I saw many people bypass me on their way to the top, shady dealings and cutthroat tactics gave most of them a lift up. But now I was seeing those same people crash and burn on the way down once their dark dealings caught up with them. Case in point, her old man.
Timothy Bronson had been someone I looked up to as a business role model. Sure he had an easy start, having inherited the newspaper from his own old man. But it’s what he’d done with it in the ensuing years that made him stand out in my eyes. The fact that he’d expanded the enterprise to what it was by the time I bought it off of him, and had made it a contender among more well established organizations in the same trade, made it easy to see the man as a force to be reckoned with in his field.
I’d procured a kind of semi formal relationship with him through mutual channels, but had always stayed to the fringes. I wasn’t in his league back then and I knew it. Over the last five years the wind had shifted and I started hearing the stories. I’d ignored them at first, after all the man I’d come to know though slightly, could in no way be guilty of the things being said about him. Why would he need to steal and rob others when he’d been given so much?
For someone like me who’d had to work for every scrap, who’d buckled down and made a conscious choice to do everything on the up and up, it made no sense. Life wasn’t as complicated as some people made it out to be, and there was no need to squeeze the little man to get ahead. I had a talent and an eye for making things bigger and better than how I found them; that was my driving force. Also being able to supply people with jobs was a big boost for me.
I guess my mother’s staunch upbringing and the values she’d forced down my throat at an early age had a lot to do with that. Which brings me to something else. If the man had turned out to be a thieving asshole with the morals of a gutter snipe, just what had he passed on to his daughter? And was I interested enough to find out?
Since I was getting nowhere with my line of thought I took a quick shower and got ready for the day. For whatever reason she was plaguing my mind, I still had work to do and I wasn’t gonna get shit done by moping around my place like a lovesick teenager.
EMILY
Well shit, this stuff really works. Day two and I can barely keep up. After that first night when Simone raided my closet, once I got back from feeding mother, she kept me up all night taking strategic pictures of each piece before showing me how to upload them to a website that she literally had up and running in less than two hours.
I was dog tired by the time she took pity on me and left so I could drop into bed for some much needed sleep. I could’ve told her there was no use, I hadn’t slept through the night since daddy died. That’s the reason for the circles under my eyes, the bags I attribute to Jason Storm. I cut my thoughts off right there. That man makes me crazy for more reasons than one.
Surprisingly I’d dropped off and slept like a log only stirring as the sun came through the slats of my window shades. I’d lain there for the longest time trying to catch my bearings. Not surprisingly ‘he’ was the first thing on my mind before it cleared and I banished him to the farthest regions of my psyche. It’s been like that for the past week or so, ever since I started making a fool of myself in front of him every evening like clockwork.
That day I’d climbed out of bed feeling even worse than I had before Simone had given me hope. Sometime during that hectic night I’d caught her fever and had actually started to believe that this might be the answer. The way she’d priced my old barely used stuff would, if sold, bring in a cool hundred grand. Wishful thinking I know, but at least I was doing something purposeful instead of feeling sorry for myself. Therein lied the hope.
By the time I woke up that first day I knew it was just wishful thinking and the dream died a quick death, that is until I made myself look at the website. My heart had gone into overdrive when I saw the notices and the hits from just that first night and early morning. Almost half the stuff had been ordered. My head spun as I tried to make sense of it and I’d called Simone in a panic.
“Girl it’s fuck this shit o’clock what’re you doing up? Didn’t we just go to bed?” She yawned on the other end and I heard the sheets rustle as she sat up. “You’ve got to get over here, half this stuff has been ordered. How am I supposed to ship this stuff, where am I gonna get…”
“Calm down. Do you really think I haven’t thought of all that already? The shipping boxes should be here sometime today, all we have left to do is set up business shipping with the post office, grab you a PO Box and voila.”
Shit, I forgot about a return address. Crazy Simone had used the physical address of our old high school for the website and I hadn’t thought much of it, I was just happy not to be using my own. “I’ll be right there once I get my ass out of this bed, see you in a few.”
True to her word she’d been here an hour later, helping me sort through orders and keeping me from losing my mind. Once the boxes had come in later that day I realized that she’d been thinking about this for much longer than I first believed. Pink boxes with Diva’s Closet emblazoned in silver with a butterfly clasp; my signature if I ever had one.
“You planned this? What if I’d said no?” She gave me her resting bitch face and her patented look that said ‘no one messes with the princess’ making me laugh. “Then I would’ve made you do it because it’s for your own good. I never doubted. You’re a sensible woman, I only surround myself with sensible people haven’t you noticed?”
She had a point. It’s the reason she never hung out with my friends and I on a regular basis. Her barbed tongue had started many a feuds in our little world over the years, but she and I have always been close. Her dad had once sued a magazine for splashing her picture on their front cover and had actually won, even though she was eighteen at the time. I still don’t know how he’d pulled that one off, but ever since then no one else ever dared. Whereas the rest of my crowd lived to have their faces splashed across every conceivable surface.
