life? What does that even mean? Back to fucking a new woman every night and never sharing breakfast with her because I'm too busy ushering her out of my penthouse?
And what about Elsa and me? Are we supposed to just go back to rivals that bicker at each other all the time? Sure we spar now, but it's with the knowledge that we'll fall into each other’s arms at some point during the argument.
“We're pleased with the progress you've made so far,” Ned says, like we're talking about Pretty Little Vixen's latest sales figures, not how I've whored myself out—with Elsa as a partner—for the greedy media, “but our plan will allow you to jump forward a few steps.”
“While most of the media has bought into your relationship,” No-name says, “that Langley chick isn't quite sold yet.”
“Normally, it wouldn't matter because it's just that trash rag, The Chronicle,” Greg says, “but she's got some real investigative chops.”
“So what's your foolproof plan?” I say with a sigh. I just want this meeting to be over at this point.
The members look at each other, and then one of the two, who has been silent all this time, speaks up and says, “A sex tape.”
Wesley the Weasel! Why am I not surprised that out of all of them, he would be the one to finally spit it out.
“A sex tape? Like Kim K?”
