Taking Control

by Jen Frederick

  Taking another swallow of the beer, I raise an eyebrow. “I was waiting for you.”

  “I guess we should start sharing things with each other.” She studies her hands.

  The room seems slightly chilled, and after a day like I’ve had, the last thing I want to do is fight. “We’re both used to be carrying our own burdens. This is a process.” I pull her toward me for a quick kiss. “We’re learning we can lean on someone else. That’s new and it will take time.”

  She gives me a grateful smile and rises. From the kitchen she says, “Jake says I’m really good at this and that I’m wasted behind the desk.”

  “He does, does he?” I follow her. She’s rummaging around the refrigerator looking for ingredients. Apparently she’s excited enough to cook. I wait for direction on what to chop. “What exactly does he think you’re good at?”

  “Investigative work. He says I’m good at seeing puzzle pieces and putting together a bigger picture.” She hands me an onion and two tomatoes and a few cloves of garlic. She dumps butter to melt in the pan while she starts dredging pieces of beef in flour. I start prepping.

  “I’ve always felt you were quick.”

  “Jake says I could do field work and more,” she babbles on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If, you know, my reading skills were better. I couldn’t do any of the searches, like using the marital records database or looking up the criminal blotter.”

  I stay silent, and not just because I am tired of hearing “Jake says” come out of her mouth; I can sense that this is important. I consider and discard a dozen different responses before settling on one. “What do you want to do?”

  “I think I’d like to try again. You’d have to hire me a tutor. One that specializes in helping dyslexics read,” she says quietly. Her head is down, and I can’t see her expression, but I think I hear something in her voice that sounds like hope.

  I nod, painfully aware of how close to the surface my own emotions are. She’s asked me for almost nothing. Clearing my throat, I say, “The best. I’ll hire the very best. No matter where they are in the world. They’ll come here and teach you what you need to know.”

  “Thank you,” she says quietly. There’s a sheen in her eyes, but I know that hugging her will look too close to pity. I simply give her a small kiss on her forehead and return to my sous chef tasks. Beside me I hear her sigh in pleasure.

  “I don’t know why I’m so emotional lately,” she admits, firing up the pan.

  “Maybe you are pregnant.” I’m only half joking. I’d love it if she were pregnant.

  She sucks in a breath and pats her belly. “I-I don’t think so, but we haven’t been careful.”

  “That’s a bit of an understatement. I’ll call around tomorrow for a recommendation for an OB.” I pick up her hand, messy from the food, and kiss the ring. Her face glows with pleasure, and I want to shove everything aside and take her right there.

  Instead, I pick up the onion and start chopping. Soon the pungent smell is serving its cock-deflating purpose.

  The beef dish is a simple but tasty one, and after we’ve squeezed the last bit of lime into the sauce pan to join the butter basted meat, fresh tomatoes, and vegetables, dinner is ready to be plated. The wine that didn’t make it into the sauce is poured into glasses.

  “You seem to be getting the hang of the cooking thing,” I say as I fork the tasty food into my mouth.

  She shrugs. “I like cooking here. Plus, having Steve drive me around makes it easy. He parks illegally, and I run in to get groceries. I’m out before he can get a ticket. It’s a perfect set-up. I would have invited him in, but he said he had to get home and have dinner with his girlfriend.”

  I give her a disbelieving look. Steve is the opposite of loquacious. A mute person is more talkative than him. She sticks out her lower lip, just a tiny bit, and frowns. “Fine, he didn’t say anything, but I’m learning his grunts and facial expressions.”

  “Steve always looks constipated to me whenever I bring up his girlfriend.”

  “See,” she points out, “you know his body language too.”

  Later when we are drying dishes, I ask her to expound on her learning disability. “Can you tell me something about your dyslexia so that I have a better idea of what kind of tutor we’ll need?”

