by Julia Kent
Including Madge.
“I told you I was. I have to make sure you haven’t destroyed my room.”
“Not like you’re ever moving back in,” he said slyly. “Doesn’t Jeremy have his own place?”
Krysta said nothing. Lydia took a delicate bite of cake and just shrugged. The less said, the better.
“Anyhow, you going to the hospital to help move her?”
“Mom and Dad are there, right?”
He nodded, a satisfied smile spreading across his face as he watched Krysta dig in to her own piece of pie, her shoulders dropping and eyes widening with pleasure. “Right. Two o’clock. I’ll make sure I’m at the apartment and meet you guys there.”
The key lime pie tasted sour as she let his question about Jeremy ping in her head. Jeremy. Last night she’d fallen asleep in Mike’s arms and it only now hit her that Jeremy stayed with Mike when he was in town. He had no place of his own.
What had happened to Jeremy?
Yanking her phone out of her purse, she checked messages.
Nada.
So she typed one:
Hey, where are you? I miss you.
True.
And she waited. And waited. And…nothing.
“Who you texting? Or should I ask, which of your guys?”
“Jeremy.”
“Everything okay?” Krysta picked up on her concern.
“I spent the night at Mike’s last night.”
Krysta leaned forward like a conspirator. “And?”
“And that’s where Jeremy normally stays when he’s in town. I…I can’t believe I didn’t think about it. But where did he stay?”
“Poor Jeremy, huddled under a ragged coat off Exit 18 on the Pike. Directing traffic for coins. Selling roses.” The sarcasm could have been used as a sauce for one of Caleb’s meals. It was poured on that thick.
“Krysta.”
“Well? You’re overreacting. Worst case, he crashed in a hotel. The guy can drop $50,000 on an autism benefit. I’m sure he can handle a few hundred for one night in a hotel. I’m surprised he didn’t crash at Mike’s, though.”
“Why would he?”
Krysta made a choking sound. “Brown chicken brown cow.”
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” What the fuck?
“You ain’t no Mary fucking Poppins here.”
“What’s the brown chicken crap?”
“Say it fast.” Lydia did.
Caleb’s burst of laughter from behind the counter and Krysta’s snicker made her wonder what she was missing.
“What does a brown chicken and a brown cow have to do with Jeremy appearing?” she hissed.
Krysta couldn’t stop laughing. “Nothing.” She lowered her voice. “It’s like the music in a porno. ‘Brown chicken brown cow.’”
“Not funny.”
“It is if you get it.”
“Still not funny.”
“What other cultural reference do I have for a threesome?”
She had a point. “You think Jeremy is just going to magically show up at Mike’s and I’ll be all, like, ‘Oh, two guys! My sex dream has come true. Someone get the lube’?”
A shrug was her reply.
“You—what? Where is this coming from?”
“I’m the one who should be asking that. Ever since ‘Matt Jones’ appeared at work, you’ve become some woman who distantly resembles my old friend. Where, Lydia, is this coming from? We used to talk about Starbucks and Scandal and how Grey’s Anatomy sucks these days and finding the right two guys. Now we talk about reality TV and viral videos and Iceland and finding the right two guys. Only instead of one of them being for me, they’re both for you!”
The rush of Krysta’s rebuke humbled her. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” she said in a small voice.
“I didn’t either.”
An awkward silence settled in.
“I don’t like being like this,” Lydia said after a long pause.
“I don’t either.” Krysta reached across the table and clasped Lydia’s hand. The motion was the same that she and Mike had shared last night, but oh, so different.
“Friends?” Lydia asked.
“Never weren’t.”
“Then let me lay this out: Jeremy and Mike want me—for real, no jokes—to be in a threesome with them.”
Jaw hanging, Krysta squeezed her hands. “You get all the nice things. No fair.”
“A minute ago you said you didn’t like the way I’ve been and all my crises, and now you tell me I get all the nice things? Which is it?”
“Both. I can say both. And so can you.”
