by Cassie Cole
Contents
Title
Copyright
1 - Cindy
2 - Cindy
3 - Cindy
4 - Cindy
5 - Landon
6 - Cindy
7 - Cindy
8 - Daniel
9 - Cindy
10 - Cindy
11 - Landon
12 - Cindy
13 - Landon
14 - Cindy
15 - Chase
16 - Cindy
17 - Landon
18 - Cindy
19 - Cindy
20 - Daniel
21 - Cindy
22 - Cindy
23 - Daniel
24 - Landon
25 - Cindy
26 - Chase
27 - Cindy
28 - Cindy
29 - Landon
30 - Cindy
31 - Cindy
32 - Daniel
33 - Cindy
34 - Cindy
35 - Landon
36 - Cindy
37 - Cindy
38 - Landon
39 - Cindy
40 - Chase
41 - Cindy
42 - Cindy
43 - Landon
44 - Cindy
45 - Cindy
Bonus
About the Author
Broken In
By Cassie Cole
Copyright © 2018 Juicy Gems Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior consent of the author.
Edited by Dorothy Eller
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1
Cindy
I knew it was going to be a bad day the moment I woke up. The 482 blinking alerts on my phone guaranteed that.
But I had no idea just how bad.
“We have to tell them.”
Jason was waiting in the doorway like a dog waiting for its master. I was hoping for a few minutes alone to mentally prepare for the day. I hated being ambushed first thing.
And my damn phone was vibrating in my pocket. Probably more price alerts. I shoved my hand inside to silence it, then shoved past Jason into my office while chugging the rest of my coffee to buy myself a moment to think.
“We don’t have to tell them anything,” I said, busying myself with logging on to my laptop with my bank credentials. Avoiding eye contact. “The presentation can go on as is. No updates.”
My phone vibrated again. This time I pulled it out to check the number, but it was one I didn’t recognize. Not today, telemarketers.
Jason closed the door. “Cindy.”
I finished my password, hit enter, and finally looked up. Jason’s eyes were bloodshot and his hair badly needed a comb. After last night’s slaughter, I couldn’t blame him.
I was lucky enough to get into cryptocurrency two years before the boom. Just long enough to learn about it, generate a cult-like worship for the new digital currency, and then start investing. Bitcoin was the gateway drug of crypto, but soon I was trading all the alts: Litecoin, ETH, even some Dogecoin for shits and giggles. Soon I was squirreling away every spare cent I made as a data entry drone into my crypto portfolio. I checked the priced 60 times per minute, compulsively like a drug addict.
I needed my fix, man.
When the boom happened, a lot of people sold early. Not me. No sir. I was a holder—or hodler, as the geeks like to say—through and through, only cashing out a little bit at a time to diversify with some tried-and-true American dollars in a shitty low-yield savings account.
But those small sells added up, along with the money I made day-trading whatever new currency was hot for a week. By the time Bitcoin peaked just under $20,000 I’d made so much money I could almost think about retiring.
And even when the price crashed back down to $6,000 a year later, I was still up 1000% from where I started.
I was known as the crypto geek at my job, so when I quit to day-trade full time everyone knew why. I hired someone to do my taxes to ensure I properly declared all of my capital gains. For the first time in my life I felt like an honest-to-God adult.
That was when my tax guy introduced me to his college roommate, the current manager of the First Bank of Austin. And when he told me he was looking to create a cryptocurrency department at his bank to get ahead of the curve, I was drooling so much I couldn’t see where to sign on the employment papers.
My own department, with my own employees, with my own agenda. Sure, some of my crypto pals called me a sell-out, but I felt just fine convincing old white men to diversify their enormous 401k funds with a little Bitcoin. I knew my shit; I was good at it. And it was easy when the markets were stable.
Today wasn’t one of those days.
“You’re looking at this the wrong way,” I told Jason in the privacy of my office. I kept glancing out the blinds at the bank floor, wondering when the manager would come storming in and demand to know what I was going to do about the crash. If I had a plan.
“Every crypto is down at least 30% overnight. Bitcoin alone is down 39%. If there’s another way to look at that, I’d love to fucking hear it.”
I gestured with my hand like I was giving him the presentation. “Cryptocurrency is inherently volatile; that’s part of the allure. It’s the wild west of investments. Sometimes you hit a gold mine and make a fortune…”
“And what?” Jason cut in. “Other times you get killed in a saloon shoot-out?”
“We’ve had ups and downs before. We don’t need to adjust our slide deck every time the market moves. If our clients see us jumpy, they’ll get jumpy too.”
Jason paced back and forth. “This isn’t just about appearances. This is about money. Our clients lost a shitload of it last night.”
“It’s a quarterly review presentation, Jason. We’re going to show them the quarterly results.”
He rolled his eyes so dramatically I could see the gesture even though he was turned away from me. “Showing them performance numbers from the end of the quarter two days ago is disingenuous, and you know it.”
