AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Okay, I get it. But this place, it’s not even doing stripping right. You’d find better almost anywhere else, so what the hell?”
Reid kept his eyes on Missy. After Missy came Lux. Never before, always after. For her last set Lux was an old-fashioned bathing beauty complete with those rolls in her hair, gorgeous in navy blue polka dot swimsuit with white ribbons at her hips and neck.
“Reid?” Owen snapped his fingers in front of Reid’s face.
He closed his eyes. “What?”
“Not, what, man. I get the what. I get your devastation. I don’t get the venue.”
“You get my devastation.” Reid shifted so he could look at Owen straight on. “You get it. Last time I checked you had my job, stock options, a healthy public profile. Is there something I don’t know?”
Owen shook his head. “You can’t tell me you didn’t know this was coming. In the back of your big stubborn head, you had to know pushing like that wasn’t smart.”
“It’s my fucking company.” Was. Was my fucking company. And now it was Owen’s. “Just do whatever gloating you need to do to make yourself feel good and get out of my face.”
“I’m not gloating. I hate this.”
“You’re the CEO of Plus.” Reid kept his voice even, but let it get sharp around the edges. “Capitalization of billions, one of America’s top ten up-and-coming IT firms.” He turned his face back toward the stage. Missy was upside down hanging from her ankles. “You’re right, you’re not gloating—you’re dancing on my fucking grave.”
“I didn’t ask for this. It’s not my knife in your back, Reid. We’d have weathered the resignations. You churned up and spat out highly skilled, hard to find people, but we’d have found others and paid more to keep them willing to put up with the crap you dished out. But the bullying charges, the assault charge.” Owen shook his head and looked at his hands, now in his lap.
Reid took a sip of his bourbon, an overly large sip. “I didn’t touch her and you know it.”
He’d never even been in a meeting or a common room at Plus or anywhere else with the woman from marketing who’d accused him of sexual assault. He’d once ridden a crowded elevator with her according to security footage and apparently that’s all she’d needed to fabricate a charge against him. It’d shocked him at the time, even though it was quickly dismissed, but the cumulative damage to his reputation was a lasting blow. If he’d made Plus people nervous before with his sharp tongue and his exacting manner, the women in particular became doubly nervous afterward. It didn’t help that he was physically imposing at six three and because when he wasn’t at the office, he was in his home gym.
“All of us who know you know it.” Owen looked up and sighed. “But Plus is too big now for you to stand on a chair in the staff lounge and do one of your famous mea culpa acts. It’s too big for you to bail a junior programmer up in a hallway and publicly eviscerate them for doing something in a way you think is idiotic. You were still running Plus like it was five years ago and there were fifty of us and you and Dev and I lived on beer and pizza and slept under our desks when we’d been up all night coding. We have over a thousand employees now. It’s not the same. You’re a control freak and you don’t trust anyone, you have no idea how people tick. You’re charming until you’re so viciously offensive you can rupture someone’s internal organ with a look. The bigger Plus got, the more of a jerk you became.”
Reid closed his eyes again. His body hurt. His eyes felt like they were made of pot scourers. “I was sacked for being an asshole. Is that what you think? Is that what everyone thinks?”
“You were sacked because you and our chairman had a fundamental disagreement about what style of leader you needed to be to take Plus to the next level.”
“Obviously I wasn’t the same style of leader you’re going to be, a no talent, brown-nosing suck ass, too worried about being liked to make the hard calls.”
Owen slapped a hand on the split vinyl seat. “And there you go proving my point. You were sacked for being a fucking asshole, Reid. If Kuch hadn’t exercised his authority as chairman, you’d have eit
her run Plus slowly into the ground or had a heart attack at twenty-eight. You appointed him precisely because you were smart enough at twenty to know we needed help, and Kuch did exactly what you wanted him to do. He told you a thousand times how you needed to modify your behavior. Hell, I told you, Sarina told you, Dev told you. We had a rule for it—no assholes—and you fucked us all over.”
Owen put his hands to his head and grunted a hard breath. “We were yours, Reid. You were our best friend and our freaking guru until you showed all the signs of turning into a fucking psychopath.”
Reid had been told he was too intense, that he did eye contact like it was a challenge. He couldn’t meet his oldest friend’s eyes.
“Do you think any of us are happy about this? We were doing this together and now we’re not. How do you think I feel about trying to pull Ziggurat off without you? I barely know where to start. I don’t have a tenth of your presence. When I stand on a chair to make an announcement Sarina has to shush everyone. Plus isn’t better off without you, but it’s less likely to implode, and I think you know that. I think that’s why you’re here, where no one who cares will find you, punishing yourself. And you know what, you’ve already been punished, it’s time to get straight, sober up and fight back.”
Reid forced his eyes to Owen’s. “I was canned.” He put his glass down carefully so it didn’t shatter in his hand. “The industry, the whole market knows I’m out. Every journalist we’ve ever spoken to has messaged me for comment about my exploration of new challenges.” He made finger quotes around that phrase from the press release. “Anyone with ears on their head knows I’ve been fired. I’ve taken legal advice and I’m not getting Plus back. Kuch was acting within his rights to sack me for non-performance. It’s over, so it doesn’t matter if I’m ever sober again, this is what I do now.” It was impossible to put the anger he felt into words. “I drink, I watch pole dancers, I sleep, I don’t dream, repeat ad infinitum. Go back to where you belong, Owen. Eventually I’ll stop feeling sorry for myself. Eventually I’ll have a new idea to explore and I’ll get the backing to build it, or I’ll go to Vegas and count cards like I did the first time, and when I do, I’m coming for Plus. I’ll buy up shares until I have a majority and can oust the great mentor, Adnan Kuchnitski, and replace him as chairman. Then we’ll see if I’m too much of an asshole to let you keep your job.”
“You’re furious, I get it.” Owen slid to the end of the bench seat and stood. “The idea of revenge must seem sweet.”
The music changed, some female rapper singing about a man who was trouble. Revenge was a bastard act. Lux stepped out on the stage dressed as a slutty cheerleader, in the tiniest red shorts known to mankind, paired with a cropped top that showed every lean muscle in her incredible torso. Now that was sweet. She had two pom-poms which she used to dust over her body before flinging them at men crowding the stage, and then she attacked the pole as though her life depended on being wrapped around and suspended from it six feet above the ground.
Lux held her body away from the pole with straight arms, feet pointed to the ground and made it undulate as if she was a fish, then she turned herself upside down and fireman-slid toward the floor stopping short of cracking her skull. Reid had seen this move again and again and every time he tensed for blood. But every one of the pole dancers was smarter, sharper, faster and more flexible than he’d been. He’d met his limitations, crashed into his own success and it’d beaten him raw.
“I sucked, Owen. I fucked it all up.”
Owen’s hand came down on his shoulder. “No, you—”
“Am always right.”
Owen squeezed his shoulder once then took his hand away. “You didn’t used to be so hard to get along with. Driven, an exacting pain in the neck, but not impossible.”
