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Brodie
Exactly two weeks after the auction, I grabbed a ride uptown in the hotel limo. Time to meet the crazy redhead who’d bid on me at the Avenue A fundraiser.
Seriously, what chick would spend so much for one lousy date? I could understand why the guys did it—there was always the possibility of getting a lay out of it. But the women who bid on guys? Were they out for a lay, too? And it’s not that my “winner” was a bad-looking woman. On the contrary, that red hair and those freckles were damn hot.
But experience told me the women who were into this were on the whacky side.
My admin Trudy was briefed, god love her, and she knew the drill. I’d send her a text just as soon as the “date” got started. She’d call me forty-five minutes later with some sort of “hotel emergency.” I’d escape.
No harm, no foul.
The driver wove through the heavy rush-hour traffic but we were moving at a snail’s pace. I still had plenty of time to get there, but I hated being late. And I hated late people, too.
Last week, I’d gotten a brief email from Nara, the woman who’d won me in the auction.
Usually, these women, once they set up our date, would send me a flurry of emails telling me more about themselves than I ever wanted to know. Maybe it was to break the ice—who knew. Either way, I would dutifully read them so our forty-five minute date wasn’t spent just staring at each other.
As always, the dates had Googled me beforehand, finding that I was the owner of the most exclusive and in-demand hotel in all of Manhattan. They liked that. They liked my money.
But if they really dug deep, they’d find the story of my father. That part, they didn’t like.
They might allude to Dad and his crimes, digging around for more info, or to get my take on the whole fiasco. But they were most always too polite to really persist in finding out more about the embezzling bastard.
And it wasn’t like I needed reminding. I was paying for his sins every day of my life, trying to make things right with the people he swindled.
Anyway, Nara’s email was different. Short, sweet, to the point. Perfunctory. No facts or details about anything, much less her life. Maybe redheads were like that?
She’d written:
Hi, Brodie. Can you meet me at Bella Stella on Park next Thursday at five? Thanks, Nara
That was it. No blathering on about her boring-ass job or that she had a really cheap, rent-controlled apartment, or how every Christmas Eve for the last ten years she went caroling with her friends.
Which was fine. She could do the talking. Forty-five minutes for charity. I could deal with that.
As we crept along Park Avenue, I took the opportunity to check on the cleanliness of the hotel limo. I was stuck sitting there, so why not?
And don’t you know…there was a condom wrapper stuffed down the seat back.
Goddammit.
Why did I look? Now I’d be pissed for the rest of the evening. Better I’d found it than some A-list hotel guest.
On the other hand, it was probably some goddamn A-list hotel guest who left it there to begin with.
Of course now that I found the wrapper, I couldn’t help but wonder where the damn condom was.
Guess the asshole who used it had taken it with him. Nice of him.
I fired off a text to Trudy to make sure the limo went through a deep clean as soon as it was back in the garage.
The shit I dealt with.
A text came in from my stepbro, Dalt:
hey, i have some folks who want to discuss your san fran expansion. call me.
I texted back:
dude. on my way out. will call in the a.m.
Yeah, baby.
He knew my business partners were douches. Ever since my dad screwed the company, which was at the time owned by all our dads, the partners had been putting me through the ringer. They were basically pains in my ass whenever they got the chance. And they got the chance a lot.
Not that I really blamed them. My dad stole from their dads, straight up, and I was trying to make it right. But sometimes, they really tested my sense of obligation. They didn’t give a crap about Hotel Vertigo. They just wanted payback.
The day they were repaid so I could get them the hell out of my life could not come soon enough.
According to an agreement worked out by the courts, until they were repaid, I had to run everything by them. I couldn’t blow my nose without their permission. Which wouldn’t have been so bad had they been decent businessmen with the ability to recognize an opportunity when they saw one.
But they’d only inherited their old man’s money, and unfortunately no business sense.
I understood it—their dads had gotten swindled by mine, but no one was more tortured by it than me. They were angry and bitter, and seemed more interested in putting the hotel out of business than making it a success so they could get their due. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
But things might be different with Dalt’s offer of help. He knew people in San Francisco who were both entrepreneurial and good investors.
People there were always looking for their next deal. They lived to take chances, more so than the folks I knew on the East Coast. And they loved hotels and restaurants.
It would be a brilliant move to expand the current New York property to San Francisco. ’Course I could always finance it myself, with my own investments, but it was always better to work with partners—as long as they were savvy business people.
It lent more legitimacy to the project.
Yes, with the right investors, I could just open something completely new and escape my shortsighted partners.
I had enough contacts in the entertainment biz to attract plenty of big name guests. Once I got those folks, the others always followed—key to making a hotel as hip and in-demand as possible.
Dalt and I hadn’t become stepbrothers until we were in high school when my mom married his dad. But when the shit hit the fan, and my father had been exposed for all his crooked dealings, Dalt had stepped up to the plate to support me.
You don’t forget something like that.
