2. Percy
CHAPTER 2
Percy
“Glamorous, Darling,” Mom said. “Absolutely Fantasmic. To tell you the truth, I was getting worried that you might have forgotten all about it. I’ll see you both then.” And she hung up. The boop-boop sound from the speakerphone made me lift a horrified gaze to Kimberly Jones, my personal assistant and oftentimes the only sane person in a three-mile radius. She was standing on the other side of my desk.
“What the hell just happened?” I whispered, my mouth going suddenly and terribly dry.
Kim held a tablet in the fold of her left arm and a pen in her right hand. Her eyes were sharp and focused, her features smooth. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it went something like this. Your parents invited you to their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and you, not wanting to fly to Greece to enjoy two full weeks of sunbathing and drinking red wine from carafes, made up a boyfriend who’s too busy right now to fly across the Atlantic. How am I doing so far?”
“That sounds right on the money,” I said, sliding back in my chair. I loosened the stupid tie around my neck and popped the top button of my dress shirt open.
Kim proceeded without mercy. “After some back-and-forth, not only did you agree to attend said anniversary party—the one you wanted to avoid all along, if I may remind you—but you also promised to bring your imaginary boyfriend along because ‘yes, Mother, I suppose he does deserve a little break.’” Kim arched an eyebrow in the cynical way only she could pull off while I nodded gravely. “I recall phrases such as, ‘You’re going to love him,’ and, ‘This is just what we need, now that you mention it.’”
I nodded again. “Yes. That sounds about right. Thank you.” I said, my voice raspy as I reached for the glass of water on my desk.
Kim hesitated only for the sake of politeness. “Do I need to call your doctor, Percy?”
I tried for a look of mild annoyance at the quip, but I was possibly the least intimidating person anyone had ever met. “How did this happen?” I asked no one in particular. I wasn’t a terrible negotiator when I had to face a room full of hostile investors who wanted to pry my company from my hands. I wasn’t even that bad at haggling in Morocco. But Mother? I shuddered to think. If the sort of concessions I gave her would become public, I would never be allowed at the negotiating table again.
Kim was there to offer the unwanted answer. “After two years of structuring your life, I know exactly how it happened.”
I deadpanned. “Does it have anything to do with the fact that I have never been able to say no to my mother?”
“It’s got everything to do with the fact that you have never been able to say no to your mother,” Kim replied, matching my tone as an extra kick in the nuts.
I gritted my teeth and directed my frustration away from the phone. “And why exactly did you not jump in when you saw me sinking?”
A tiny smile lifted the corners of her lips. “You looked like you really wanted to take your boyfriend to Greece, Sir.”
The back of my head thumped against the faux leather of the chair. “The boyfriend I don’t have, you mean.”
“Precisely.” Lowering her tablet to my desk, Kim sat in one of the comfortable chairs where we imagined clients might want to sit when visiting. Not that I had done any client work in ages. “If I may remind you, I’ve been trying to schedule a date for you for the past, oh, four months.”
I closed my eyes. “I’ve been busy.”
Kimberly Jones was possibly the only person who could make shifting in a chair sound ironic. “I make your schedule, Percy.” You weren’t busy , she meant.
I opened my eyes again and shot her a look of despair. “Let’s not talk about that, shall we? Unless you can turn back time, there’s nothing either of us can do about that.”
Kim nodded firmly. “Correct. So, what can we do?”
We looked at each other for a minute. “I was hoping you would know.”
The cogs in Kim’s brain were chugging along just fine. They had been since the moment I had agreed to this ridiculous thing. “A. You can simply say you broke up, slash, the boyfriend couldn’t make it.”
I shook my head. “I did that once. And it was true, then, but they still make fun of me for ‘making up a boyfriend.’” I air-quoted and dropped my hands on the desk.
“B, then. Get a boyfriend by Sunday. Today being Friday, of course.” She said it like it was the easiest, most obvious solution to all my problems.
This was their thirty-fifth anniversary. I couldn’t miss it. Not when I missed the thirtieth for that stupid music festival in the desert I went to with Richie Harrison. We’d been young and stupid and still newly rich. To this day, I couldn’t see my mother without her showing me photos from the celebration week. She would laugh at a perfectly reasonable photo and shake her head dismissively. “You had to be there,” she’d explain. It was less bearable when she would just sigh and tell me how much they missed me the entire week. “Aunt Judith was so looking forward to seeing you, Darling.”