We’d set up business shipping online, and I learned I could ship everything from the privacy of my home without ever having to step foot outside.
With the first set of orders neatly packed in their boxes with purple tissue paper lined up against the wall, ready to be picked up my the mail person, we’d had a celebratory drink of champagne which she’d brought.
There was a cool forty grand in my account and I didn’t even let the thought that that was a little less than my monthly allowance, get me down. Those days were obviously gone. And the orders kept coming in all that day and into the evening.
Now it was day two and I was down to five pieces of the fifty or so that I’d first uploaded. I knew that this money would barely breach the surface of the debt my dad had left behind. Bills that I never knew existed, of which I was now ashamed, needed to be covered. He’d seemingly taken care of the bigger loans and such, but we were still about half a million in the hole with household expenses and then there was the mortgage. At least he hadn’t taken out a second one.
I knew we might be forced to sell the house at some point but was afraid of what that would do to mother. I never realized until now just how fragile she is. For that matter I’d never been very aware of my own strength. Sure I could hold my own in a fight, but this was different. This shit was worse than an episode of Survivor.
5
Emily
I got to about midmorning before thoughts of Jason Storm began to crowd my mind once again. Like I said, I’ve heard his name in the past, even well before daddy had mentioned his business dealings with him, he was on the lips of many of my friends. As a new transplant from back east, his money, not to mention his good looks, had made him a hot topic for months.
Funnily enough, though I had the reputation of a bubble headed socialite, a breed thought to flit from bed to bed with a new man on her arm every other week, I was quite the prude. Not many knew this, except for my closest friends, but I’ve never seen sex as the harmless pastime so many took it for.
Between a flighty mother whose only interest was her next designer shopping spree and a dad who was always hot on the heels of the next best deal, I had a nanny who’d instilled her own values on a young impressionable me. I’d lucked out there, and Estelle was my one true regret of this whole mess. Well except for my dad and his horrible end.
After I’d outgrown my use for a nanny, I’d insisted that Estelle be kept on in some capacity or another and so she’d become the head housekeeper. A position she’d held since my first day of kindergarten until a week ago when I had to tell that wonderful woman that I could no longer afford her services. She’d cried and offered to stay on free of charge until I got myself together, but I couldn’t ask that of her. I’d only just begun to learn how hard the real world is.
I do miss her sorely though, but I held fast to all her little anecdotes and adages that had always kept me one step ahead and above my peers.
So, while most of my girlfriends had been goo-goo eyed over Mr. Storm, I hadn’t given him a second glance. Back then I was well on my way to becoming a cross between my parents. Flighty, in the way I flitted away my days and nights doing nothing but seeking out the next party or social event, but still savvy enough to know the worth of a dollar. This is why I still had a few dollars in my savings, though not enough to keep both my mother and myself in the lifestyle we were accustomed to.
I’d of course appreciated his dark good looks; who wouldn’t? His jet-black hair, which he wore cropped close and those piercing blue-grey eyes that always seemed laser focused on the camera whenever he was snapped. The dimples in his cheeks that were evident even without a smile, and that strong jawline that said he was all man and serious with it, I’m sure had melted many a heart from coast to coast.
My disinterest stemmed more from my personal promise to myself that I would never marry someone like my dad, who was consumed by his business. My dream was to marry a man who worked a nine to five, left work at the door, and was happy to spend time with his wife and kids. Obviously from the write-ups on Storm, he was not that guy. In fact he seemed to be a lot like daddy from what I heard.
Sure I loved my dad, but I wouldn’t want to be married to him. I well remember all the missed recitals and plays, ballgames and pretty much my whole childhood. His idea of parenting was to give me every material thing my heart desired, but his time, which I would’ve gladly traded for, was given to his business.
With that idea firmly planted in my mind, the likes of Jason Storm held no appeal for me, good looks notwithstanding. But now it seems, after closer acquaintance, he has invaded my mind and refuses to leave, though I try at every turn to keep him out. Even my dreams, when I do sleep, are overtaken by him and that snide smirk which seems permanently planted on his smug face.
It hadn’t been that way in the beginning. When I first sought him out, it was to get to the bottom of his thievery. I’d convinced myself that he had swindled daddy out of his company, the company he’d inherited and expanded over the years. The one he’d always boasted to me would be his legacy, a legacy he planned on leaving to his only daughter. I could hear him even now, telling me that I never had to worry a day in my life because my future was already set.
I shied away from such thoughts as well and went back to dwelling on my degradation. Though the furor that had first surrounded him when he moved here had died down somewhat, the name Jason Storm wasn’t new to me but the man himself was. Even though in the last month or so before he died I’d heard daddy mention him a time or two, since I’d never paid too much mind to his business dealings in the past, this time was no different and I’d barely given non- interested murmurs for answers whenever the subject arose.
