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“Sometimes it just helps to tell people things instead of keeping them locked up inside.”
Wesley nodded at that. “Phantom zone on, I guess.”
The difficulty was apparent in his voice. This was a man who’d kept his emotions locked up for so long that he’d lost the key he’d need to access them.
“I told you about my dad,” he said.
“Zeppo?” I asked.
“Yeah, Zeppo. With his failed businesses that he’d take out on me and my mom. I just realized I’d spent my whole life afraid of turning into him. And this is just the kind of thing that would happen to him. Not the improprieties, per se, but the failure. Working hard at something and building up a career only to lose it because of some stupid, impulsive act.
“We blamed the microwave for the failing of the meat market, but I overheard him and my mom fighting one night. It wasn’t the microwave that screamed at the customer who said his cuts looked terrible and he’d never be a fraction of his father. He wasn’t doing great as a salesman, but he didn’t lose the job until he slapped a customer. It was only a matter of time before he lost his temper on a kid and got fired from the driver’s ed job. That’s why I had to get my mom out of there.”
I watched as he told his story, his eyes looking like they were going to form tears, but they’d forgotten how.
“But you’re not your dad,” I told him. “Marty was doing everything he could to push your buttons and you just stood there and negotiated with him. You’re twice his size and solid muscle…”
He blushed. It was kind of cute.
“…you could have beaten the living shit out of him. You didn’t.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had to do that if I could have just controlled myself around you.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “but what fun would that have been?”
He paused as he took the final bite out of his toast.
“You make a good point.”
CHAPTER14
***WESLEY***
Istopped for coffee before work. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d pulled a true all-nighter, but I also couldn’t genuinely remember the last time I didn’t even want to go to sleep at the end of the day. Most of the things that had kept me up in the past were obligations, be them work or otherwise, but this all-nighter came from a newfound interest in life and never wanting the moment to end. Even the stressful negotiations with Marty and Rebecca (that could have ultimately cost me my career) weren’t enough to cloud the elation I felt from the night before.
Sloane, combined with the lack of sleep, made it nearly impossible to focus on the paperwork that I had to do in order to take care of the house sale.
I tried to protect her from the harsh reality of the situation, but I wasn’t sure how well I achieved that.
There was a knock at my office door.
Could it be? I wondered. Please be Sloane.
I checked my reflection on the glass desk to make sure that my hair still looked right from when I styled it that morning and then said, “Come in.”
It wasn’t Sloane, though. It was the delivery man asking for a signature.
One of my best employees, Courtney Pines, managed to sell that wax museum to a woman who produced pornographic movies. It was a long story, and one that we tried not to tell too many people, but that was the sale that kept our company from completely going under a few months ago.
An unintended consequence, however, was that the producer, Mink Blossom (who, I’m told, is quite well-known in the industry), kept sending the office gifts to thank us for her new studio. This delivery was one of them. At the beginning, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked in the boxes, which were full of DVDs of Ms. Blossom’s films. I tried pushing them off onto Courtney, but at a certain point she told me to stop and that was around the same time the culture audits began, so I didn’t press it.
I took this package from the delivery man, thanked him, and asked him to close the door behind him. Once he left, I opened the closet, which was where I typically kept them, but there wasn’t any more space for it. For so long, I’d been just shoving them in there, hoping that Ms. Blossom would stop sending more before the closet overfilled and I had to actually do something about it. But now I was all out of room and didn’t have a plan for what to do.
In that sense, it felt similar to the company as a whole.
I put the box on top of my desk, planning on taking it home with me at the end of the day. Maybe I could just put it in the garage or donate it to a second-hand store, though I wasn’t sure they took dildos and such.
There were solutions to the problem of too many boxes, but I wasn’t so confident with the problem of how to save Dynasty. Especially when my actions had made things worse.