“How can you say that?”
“Who wouldn’t want one night with two incredibly hot guys? Lydia, that’s the dream, right?”
“Not a dream.”
“Then what is it?”
“Not a one-time thing.”
“Huh?”
“They want to create something I’ve never heard of.”
“What’s that? They want you to dress up like Robin Thicke and twerk them?”
Caleb appeared just then with more coffee and a disgusted look on his face. “I give up. I’m never serving you two again. From now on, you get everything yourselves.”
“Sorry we brought up your favorite fantasy!” Lydia called after him, receiving a middle finger as an answer.
“Such a loving family,” Krysta intoned.
“We try. Mom and Dad are so proud.”
“Speaking of Mom and Dad…” The clock Krysta looked at said Lydia had twenty more minutes before she had to leave.
“Are you going for it?”
“Dating two guys?’
“Whatevering two guys.”
“Would you? If you were in my shoes?”
Krysta gave it some thought, then poured herself a cup of coffee, fixing it just right. “I would give it a try, I guess.” Her half-shrugged shoulder and weak wording made Lydia doubt her.
“Maybe kinda sorta? It’s a genie you unleash and you can’t stuff back in the bottle.”
“Or other places.”
“Ewwww.”
“Sorry. The jokes write themselves.”
“Speaking of jokes, let’s talk about your imaginary relationship with Caleb.”
Krysta’s mouth puckered with disapproval. “Let’s not.”
“You can dish it out, but—”
“Quit deflecting.”
“Fine.” Lydia frowned and poured herself some coffee. “I just—I don’t know where to start.”
Sympathy lined her friend’s face. “I keep making jokes, but you really are in one hell of a bind, aren’t you.”
“Let’s not add BDSM to this.”
“Ha ha.”
“I feel like I’ve never really gotten beyond that woman in my car in the parking lot, finding out that what I had worked so hard for was swept out from under me when ‘Matt Jones’ was given the social media job,” she said, her voice soft and breathy. “That day all those years of work just disappeared. And there he was, so hot and adorable and strong and sensitive—the perfect package, you know? They don’t exactly grow in a cubicle farm.”
“Tell me about it,” Krysta agreed.
“The big project I pitched to Dave, Matt—Mike—finding me in the closet, our elevator moment…” Her voice trailed off.
“You feel like you’re not the same Lydia? Of course you are.”
Sipping half the cup in one long, contemplative move, Lydia finished and set her coffee cup down, noting how full the restaurant had become.
“It’s not that I shouldn’t be me. The feeling is more about being stuck. Reactive. My default is to react to life instead of taking action.”
Shaking her head, Krysta took a look around as well. A crowd had poured in and Caleb looked like a jackrabbit with a coffee pot in hand. Lydia knew she should get up and help, but this was too important.
“You might see me that way. And I might even be that way. But that’s not how I feel
, you know?”
Krysta nodded. “I get it.”
“Here I am again, reacting to what Jeremy said, responding to Mike’s initiative, fumbling through my reactions to them without being the one who sets the tone. I’m tired of always changing my frequency to be in tune with someone else’s vibration. From now on, I want to be the vibration.”
“Then do it.”
“How?” Saying it was easy. But taking the steps she needed to be at the vanguard of her own life seemed like being told she needed to learn a language, but not knowing its name.
“Start by figuring out what your gut tells you.”
Just then, her stomach gurgled.
“Okay, it’s telling me I ate too much.” The two shared a smile only old friends can exchange.
“What do you want? Ignore what Jeremy and Mike want. Ignore what the world says you should want. Push aside convention and expectations. Lydia, what do you want?”
Silence.
“And once you decide that,” Krysta said, her eyes tracking Caleb, “you need to go after it with fierce love. Because that’s the only way any of us should live.”
Jeremy hadn’t planned to spend his afternoon with the man who had just made love to Lydia, doing twenty-pound barbell diagonal lunges, but the effort and concentration required for the free-weight room at Mike’s apartment building’s gym was a welcome change from the emotionally overwrought state that everyone seemed to be in.
