It took me a while to think up exactly what I wanted to do. I had never been the most romantic guy in the world, not by a long shot. But I wanted to make the effort here. Eventually, it was all planned out.
It was early April, the beginning of spring when the weather starts to warm up and the cherry trees start blooming. I got everything taken care of at work and told Marissa to pack her bags, that we were going away for the weekend.
“Ooooh, where to?” she asked, and I just winked at her.
“I’ll give you one hint… you need to take your passport.”
She asked what to pack, and I told her the weather should be just a tad warmer than in New York. For a full twenty four hours Marissa tried to trick me into telling her where we were going, but I was determined not to let her know.
When we got to the airport on Friday morning and got our boarding passes, I saw the surprise show on her face when she saw we were going to Paris, first class.
I’m pretty sure half the airport heard her squeal of delight, and I couldn’t help but grin at her absolute, pure joy.
“Oh my God! I’ve never even gone outside of America except that time we went to the Bahamas!” she told me.
“I know, and I know you said you’d always wanted to visit Paris, so I figured this was as good a chance as any,” I replied with a grin. I couldn’t help it, her joy was contagious.
“I can’t believe it! We’re actually going to Paris?”
“Yup!”
Eight hours later we’d landed, gone through customs and gotten our bags. Despite both of us being slightly jet lagged, the excitement kept us both awake, though for different reasons.
That first day we went to the top of the Eiffel tower, taking the elevator all the way up, getting an amazing view over Paris. We stopped for lunch at a creperie, enjoying a classic French meal, before spending our afternoon at the Louvre, only getting to see a fraction of the thousands of amazing works in the amazing museum but loving every single moment of it.
Finally we went to a bistro for dinner, enjoying the most succulent chicken either one of us had ever had. I always found it amazing how the French essentially cooked with the same ingredients we did, and yet managed to do it all so much better.
Finally, we arrived at our hotel, at this point both of us completely exhausted. The driver had brought our bags over earlier, and we were quickly shown our room, a Presidential suite that, like every hotel room in Paris, was small compared to American standards, but no less opulent. Our view overlooked the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower, and was hands down one of the best views in the entire city.
“Today has been amazing!” Marissa exclaimed.
“I agree. I’m glad you liked it.”
“I’m so tired, but I think there’s one last thing I want to do before going to bed,” Marissa cooed as she came closer to me, grabbing the hem of my pants.
When we finished making love, we were both completely spent in every sense of the word. I don’t think I’d ever slept so well in my life, and the next morning we woke up after nine, which was definitely what I considered “sleeping in” at that point in my life.
For breakfast we walked down the street until we found a quaint little boulangerie that sold croissants that practically melted in our mouths. We spent the day leisurely walking around, visiting the occasional sights (after doing some shopping on the Champs Elysees we walked under the Arc de Triomphe) and checked out a few chocolate shops where the only thing more elaborate and skilled than the chocolates themselves was the service we received.
That night was our last in Paris, and I knew what I wanted to do. I was nervous as all hell that entire day. I had no idea if Marissa was going to say yes to me, but I hoped so. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and I hoped beyond all hope that she felt the same way.
We started by going to a Michelin star rated restaurant that it took me a LOT of bribery to get a reservation for.
“I know this is starting to sound old, but I’ve never tasted anything this good,” Marissa told me, laughing, as we had our seventh mini course of the night.
When the meal finished, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest even harder than before. It was a perfectly clear night, absolutely gorgeous. I had our driver take us to Tour Montparnasse, where the elevator quickly whisked us to the top of the building.
“But… that sign says it’s closed!” Marissa exclaimed as we walked past.
“I know, I had them close it off for us,” I told her.
Speechless, I took Marissa up the elevator to the roof. When we got there, she exclaimed with surprise and pleasure when she saw what I had done.
Over 100 red roses lined the roof, candles rather than the usual lighting illuminating the space as we looked over the Paris skyline, the Eiffel Tower lit up in all its glory.
“Oh my God,” Marissa whispered, looking around. I had to admit, it looked perfect. A small table held a bottle of Moet and Chandon and two glasses, which I really, really hoped we were going to use to celebrate in a minute.
“All this… for me?” she asked, still stunned.
I knew this was the moment. The moment I had thought about for a long time now. My heart pounding in my chest, I knew if I didn’t get these words out now, I never would. They were partly prepared, partly impromptu.
“Marissa… from the moment you first spilled wine all over me at a charity function, I knew you were the one. I knew you were special. And you are special. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known in every respect, and I know more than ever that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I hope against all hope that you feel the same way. Marissa Stone, will you do me the honor of marrying me?”
I got down on one knee and took out the little blue box from my jacket pocket, the box with the ring I hoped Marissa would love. I knew she liked princess cut diamonds, and this was one large one in the middle, surrounded by three smaller ones on either side, set in a perfect gold band.
Marissa’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes widened.
“Of course. Oh my God, Nick, of course I’ll marry you!” she cried.
It was hands down the happiest moment of my life when she said yes.