I picked up my coffee, realized it was empty, and set it back down with a sigh. “So what do you propose? We change the reports to reflect the new numbers?”
He stopped pacing and sunk into the chair across from my desk. Now that he’d convinced me, it was like a weight was off his shoulders. “At the very least, we mention it first thing. Rip the band-aid off. Then show them the quarterly numbers, while commenting that they’re slightly lower.”
“Mention the movement, but don’t show them any firm numbers.” I nodded to myself. “I like it. And even with last night’s crash, we can focus on how much they’ve made prior to now. Most of them have still doubled or tripled their money, even after last night.”
“Jonathan Franks will be there,” Jason pointed out. “He’s only been with us five months, so unlike the others he’s certainly in the red.”
“Right, right…” I muttered as I pulled up the CoinMarketCap tracker on my laptop. All the beautiful inclining lines now had steep cliffs at the end, and the 24h and 7d change columns jumped out with harsh red font. “And if the boss man decides to sit in on our presentation?”
Jason frowned. “He never joins our quarterlies.”
“And we’ve never seen a loss like this since I started working here. But things change.” My phone vibrated; it was the same number as before. And they’d left two voicemails. Maybe it was an angry investor who couldn’t wait before the quarterly to give me a piece of hi
s mind. Even a telemarketer was preferable to that.
I tossed my phone on the desk. “We’ve got the quarterly at 11:00. Think you can whip up some talking points for me to give before the presentation?”
“Already on it,” Jason said, with the first smile of the morning. “You might need to take the particularly ornery ones to lunch, though.”
“I was planning on doing that anyways,” I sighed. “Except it was going to be a celebratory lunch rather than apologetic.”
“Life’s full of disappointments.”
My phone vibrated again, rattling across the wooden desk. I gritted my teeth and snatched it up, answering without looking. “Whoever this is, I don’t want to hear it.”
But it wasn’t an investor. It wasn’t a telemarketer. It was someone with whom I’d never spoken, and the words he said made me numb.
I lowered the phone to my lap and stared off. It took a few heartbeats for the words to sink in.
“What we really need to emphasize are our new ICO predictions,” Jason said, picking up where he’d left off. “The X-Tether offering is especially promising, and we’re one of the only banks in town to offer the ICO in traditional portfolios, so unless they want to download a paper wallet and hide their coin in a safe… Cindy? What is it?”
I stood. “I have to go.”
He gave a start. “I was hoping to go over these comments with you before the presentation. I want your feedback on them, rather than just reading what I’ve written verbatim…”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I put away my laptop. “You’re giving the quarterly presentation.”
All the color drained from his face. “What? Why?”
I frowned, tasting the words before I said them. They didn’t sound real in my head. They seemed foreign. A random string of syllables.
“My dad died.”
2
Cindy
It was weird how one little event could put everything in perspective.
I packed a small suitcase. The drive was six hours, just long enough to be a pain in the ass. More than just a day trip. Yet after placing folded jeans, a single pair of fresh panties, and a single shirt into the suitcase, it felt more empty than adequate. Think, Cindy. The estate lawyer said I had to get the affairs in order. That could take days.
No, not just the affairs. Dad’s affairs. Because my dad was dead at age 51.
I kept repeating the fact while packing, trying to make it sink in. I was probably in shock. People went into shock when something tragic happened. That was a thing. I shouldn’t over-analyze it.
I should finish packing, because right now I was only delaying the inevitable.
West Texas was the worst. The fucking worst. That’s something people didn’t know about Texas: that we had different biomes. It was big enough to be a bunch of different states, after all. East Texas was full of rolling hills and gorgeous forests. The south had the cliffs and buttes of Big Bend National Park. Austin was a wonderful mix of both types of terrain, all just a short drive or bike ride from the city.
But West Texas? That was what people pictured when they thought of Texas. Flat as can be, with more brown than green in all directions. Completely flat. Fields of stereotypical oil rigs churning away as far as the eye could see. It made the drive unbearable. No amount of Radiolab podcasts could distract from the fact that I was driving away from civilization and into the ominous desert.
Of course, the drive was unbearable for a larger reason than the shitty view: I was going home.
It was the last thing I wanted to do. The thing I avoided at holidays or long weekends. It made my chest tight just thinking of returning, a tightness that was increasing with each mile along this two-lane road. I wouldn’t have even considered coming back if not for the need to close out dad’s affairs. Avoiding a problem was always worse than confronting it quickly. I didn’t want things lingering.
I wanted them done.
My phone rang. I cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Aunt Sophie.”
“Oh Cindy,” she practically moaned. I could tell she’d been crying—or was trying to make it sound like she had. “I called as soon as I heard. It’s just so sad…”
“It is.”