Present company included.
Mike was bench pressing, waving off any spotting, able to lift his weight easily and punishing himself by adding a twenty-kilogram weight on either side of the bar.
No thanks. Jeremy rather enjoyed having fascia connecting his ribs. If he tried to lift his own weight plus forty kilos he’d be a walking hemorrhage.
“How—was—the—hotel?” Mike puffed.
“Fine.” When he’d realized that he would be homeless for the night, Jeremy had checked into Parker Omni house, ordered three lobsters, a cheesecake and an entire bottle of vodka, and spent the night watching really bad porn at prices so inflated they were on the pay-per-view equivalent of Viagra.
Nothing helped.
“Nice place. Been there a few times, but always on business. You okay paying for it?”
What the fuck? “I’m fine.”
Mike racked the bar and stood, moving on to do backwards lunges with forties. “You doing all right financially?”
This felt a bit private. Mike had never asked him about his money. Was this some kind of dick-waving contest?
If so, once Jeremy unzipped and pulled his out, Mike’s eyes were going to bug out.
“Fine.”
“You can always work with my financial advisor, you know. You don’t have to blow through it all.”
Was that what he assumed? Fuck it.
Time to be the tripod.
“All those years while I was traveling around the world, having fun, hanging out, doing whatever I wanted…” Jeremy paused and looked at Mike with a guarded set of eyes.
“Yeah.” Where is he going with this? Mike wondered.
“I wasn’t just drinking and sleeping around and getting caught, thrown in jail, and all that.”
“Okay.” Mike really wondered where Jeremy was going with all this. He racked the weights and grabbed his water bottle, chugging but keeping eye contact.
“It started when I had this opportunity while I was in Fiji to help this non-profit organization out.” Jeremy seemed really reluctant to say whatever he was saying, so Mike relaxed his arms, uncrossed them and tried to be as casual as he could be to hear the guy out. Whatever was coming was going to be a doozy. Mike wondered what international agency it involved. MI5? CIA? Interpol?
“So these micro-loan programs that are out there, you know, give somebody in India $300 to start a company.”
“Yeah, sure. They’re like, uh…like little…it’s almost like investing in little mini start-ups.” Why was he babbling on about social programs? Mike had asked about his finances, not his liberal-driven guilt projects.
“Right, right,” Jeremy said, nodding his head vigorously. “I had this opportunity and threw $10,000 into the first one.” He racked his weights and joined Mike in refilling his sports bottle at the water cooler.
Mike just nodded and made a motion to Jeremy to get to the point. “And that went well, no problems. A handful of defaults, but the agency distributes the loans and they process everything and I, you know, get a small, uh—not quite a dividend check, but a repayment check every month, and I went to Sri Lanka and did the same thing. So, for the past ten years, whenever I go to a new place, I find out about these micro-loan programs and I invest ten, twenty grand, sometimes more and just see where it goes.” Sometimes a lot more.
Jeremy’s eyes bored into his. Mike frowned. “So, you’re a good steward. You donate money—”
“No, I don’t donate money,” Jeremy interrupted. “I invest, and over the course of ten years I’ve invested millions.”
He nodded slowly. They both nodded slowly at each other. Jeremy’s eyes sank into a kind of strange panic that did not fit with his personality at all.
And then, Mike understood. “Oh, God—Jeremy, you lost it all, didn’t you? Holy shit, man! When we walked out of the company thirteen years ago we were both worth millions and now you’ve just blown it?” A sense of self-righteous outrage bubbled up in Mike. “You have just been…so fucking irresponsible. You’ve spent all these years just screwing anything that you could get your hands on and drinking—”
“Mike.” Jeremy held up one palm. “It’s the opposite. It’s. The. Opposite.”
Mike stopped himself in his spiral of indignation. “What do you mean it’s the opposite?”
“My investments have all paid off.”