We cracked open the champagne and had a glass, overlooking the Eiffel Tower. I kept glancing down at Marissa’s finger with the ring on it, and caught her doing the same more than once. We were both so giddy with excitement! We stayed up on the roof, cuddling, for about two hours. Finally, we made our way back down, and the driver took us to our hotel room where we spent the rest of the night making passionate love before heading back Stateside the next day, taking advantage of the long flight to catch up on all the sleep we’d missed out on the night before.
* * *
The lady behind the counter called out my order then, and I thanked her as I picked up my food and walked back to my apartment. The dress Marissa had picked out with my black card, a silk turquoise cocktail dress that hugged her curves but was still reasonably priced at only $600 still hung in my closet, along with the Jimmy Choo gold heels that had been on sale. Marissa’s one true splurge that day – a $2000 Prada purse which she promised to pay me back for eventually, and which I refused to let her do. She loved that purse, and carried it with her every single day until she disappeared. They never found her purse, just like they haven’t found her.
When I got back to my apartment, I did the work I’d been putting off for a little bit, trying to force my brain back into the present. Still, it was hard to ignore my memories of Marissa’s long legs, her smooth skin pressed against mine, her muscles twitching against my body. I missed her more than I missed anything in the world. Marissa had been my soul mate, and now she was gone.
Fortunately for me – or maybe unfortunately – the next day at work there was an emergency that meant I had no time at all to think about Marissa and our time together.
I got into the office at 6am, like I normally do. For the first couple of hours, I was alone, and
that was the way I liked it. Most of the staff got in at either 8 or 9, and I always loved those first couple of hours when I knew there would be no interruptions, nothing to bother me at all.
That’s why, when my office phone started to ring at 7:14am, when I was in the middle of answering a bunch of questions in an email for an interview with the Washington Post, I basically jumped half a foot in my chair. Very few people had access to my direct line, and my assistant wouldn’t be here to put calls through to me for another 45 minutes.
I picked up the phone. “Hello, Nicholas Kerry speaking.”
“Hi Mr. Kerry, this is Tony Liss from Onboard Web.” This wasn’t good. A phone call from the company that hosted the servers that delivered most of the information used by millions of users on our web apps, direct to my line? Tony continued.
“We’ve noticed a spike in the number of requests to your servers, and we suspect you’re the target of a DDoS attack.”
I immediately closed my eyes. A DDos attack is a denial of service attack, basically someone flooding the servers to make them crash by having too many visits. It’s usually some group of hackers trying to be funny or who are just bored, but up until then Onboard had always managed to stop any potential attacks before they crashed the servers. Going by Tony’s tone, it didn’t sound like they’d managed it this time.
“How long have the servers been down?”
“We’re not 100% sure, but likely five to six hours.” I had to admit, I liked Tony’s frankness. He wasn’t beating around the bush. “The automatic warning system didn’t kick in, so we had no idea until I came in this morning and manually looked at the server loads. I called my manager and he gave me the number to call you. The problem’s fixed now, and everything is back to normal, but I wanted to let you know.”
“Thanks, Tony.” There was no reason to get pissy with the guy who hadn’t done anything wrong, was just doing his job. I’d be calling up his boss, however, to find out exactly what happened. Five to six hours of downtime meant we had likely lost in the $800,000 to $1 million range in revenue from people who would have made purchases inside the app but wouldn’t have been able to access it. We paid seven figures a year to Onboard, in part to make sure these things didn’t happen. This was one of the reasons I wanted to move our apps away from needing an internet connection. My father had built those first apps, but this was the future. People had to be able to access their apps while being offline. Otherwise, problems happened. Problems like this one.
Immediately I grabbed a phone out of my drawer and loaded up one of our apps. Sure enough, working fine now. Thankful for small miracles, and thinking that Tony was a quick thinker, and wondering if I shouldn’t try and headhunt him for the company, I moved in to damage control.
I rang up the firm we used for PR and asked them to prepare a statement, and to send it out to all the major media outlets. Thankfully someone was in their office already. They know the media doesn’t sleep. I gave them the details of what I knew, and the numbers at Onboard if they needed anything else, asking them to speak with Tony Liss, then went on to do the damage control required at my own company.
At this point people had started trickling in. I went to see some of our IT workers and asked them to make sure everything was working fine, and to co-ordinate with Onboard if there were any problems. Then I asked them to track down the origin of the DDoS attacks. I knew there wasn’t much chance of being able to put a name to the IP addresses, as usually the people making those kinds of attacks are a bit too smart for that, but hey, you never know.
A couple hours later I got a phone call from Gregory Bell, the CEO of one of the businesses that most often competed with me, and a former classmate from when we were at boarding school together. Greg always resented the fact that I inherited my company, whereas he had to build his from the ground up. Of course, he does tend to forget that my father gave him a $100,000 loan to start up – without wanting any equity or interest - because he liked Gregory’s business sense.
“So I hear you’re having technical problems,” Gregory opened as soon as I picked up.