  “Around the third grade, I was doing poorly in writing and reading—lagging behind. I had a good memory, and we were often placed together in groups. I’d just ask one of my partners to read part of the book out loud. I’d remember enough to get by but struggled, particularly with spelling. Like, I heard a word or a sound but couldn’t apply it to paper. Finally, they put me through a bunch of tests and out popped the dyslexia diagnosis. So I can read, but just not well, and it takes me a long time to get through anything more than a couple sentences long.”

  I remember her struggle over reading my mother’s last letter and feel guilty for asking her to make the attempt. She reads my thoughts with ease. “Stop. Please. I liked that you asked me. That the issue of my poor reading never comes up because it isn’t important to you.”

  “It isn’t.” I draw her down onto the sofa next to me and pull her legs over my lap. “It’s the least important fact I know about you. You’re smart, loyal, and brave. You like to call yourself pragmatic, but you’re far more optimistic about everything than I am. I’d rather wake up next to you every morning than anyone else, reader or not.”

  “I wish I could read though.” She rubs her cheek against the cloth of my T-shirt, and my heart begins to pump just a tad bit faster. Proximity to Tiny—oh hell, just thinking about her—accelerates my heart rate. She makes me feel alive, and that’s worth more money than the world holds. “When you hired that volunteer to read to Mom in the hospital during the chemo days, I was jealous because I couldn’t do that.”

  “She loved you more than there are grains of sand on the beach.”

  “I know.” She sighs.

  Her hair feels feather-soft under my hand, and I hate that I’m going to disrupt our quiet moment together. I delay the inevitable for just a few moments as we sit quietly embracing. The sun sinks lower and the amber rays give the warehouse a nostalgic Norman Rockwell patina. “I’m going to be getting up tomorrow around three a.m. I need to watch the opening of the Asian markets,” I say, searching for the best way to explain this. “I fired a member of my management team, and he’s unhappy.”

  She makes a move to sit up and swing her legs off my lap, but I hold them down. I want her to be in my arms when I tell her how her life will change. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing that a little money and time won’t take care of.” I strive for calmness. “Louis was this brash kid out of business school with a huge chip on his shoulder. He’s the middle son in a family of overachievers. His dad is a successful investment banker, managing partner at Witt and Durand, and his brother went into business with a few friends and started a hedge fund, first trading in oil futures and then expanding into all kinds of energy—solar, natural gas, and even coal. The little sister is a violin virtuoso and is touring in Europe.

  “Louis started out at his father’s firm but he didn’t fit in well there, mostly because his father kept asking him why he wasn’t more independent like his siblings. He came to me hungry, ambitious, and not a little bitter. I used all of that. I worked him like a dog, and we made money. I was well on my way to building Kerr Inc. into a multinational holding company to be reckoned with, but in the last four years, it’s become huger, grander, and richer than perhaps I’d even imagined.”

  “$29 million a day,” she murmurs.

  “Yes. $29 million a day in earnings was what the journalists parsed out from the increase in revenues for Kerr Inc. and the corresponding increase in the market cap—or the total amount the public shares are worth,” I explain. “I’m completely and utterly to blame for both feeding Louis’s appetite for wealth and not injecting enough balance into our lives. Before you, Tiny, I existed for o
ne thing—and that was make more money. Buy more companies, make a larger push to invest globally in Brazil, India, and China. And I have to tell you that there is nothing less fulfilling than watching your stock price tick up and having no one around you but the people you pay to be your companions.

  “When I saw you on the sidewalk outside of that wig shop, I realized that my quest for more would never be satiated by adding more companies to my portfolio. I wanted what I didn’t have—a family.” I intentionally leave Richard Howe’s name unsaid, but Tiny squeezes me, her small hand pressing harder into my chest, her legs curling around me, as if by holding me tighter she can eliminate decades of pain. What she doesn’t realize is that just her presence in my life, the fact that I can call her mine, has made me able to look forward. Her hugging me tight is an awesome fucking bonus.

  “But Louis didn’t like this?”