“Do you want me to leave the river cruise? We’re still two days from Paris, but I can talk to the captain…”
“No, don’t do that,” I quickly said. “I wouldn’t want you to go to the trouble.”
“It’s no trouble! This is a matter of family…”
I cringed at giving Aunt Sophie an excuse to go all drama queen on a poor riverboat captain who probably didn’t speak English. Even worse, I cringed at the idea of her coming here and distracting me during the process. Nothing was ever simple with her.
“I’ve got it handled, Aunt Sophie. Honestly, I’m hoping to be done and driving home by tomorrow.”
She made a dramatic sigh into her receiver. “If you insist. I trust you. Are you going home with anyone?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Someone for emotional support.”
I tried not to bark a laugh at her. Aside from a few failed Tinder hookups, the closest thing I had to emotional support was my coffee every morning.
“Nope, just me.”
There was a pregnant pause on the line. “Are you certain? You hated that ranch…”
Hate was a strong word, but in this case it was accurate. I hated the ranch where I’d grown up. Not for any serious reasons: nothing tragic or creepy happened there when I was a child, unless you count the time my mother fell off a horse and broke her leg. No, the reasons I hated the ranch were all stupid teenage girl bullshit. I could admit it now, with the clear vision of hindsight. The town was too small, so I had no friends. The only boy close to my age within 20 miles was Francis Honeycomb, the son of the rancher whose land bordered ours to the north, and he was a big pile of wasted energy. A psychopath with a mean streak and a cellar full of doomsday materials. My best friends were the chickens in the coop. And let me tell you a secret: chickens make awful friends.
Beyond the lack of companionship, I was a geek. I loved Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering cards. I grew up on 80s movies featuring robots and ever-powerful computers and a world that was rapidly becoming more technological. A world I wanted to be part of. Yet while everyone else was getting AOL hooked up, our little ranch remained stuck in the 19th century. For a girl with the future on her mind, watching the world advance around us left me feeling like I was missing the bus.
And I was kind of a bitch to my parents about it, even though it wasn’t their fault.
“Was I really that obvious?”
“Oh, honey,” was all Sophie said. I winced.
“It’ll be easy,” I said with a tone of finality. “I’ll handle the will, get the ball rolling on selling the estate, and be back home by tomorrow night.”
I waited for her to argue about selling the estate, to insist the ranch had been in our family for five generations, but thankfully Sophie wasn’t sentimental. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do. Hopefully I’ll see you at the funeral…”
“It’s Tuesday now, so we’ll probably have the service on Saturday,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it at all, but it seemed logical. “Does that give you enough time to get back?”
“Oh, who knows?” she said, exasperated. “I need to look at my calendar. But I’ll do my best.”
We exchanged our goodbyes and hung up.
There was no chance Aunt Sophie would come to the funeral. She and my dad got along, but they weren’t close. She felt the same way about the ranch as I did, which was why she’d hitchhiked away and found a rich oil family to marry into at the first opportunity.
But honestly? I was glad she wouldn’t be there. The extra drama she would provide would only—
“What the fuck is that?” I muttered.
Ahead, in the middle of the road, was a horse. No, not just a horse: a man riding a horse. I slowed down to a ca
reful speed and gave him a warning honk, which sent him yanking the reins to the right to guide the horse to the shoulder.
I got a better look as I passed. The man was tan like good olive oil, with well-defined muscles that would have been borderline unrealistic even on a Greek statue. Like, I’m talking Gaston from Beauty and the Beast ripped. His face was covered in shadow from the black cowboy hat he wore.
It was the only thing he wore.
I gawked at the completely nude man as I passed, then stared at him in my rear-view mirror. His body gently swayed with the horse’s movements, making the muscles undulate. I realized I was still coasting, so I got a hold of myself and accelerated back tot he speed limit.
“Cowboys on the fucking road,” I muttered. “The sooner I’m back in the city, the better.”
3
Cindy
The estate lawyer’s address took me down three different dirt-and-gravel roads before ending at a two-story craftsman style home next to a wide piece of fenced-in pasture dotted with black cows in the distance. Before I could check my phone a man in jeans and a polo came out the front door, introduced himself as Robert Bonile—while insisting I call him Bobby—and ushered me inside.
I should have guessed that the lawyers out here had their offices in their homes. West Texas, y’all.
“Cindy, I’m so sorry about your dad,” he said while holding the front door open. He was in his 60s, with a Wilford Brimley mustache and a slow voice which made every word drip out of his mouth like molasses. “I knew him for a long time. He was a good man.”
“He was.”
He led me into a dark-wood room with a brick fireplace in the corner. A wide mahogany desk occupied the middle of the room, with two leather chairs on the other side for guests. There was no computer on the desk: just a single manila folder. I thought about making a joke about using pen and paper instead of digital copies, but decided he wouldn’t like my brand of humor.
“You must be devastated,” he said as we sat down.