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“Anything interesting happen?” she finally asks.
I shrug. “I met a lot of agents and repeated myself probably a dozen times. Mostly, I think a good email would have sufficed. Or maybe a Zoom call.”
She stares at me, and I get the feeling that I’m missing something. “Sorry I got home so late. I tried texting, but I guess your phone died?”
Addison’s stare gets more intense as my words hang in the air. “I got the texts.”
“Okay Addison, what did I say or do that has you acting like this? I’ve had a terrible weekend and am exhausted. Please, just talk about what’s bothering you.”
It’s like I pulled the pin on a grenade. Two seconds pass while she stares at me, and then she explodes. “You’re the new owner of Loughton House, and you didn’t tell me? What other secrets are you keeping? Were you spending the weekend in LA with a bunch of agents who happened to be women? Without clothes? Did you even go to LA?”
I blink. “Oh that. Yes, my father gave me Loughton House on Friday. Why is that such a big deal, though? I’d already decided that I was going to do what I wanted, regardless of what he expected from me. I assume the rest of the questions are just you… being you?”
Addison looks shocked, like what I said was something a lunatic would say. “You just became a real-life billionaire. Not a guy whose family is rich. Nobody can take your money away now, and that’s a freaking huge deal, Phillip. Plus, now you don’t have to listen to your father yell at you like he did on Monday.”
She doesn’t understand. He couldn’t yell at me anymore. On Monday, I won. If he’d pushed, I’d have walked away from the company. He couldn’t take away my money either. Sure, he could have taken away the family’s part or Andrew’s part, but I negotiated my own piece of the earnings from Loughton House long ago.
“It didn’t matter, Addison. I could work for Loughton House, or I could work for any of its competitors. I have plenty of money. Nothing changed except that now I don’t have to worry about my father getting in my way. This was the only answer for my father, and I had a feeling that it’d happen. What else could he do? I’m the only person he trusts to take care of the only thing in the world he truly cares about.”
Addison sits down on the chair again, the shock still very visible on her face. “It should be a big deal,” she mutters. “It’s a big deal to me. I wanted to celebrate with you, but you didn’t even tell me.”
“I’m sorry. It just slipped my mind, truthfully. It didn’t matter and there’s so much that does. I feel like taking that month off has created a mountain of extra work for me. Between finding people to fill the new positions I’ve created, catching up on the things that no one took care of, and dealing with the day-to-day operations of Loughton House, I’m running myself ragged. Especially since I’m doing everything I can to come home and get to spend at least a little time with you.”
I can see that the last bit grates on her, but she doesn’t lash out. Hopefully, she understands that I’m not upset about that. She’s the reason I’m doing this. I’m trying to walk a razor’s edge between running Loughton House the way it should be run and having an actual life with the woman I love. It’s wearing on me, but it’s going to be worth it.
She gives me a nod. “I trust you, Phillip. I know I kind of blow up sometimes, and I’ve got some serious fear when it comes to trusting people. Maybe in the future, you could just text me a quick, ‘Hey babe, just letting you know my dad gave me the company, and I’m a billionaire now. How’s your Friday? Anyway, back to work.’ Just something. Especially when it’s a big thing like that.”
I grin. “Maybe I’ll just text you that I want you bent over my desk. Then I can tell you my news in between your moans.”
She almost blushes. “I like that idea a lot more. Maybe you could find some news to tell me today.”
“That sounds perfect. It’s been too long since I’ve been inside you.”
She downs the rest of her coffee and hops out of her chair. “Good. My pussy isn’t even sore right now, and that’s a terrible feeling. Like you’ve forgotten me completely.”
I chuckle and take another sip of coffee as she goes back to the bedroom to get dressed. I’m too busy today to spend lunch with her. There’s so much work to do. But she’s right. We’ve been slowly sliding further and further away from each other with each day now that I’m back in my old job. I don’t even want to think of the extra workload my father dropped on my shoulders.
I need to hire more people, but that only makes me sigh even more. My world is falling down around me, and Addison doesn’t even see it. To her, nothing’s changed except I work in a different office.
There’s no way to explain to her how much rides on my shoulders right now. She can’t understand that the thing she wants to celebrate is the thing that could break me if I’m not careful. Balancing work would be hard enough, but learning how to weave time in with Addison may just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
And that isn’t something I can ever tell her.
Forty-Five
PHILLIP
“Profits are down this quarter,and we’re expecting them to drop even more next quarter. We don’t have enough strong authors, and the self-publishing industry is eating at our margins.”
My financial director is clicking through a slide show as Andrew and I watch the charts that aren’t surprising at all. They may not be surprising, but they’re still terrible news. We’ve stayed in a growth trend even while the other major publishing houses are starting to freefall thanks to our ability to push winners to the moon. We just haven’t had enough winners, though.
I turn to Andrew, interrupting the financial director’s presentation. “Have you thought about picking up proven all-stars from the self-publishing sphere?”
Andrew shrugs. “They expect a lot, and they never want to go fully traditional publishing. Plus, there are so few that can dominate the lists that we need to do well on for success.”
I frown. It’s the same thing I’ve heard so many times in the past. They expect a lot because they know what they can do without us. If we can’t give them something they don’t have, then what purpose do we serve them?
“What about small fish that haven’t become popular? Why don’t we treat self-publishers like the slush pile? Hell, they’ve already got reviews so we can eliminate the truly bad. Sure, we can’t really afford to pick up the chart-toppers, but we might find some diamonds in the rough. They probably won’t even have an agent, so we’ll be able to negotiate better deals.”