  “No, because his focus is singular: making more money. Nothing else matters.” I settle into the cushions, lying down and draping Tiny over me like a blanket. “I was—still am—eyeing an investment in a Japanese company that’s on the cusp of some revolutionary solar energy technology. Most solar panels are polycrystalline because monocrystalline silicon is too expensive to mass produce. SunCorp believes that it can produce high-quality monocrystalline silicon in greater quantities, which could impact not only solar energy but the entire semiconductor industry.”

  “I can tell you’re excited about this company.” She pats my chest. “You’re so animated.”

  “Perhaps.” I dip down to kiss the top of her head, the scent of lemon shampoo tickling my nostrils. I stir restively, thinking of a dozen things better than talking for us to be doing in a prone position. Hurriedly, I continue. “There are dozens of competitors. Clean energy is one of the hottest markets right now, and everyone wants in—from the wind farmers to those who are trying to turn ice-trapped gas into a power source. Deciding which clean energy company to invest in is the challenge.”

  “But you like this one.”

  “I do. Their people are smart and multinational. It’s not just a Japanese company. They’re attracting bright minds from Switzerland, Brazil, and the U.S. Their management style is a great blend of Western ambition and Eastern honor. I had Kaga run a check on the people at the top, and he says he’d do business with them. But I haven’t moved fast enough for Louis, and he prefers I swallow the company rather than just invest.”

  “Why is he so impatient?”

  “Because he’s worried I’m being too patient. I’m willing to wait, willing to lose it.”

  Maybe my tone changes, but something I’ve said causes her to push away and sit up so she can look at me. “Did you wait because of me? Because of my mom dying? Because I couldn’t get out of bed for a week?”

  “No,” I say sharply. The last thing I want or need is for Tiny to believe that she somehow caused any of this. She’d internalize that guilt and hold it close until it corroded what is good and pure between us. “I’m willing to lose it because I trust my instincts and it wasn’t time before to make a move. I’m not sure it’s time yet. Like I said, there are hundreds of clean energy tech companies to invest in, and SunCorp is just one. If I lose this one, it’s because I let it go intentionally.”

  She searches my face, looking for signs of insincerity. Finding none, she allows herself to lie back down. I pull her tight against me again. “Louis jumped the gun, then?” she asks.

  “Yes, because my focus isn’t just on business anymore. I don’t want it to be. There’s no real purpose in making more money, other than I enjoy playing the game. But I don’t want the game of acquisition to be the only thing in my life.” It’s important that Tiny understands that the changes occurring in my life are the product of my own desires—that her being in my life is paramount.

  “What is it that he did?”

  “He took analyst reports from me and told a business news journalist that the upper management of Kerr Inc. was going through a crisis. He ran with it.”

  “Because he could name Louis as his inside source. Did he also suggest that you were mentally unstable due to drugs or something?”

  “The innuendo was heavy, but I think it was just alcohol.”

  “I assume you have a plan, because you’re far too calm if you don’t have one.”

  “For years, I’ve set aside ready capital with low returns like public sector bonds, gold, currencies, and treasury bills. It’s sizable. I’m going to wait until the price of Kerr Inc. stock is low enough and use my private fund to buy it up. I named it the Nessie fund—the monster in the lake no one has ever seen.”

  “Your purchase of the stock will signal you feel confident about the company and drive the price of the stock up. Will you sell then? Or will the financial police think you’re doing something shady?”

  “Financial police?” I can’t keep in a huff of laughter. Tiny curls up and punches me.

  “I’m sorry. Not everyone goes to trading school.”

  I swallow back any hint of a smile. “The SEC. Yes, that could be Louis’s goal. He might suspect that I have a contingency fund. But I doctored several reports that he stole from the company, including the SunCorp one. I believe he’ll use that information to buy his way into another holding company, perhaps a hedge fund. When they use it to make, buy, or sell decisions based on his inaccurate information, Louis will be blackballed from Wall Street. He’s not even notorious enough to be able to give inspirational speeches on how to sell shit like Jordan Belfort. My guess is he’ll have trouble getting a managerial position at a big box story in Jersey.”

