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I round my old desk in the new office, which is sitting above my first brick-and-mortar fitness center. The glass-wall new development is surrounded by a mix of older red-brick buildings, former factories, and warehouses designed by famous architects. A more soulful vibe that I preferred to the glass-and-steel forest uptown to set the new location of my company’s headquarters. NOHO (“North of Houston Street”), with its cobblestone streets and vibrant, artistic community, felt like the perfect place for my business to thrive.
The view always puts a big smile on my face. Contrary to my COO, who, while also contemplating the sunny June day, still looks frowny and troubled.
“Relax, Evan.” I walk up to him and pat his shoulder as he stands. “What’s the Mighty Gabriel Mercer going to do, anyway? Send me to bed without dinner? Bring it on. I’m all for the intermittent fasting.”
“You’re being brazen if you think making an enemy of such an influential man won’t come back to bite you in the rear end. Mercer has ties to a lot of real estate deals in Manhattan and beyond, and could make it difficult for us to expand.”
“As you smartly pointed out, his core business is real estate. I wouldn’t even call him a competitor. It just so happens that most of the properties he owns are fitness centers.”
“Yes, but we already had to buy this property on the hush-hush to keep under his radar; now you’ve put us front and center in his field of vision.” Evan drops his arms to the side. “Doesn’t that worry you?”
“What are you suggesting? That he’s so powerful he could buy all gym-suitable buildings in America? Mercer is not omnipotent. And he could never take the internet away from us. We’re a crowd. Business has been democratized. Didn’t you get the memo?”
Evan purses his lips tighter than a kitten’s ass. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“All right, Taylor Swift, I won’t.” I give his trapezius a gentle squeeze, the muscle tightly knotted under my touch. “Please go take a yoga class. This level of stress isn’t good for you.”
I leave him to brood alone in my office, hoping he’ll heed my advice and blow off some steam with a little controlled breathing, or at least take a sauna.
I reach the ground floor and greet various patrons on the way to the women’s locker room. The chit-chatting almost makes me late for my class, but I make it a point not to be short with anyone despite being pressed for time. I didn’t gain twenty million Instagram followers by being aloof and unattainable.
Not the style of the competition, as Evan calls it. The Mighty Gabriel Mercer—MGM, I rename him in my head—has exactly zero Instagram followers because he has no Instagram, Facebook, or any other social network on the planet.
What a snob.
The only thing more annoying than his looks—dark, handsome, groomed to perfection—are his self-celebratory statements on how he turned a one-million-dollar loan into a ten-billion-dollar empire. Heck, if I had a million dollars to start with, my company would be a hectocorn by now.
Not that I’m judging. But in the male-dominated business world, size counts. The competing little pricks have even designed a scale for their appendage-measuring contest. A start-up is proclaimed a unicorn when it reaches a billion-dollar valuation—that’s where I’m at. My company is a rare, magical creature that has beaten all the odds. But I still have to contend with the behemoths that dwarf my worth. The decas, or decacorns, aka the corporations that have hit the ten-billion mark—that’s where MGM’s at. And above that is the ultimate goal of a hundred-billion market cap, reserved for the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon—they were start-ups, too, once. Becoming a hectocorn is the pipe dream of every new entrepreneur. Mostly unreachable, to be fair. Especially for someone like me: a woman with no money and no connections who had to start from zero.
But I’m not interested in dwelling on what I don’t have or can’t ever attain. I prefer to count my blessings for everything that I’ve achieved and still strive to achieve. For his sake, I hope MGM is the same. That he’s too busy making piles of money for himself and his investors to care about little old me and my press releases. He probably doesn’t even know I exist.
I change into a neon-pink sports bra, black leggings, and pull my hair up in a high ponytail.
With a bright smile stamped on my face, I cross the gym and enter my HIIT class shouting, “Morning everyone, who’s ready to pump the heat and grind some positivity into their lives?”
2
GABRIEL
“Are you sure you want to blow a million dollars on an old car?” Mila, my executive assistant, asks me as we get out of the meeting room. The deal with Apex Watches is not in the bag yet, but their executives seemed pleased with our proposal to install display cases for their fitness tracker in all of our 2,400 gyms.
“Don’t call it an old car, it’s a 1960 Aston Martin GT Zagato,” I say as we pass by the cubicles of my employees, most of them young and fresh-faced, working away on their computers.
“Yeah, but the wheel isn’t even on the proper side.” Mila stops when we reach the elevator. “Couldn’t you find a less expensive toy to play with, James Bond?”
The elevator doors swish open and we step in. Mila uses the key around her neck to unlock access to the top floor—my floor.
I cross my arms, leaning a shoulder against the metal wall, and grin at her.
“Nuh-uh, don’t give me that,” she chides. “The cocky bastard act doesn’t work on me.”
I chuckle. “One reason I hired you. Anyway, this time you don’t have to rein me in. I want that car.”
A ding announces we’ve reached our destination. As the elevator doors part on the executive floor, the sun bounces off the glass-and-metal walls of nearby skyscrapers, blinding me. I squint at the view of the tall buildings interrupted only by the splotch of green that is Central Park—its majestic trees small compared to where my office sits above the rest. I stride toward my door, Mila close on my heels.
“You’re the boss.” Mila sighs, resigned. “How high should I bid?”
“Every other loser will bid at around one, but I don’t want to take chances, let’s go for an even 1.2 mils.”