Mike cocked his head, his lips parted. He took a deep sigh, sizing up Jeremy, who now had a look of confidence in his face that belied what had been written all over him just seconds ago. Sweat poured over their foreheads and both took a moment to wipe with the hems of their shirts, the room suddenly warmer than it should be.
“What do you mean they’ve paid off?”
“Let’s just say that two of us are standing here in this room and one of us is a billionaire.” Jeremy’s lips twitched with amusement.
Huh?
“You’re the billionaire.”
“I’m the billionaire.” Jeremy pointed to himself. “That’s me. Billionaire Jeremy.”
The air whooshed out of Mike’s lungs and the room seemed a bit too real for a couple of seconds. He looked up—and oh, how he hated looking up at Jeremy—and pointed his finger inches from his nose. “You’re a billionaire?”
“According to my accountant, who I just met with the other day, all the investments total nearly a billion and a half. My net worth is 1.5 billion.”
“You’re worth 1.5 billion?” Mike started to laugh. That was close to his target figure if everything had gone through as planned with the board. If he hadn’t met Lydia. If he hadn’t screwed up. If he hadn’t—the implications of years of self-discipline, denial, strategy, of ambition came crashing on him and he searched for a seat, finding a cheap stool. It was as welcome as the most comfortable Herman Miller chair. His hamstrings screamed as he lowered himself in place, as if every muscle in his body were in pain right now, a reflection of his mind.
“You’re a billionaire,” he said again.
“Yes.”
“So I’ve spent…” He held up his hand as Jeremy tried to speak. “Hang on. Let me get this out. Let me get this straight. I’ve spent the past thirteen years working my ever-loving-ass off, buying my dad out, growing this company—well, it isn’t mine anymore—growing that company, building an empire so that I could have an extraordinary payoff, and then all that risk would be worth it. And I blew it. I totally blew it.”
Jeremy’s face oozed sympathy. Mike wanted to peel it off and fling it into a pit of wolves.
“And meanwhile,
you are out being a worldwide Van Wilder, Mr. Party-Animal-Crazy-Dude. But you’re investing in little, socially progressive funding opportunities for, like…cake makers in Borneo, or empanada cookers in Bolivia.”
“That’s one of the projects, actually,” Jeremy said, holding his index finger up, ready to go into more detail.
“I…I got it. I got it,” Mike said. “For thirteen years you’ve been having fun,” he said, the last word coming out as a growl. “And through that fun you’ve accomplished everything that I wanted.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Jeremy said. “I did what I wanted. My investments are mine—risks I chose carefully, after weighing out the potential downfall and the possible reward. I didn’t just invest in the microloans. I have a balanced portfolio for safety, but I loaded a lot into these investments. You’re not the only man capable of taking calculated chances.”
“Of course I’m not.” Mike simmered, a stew of anger, outrage, incredulity and shame bubbling inside. Jeremy was a billionaire?
And Mike wasn’t.
“I suppose congratulations are in order.” The words came out with more bitterness than Mike intended. Taking in a few breaths, he tried again. “I really do mean that.”
Jeremy’s wry smile showed he understood. “You can’t believe I did it.”
Sincerity made Mike blunt. “You bet your ass I can’t believe it. Party Boy makes the better financial choices and ends up a billionaire. Hard-nosed CEO risks it all and ends up the butt of a million viral social media jokes and the future object of an entire campground’s hatred.”
“I can see how that could make you bitter.”
“Your sympathy is duly noted.” Mike took a long drink. “And fuck you,” he added for good measure.
“I deserve that.” Jeremy seemed smug. When did Jeremy become smug? Mike could get away with being smug because he was—had been—a major player. Jeremy couldn’t deal his way out of a paper bag.
Yet who was the billionaire now?
“How did this happen?”
“Is that a philosophical question or do you want a blueprint?”
“I want to know how I ended up being your bitch and the woman we both love disappeared.”
Jeremy frowned. “She didn’t disappear. She’s at the hospital with her grandma.”