  “Ouch. But I guess he deserves it. When did you do the doctoring?”

  “Last week. I figured that if he was going to act it would be when I took the weekend to go to Connecticut. This coming week will be busy. I’ll be making sure that all my ducks are in a row when the SEC does come calling.” I pull us both upright and rise to get the paperwork that I’d printed out. “Along with investigating Louis, I had Jake check up on the Hedders.”

  Tiny’s face screws up like she’s smelled something rotten. “What about them?”

  “They’re bad news, both of them,” I say. I’m not going to reveal to her the creepy part about Malcolm hiring a new prostitute who looks like her, but I do relate the information Jake gathered about the elder Hedder. “The police don’t have any new leads. Mitch is a suspect, but he has an alibi.”

  She looks at the print outs I’m holding. “I just can’t see Mitch using physical violence against someone.”

  “It’s not a violent crime. She took the wrong cocktail of prescription medications. It could have been a mistake, or someone could have mixed them purposely.”

  “Killing someone is a violent crime.” She frowns. “It doesn’t fit Mitch. He’s an unfaithful jerk, but not a killer.”

  “He’s someone you haven’t seen since you were sixteen,” I remind her gently. “People change. You don’t know what Mitch Hedder has been up to for the last nine years. What we do know is that despite not being gainfully employed since he ran out on your mom, he has been able to amass enough money to enjoy an extended stay at the Plaza. Those rooms run close to a thousand bucks a night. Does that square with the Mitch you know?”

  She shakes her head slowly. “No. He’s never had that much money. I don’t know where he got it, but killing? That’s a huge deal, Ian.”

  “I’m telling you all of this for a reason.” I pick up another sheet of paper. “I have Steve because a man with a lot of money can’t be too careful. It’s unlikely that I’d ever be in danger, but we know from what happened a couple of weeks ago that someone out there doesn’t like me much. I’ve had Steve drive you around because I want you to have the convenience of a driver but also because I need you to be safe.”

  “The bodyguard,” she says with great distaste.

  “I know you don’t like this, but tomorrow I’m going to share the news of our engagement. While I’m not famous, this city loves to goss
ip, and for a short time, you’re going to be of interest. I’m not going to have an ounce of serenity if you aren’t protected, so it’s either you have Steve with you all the time or you have your own handpicked bodyguard.”

  With a sigh, she rises and walks over to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson. “And I don’t get a say?”

  “You do in who follows you around.”

  “But not in being free.”

  “You won’t even know the person is there.”

  “Every time I go out, someone is going to follow me around, and you’re saying that I won’t even know?”

  “You don’t seem to mind Steve.” I say implacably.

  She waves her hand. “He’s like a friend. A silent, surly friend.”

  “You can hire another one like him.”

  “I knew this was coming,” she sighs. “But I don’t like this,” she says.

  “Noted.”

  “Who then?”

  I read aloud from the profiles of the four different people Jake has suggested for her. Three are former military. Two Special Forces and a Marine. The fourth is a former policewoman who left her job after her partner was killed on a drug bust. She’d been accused of participating in under-the-table dealings, but Jake believed that these were false accusations from the actual dirty cops. I trusted Jake.

  “I want Marcie, the woman,” she decides.

  “Good choice. That’s who I would’ve picked.” I set the papers on the table. “Now that we’ve done all the hard stuff, let’s go upstairs. It’s been far too long since I’ve been inside you, and I’ve a hankering for some dessert.”

  Later, after a long bout of lovemaking, Tiny asks. “Why would you have picked Marcie? Is she pretty?”

  “I have no idea. I would’ve picked her because I’m a jealous motherfucker and I don’t want another man spending that much time with you.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “Because I’m not a stupid fucker. Just a jealous one. I know better than to tell you what to do.”