“I’m honoured that you have a Google Alert set up for JollyKolly Games,” I replied.
“Just wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you. You know, take over anything you don’t need anymore.”
Gregory was constantly trying to get me to sell him apps on the cheap.
“Thanks for the kind offer, Gregory. But we’re alright, you’ll be my first call if anything pops up on the market.”
I hung up, rolling my eyes. Gregory was harmless, and his jabs at me didn’t bother me at all, but dealing with him when I had a real crisis on my hands wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do right now.
I spent the whole day doing damage control while trying to get done the two dozen things that had been on my to-do list. We found out the attacks originated with a group of hackers in Turkey that were well known in the dark corners of the internet, and that there was well and truly nothing we could do about the attack. Fair enough, I was used to that sort of thing.
After six I opened a new browser window and started scanning the blogs to see what people were saying about the attack.
Luckily, most of it was good. The PR company had decided that we should offer one of the $0.99 purchases for free for every app affected, and I agreed. Most of the blogs were understanding and praised the response by the company, which was what I was looking for.
Leaning back, I tried to convince myself to do another four or five hours work before going home, getting some of the stuff I was supposed to have done finished earlier, when my best friend and the head of our legal department Tyler Warren came in carrying a six pack, throwing it across the room to me where I caught it easily.
“You’re lucky I played football as a kid, it would have been a tragedy to lose all that beer,” I laughed as I grabbed two of them and twisted the caps, plonking the others on my desk as I passed one across to Tyler.
“I figured you could use one of these after today,” Tyler grinned as he took a swig. I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath before enjoying my first gulp. A nice, cold beer was exactly what I needed just then.
“Fuck man, you have no idea how good this tastes right now,” I told him as I closed my eyes. “What a hell of a day.”
“Yeah, well, it’s over. And from what I’m reading no one hates you, hell, chances are you’re going to increase downloads over this since the company name’s in every paper in the city and on all the tech blogs.”
“I wonder if this is how Zuckerberg feels every time Facebook goes down for like an hour.”
“I don’t even want to think about it. Talk to me about something that’s not work related.”
For the next half hour Tyler and I just shot the shit about the latest football games, decided to go see a Rangers game sometime, drank three beers each, then Tyler said he had to go home to his family and left. I sat in the office, staring at the computer screen, not wanting to do anything except go home and collapse into my bed.
Unfortunately, duty called, and for the next three hours I worked, ordered a burger and fries to be delivered to the office (I definitely felt like I’d earned it, plus I hadn’t eaten all day), before finally deciding I had to get some sleep and headed home.
As soon as I got in the door, I pushed it shut with my heel, took off all my clothes, had a blissfully hot shower and collapsed into bed. I know it’s a cliché and all, but I’m pretty sure I was literally asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Sadly for me, a blissful night of peaceful sleep wasn’t in the cards. I tossed and turned, dreaming of Marissa, before finally waking up and being unable to fall asleep again. I looked at the clock. Just after 3am. When I looked over and it said 4:30am and I still hadn’t gone back to sleep, I knew it was pointless. I was awake. I might as well get up and have the first of what was bound to be many coffees that day.
I sat in the dark at the breakfast bar in my gourmet kitchen with
a hot cup of coffee in my hand, looking out at the lights of the city from the floor to ceiling windows of my apartment. I was back to thinking about Marissa, about the day she disappeared, about the worst day of my life. I had gone over every single moment of that day so often in my memory that none of the details faded, it was like watching a first person video every single time.
* * *
When we woke up that beautiful summer morning, sunshine streamed through the window. It was a Saturday, and it was going to be a gorgeous one. Marissa was lying naked next to me, tangled in the sheets. The soft hum of the air conditioner kept the room cool, but not cold, and we didn’t need blankets.
The sunshine illuminated her face, and I remember thinking that she looked so radiant, so perfect, her entire body glistening with perfection. She let out a small murmur then and woke up, her eyes opening softly, looking directly into mine, those perfect red lips forming a small smile.
“Is it morning already?” she asked, stretching her arms slowly, with the grace of a ballerina.
“Yeah, but I think we can stay in bed a little longer,” I murmured into her ear as we rolled over. After I’d proposed to her, during a weekend in Paris that was better than any other weekend of my life, Marissa had moved in to my apartment.
I pressed my pelvis against her hips and she rolled over slowly to face me. We made love slowly, passionately, as the day dictated. When we finally fell out of bed around eleven, we showered and decided to get brunch at a café down the road that we both loved. We sat at a small table on the sidewalk, people watching as the slow minutes of the day trickled past.
“Looking forward to the party at the Hamptons tonight?” Marissa teased me as she looked over the rim of her coffee cup. She knew I hated these events, and I knew she hated them too.
“Probably not as much as you are,” I replied teasingly.
Some friends of ours (well, mine) were starting a new company and holding what was almost certainly going to become a dinner to try and find potential investors. Marissa and I had been invited, and neither one of us was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it was one of those things we couldn’t really say no to.
Never Give Up (A Billionaire Love Story) Page 3