Had I not been so selfish I would’ve noticed the change in the man I loved more than life itself. I did notice that he’d lost a little weight, but had put it off to another one of his intense business ventures. He always got like that when he was going after some deal. Gaunt, restless and hyper, almost jittery. So when I did notice those things this last time I made no note of it.
After he’d taken his own life and it came about that he’d sold the company, my future, I had no choice but to get to the bottom of it. I may not have delved too deeply into the machinations of the company that would one day be mine, but I had some working knowledge of the particulars. I knew enough to know the financial worth of the business, and if it was so that daddy had sold it for whatever reason, there should be more money than was left once the dust settled.
At the back of my mind I suspect that there was more to it than what the accountant had shared. There’s no way that a man as fastidious as Timothy Bronson had let things get so bad that he’d sold his company for pennies on the dollar, leaving his wife and child without support.
It was with that premise that I had first approached the formidable Jason Storm. I was sure that there was some shady dealings on his part, that in fact he had swindled my dad and that was what had led to his death at his own hand. I had no evidence of this, and going through daddy’s papers hadn’t pointed to any such thing, but I still could not fathom that things had been as cut and dried as they’d been relayed to me.
It was I think, after the third or fourth meeting that I realized a change in me towards him. Suddenly I would get butterflies in my stomach right before it was time for me to go face him down, and not the nervous sort. I found myself looking forward to sparring with him as serious as the situation was. And every evening after that, I left feeling like I’d lost something vital once out of his sight.
I’d brushed it off as nothing more than nerves and the events of the last few weeks finally catching up to me. But I secretly knew that there was more to it than that. Especially when he started following me into my dreams. Now that there was no need to see him again, that feeling of listlessness prevailed even now in the midst of my new venture.
I got started on the latest orders while shunning thoughts of him. I had to grudgingly admit that he was not the thief I first thought him to be, and that only made way for the attraction I’d been keeping at bay. I could no longer kill any thought of him with the idea that he was a thief, that he’d robbed me and my mother of what was rightfully ours. And with that barrier, that last line of defense gone, it seems I was now wide open to let the thoughts flood in.
As I closed and labeled the last box for shipping I gave up the fight not to go snooping into his life. Until now my only interest had been in his business practices. I had no need to go searching through his personal life. But now in the early morning hour before mother awoke with her constant needs to keep me occupied, the temptation proved to be too much.
All it took was adding his name to the search engine and there was his life story for all the world to see. I still bore some slight resentment against him, unfair as it may be. But how could I not when he had taken over my dad’s office, and had already begun implementing changes from what I could see? I chose to go to him at end of day when I was sure that certain of the past employees he’d kept on would be gone. It will be a long time before I overcome the embarrassment of my fall from grace.
I’d once walked through those doors to smiles and warm welcomes, but the first time I’d gone to face him down, the looks bordered more on self-pity, and even some had held glee at my demise. There’s nothing worse, it seems, than losing one’s fortune in the eyes of some people. I’d even heard a few whispers, which I’m sure were intended to be overheard, about my poor state.
Apparently I was seen as nothing more than a useless blonde headed bimbo who would now set her sights on some rich older man to get me out of the predicament I find myself in. Some of my so-called friends were even beginning to distance themselves, though how they knew that we were that desolate was beyond me.
True our set was a close-knit circle where everyone knew each other. Wives lunched together while husbands made deals in the boardroom. I’m sure some of those husbands talked shop with their wives, and probably knew more about what went wrong with the
company than I did. I knew that this hurts mother as much as daddy’s death. She so relished being the ‘queen’ and now that she’d lost her crown she was finding it hard to cope.
I spent the next hour reading all about how he came from nothing to be one of the foremost contenders in the business world. I didn’t understand how a software programmer had risen so high and so fast in the industry, but it was obvious that the man had his fingers in a lot of pies. “Quite the little entrepreneur aren’t you?” I sneered at his profile before hitting the image button.
Each picture was of him and a different woman. The little snippets under each said that he never kept one around for long, no more than a couple months at the most. “Dog.” I hid the little blip of jealousy under snark. Why should I care who he sleeps with, or what he does with his life for that matter? Our association was at an end. I had no more need to be in his presence since he’d proved to me once and for all that daddy had indeed sold him the company, lock, stock and barrel.
It was very telling though that the write-ups on him were very superficial. Almost as if at some point after he first came on the scene ten years ago, he’d faded to black. There were pictures of him yes, out and about around the globe, but there was no real substance, only guesses and innuendos. There; someone else had caught on and written a story about the secretive Mr. Storm who kept his private life meticulously protected. I wonder what he thinks about my lifestyle? If he’d ever cared to look.
6
Jason
Loving The Enemy Page 3