I cocked my head at Kim. “How…how do I do that?”
“Speed dating?” she suggested.
“And taking an innocent stranger to Naxos for two weeks of socializing with my extended family? I can’t be that cruel.” I crossed my arms defiantly.
Kim used her tablet’s pen to tap her chin. “Actually, I might have a solution. Percy?” She looked as if divine providence had struck her. Eyes wide and mouth slightly open, she lifted the pen to make a point. “Oh, this is brilliant. Yes, I can make this work.”
“What are you…?”
But Kim was already ten steps ahead of me, which was the reason I had hired her in the first place. “I need to make some arrangements. I’ll have Anton help you with the meeting notes for tonight. I’m on a mission.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, split between awe and pure horror. Kimberly Jones was a formidable force on any Wednesday morning before coffee. But Kimberly Jones with an impossible challenge on a tight deadline? I pitied the poor souls who found themselves in her way.
Kim stood up promptly. “I’m going to find you a man to play the part of your loving boyfriend for two weeks in Greece. One who can absolutely survive your family.”
I wanted to sneer with an: “Impossible!” but I didn’t dare add fuel to this fire. Does such a man exist? Kim was turning on her heels with the kind of determination that promised that, yes, that man absolutely existed. And she was about to pull him out of her bottomless top hat.
When the door to my office closed, I released an embarrassing whimper of despair, cleared my throat, and stood up. Walking around the chair to the double-glass window overlooking the Hudson River, I allowed myself a deep, reassuring breath of air.
Kim had been keeping my life organized and my sanity intact since the day she joined my team. In the two years of this partnership, I changed my diet from quick takeouts to healthy, balanced meals, hired a personal trainer to get some use out of my private gym, attended yoga classes twice a week, and found the freedom to focus on my passion projects instead of having to deal with the day-to-day problems of running the company. With Kim’s help, I had mostly relegated the tasks to capable people she herself had vetted.
There were no doubts about it; Kim had fixed my life just so. And I suspected she would fix the mess I had made with a single phone call at eight in the morning, committing to a two-week trip to Greece.
Though my fingers trembled at the mere thought of it, I was reasonably confident that something might come up and rescue me from the embarrassment of having to admit that I, in fact, made up a boyfriend.
“Again?” Mom would ask, spilling her wine with laughter.
“Orson was real,” I would mutter under my breath, but nobody would ever believe me.
I swallowed the knot in my throat and picked up my phone when it vibrated. “Sis?”
“Is it true?” she asked.
The space between my eyebrows creased. “Is what true?”
“You’re bringing a mystery man to the anniversary party,” Emily teased.
“Mom already told you?” I gawked.
“Where do you think I am?” Emily laughed. “I was there when she called you.”
“Emily, you are the only person who would volunteer to arrive sooner than expected. How bad is it?” I added the question in a conspiratorial tone.
My sister feigned seriousness. “For your information, I am here to help make sure everything is ready for the party.”
“As if Nektaria and Dimitrios would ever let you meddle with planning,” I said with a snort. The caretakers of my parents’ summer home might have been employed by us on paper, but they were Zeus’s own representatives on Earth in actuality. Nobody messed with their party-planning process.
“You’re deflecting, Little Brother,” she singsonged. “Is it true, then? We’re finally meeting the Phantom Boyfriend?”
I exhaled resignedly. “Yes. I’m bringing him. He’s absolutely real.”
“What’s his name?” Emily asked innocently.
Fuckshit. “Ask him yourself when we get there.”
The laughter that nearly deafened my left ear proved that her question hadn’t been innocent at all. “Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you, Percy.”
“Me too,” I admitted grudgingly.
“Right. I have to go, Lil Bro. Dimitrios wants my opinion on the color of the ribbon we are tying to the balloons,” she explained importantly.
“I’m sure he does,” I teased. “Make sure to write him a memo on the color of the candles on the cake, too.”
Emily politely told me where to put the candles and what, then, to do with them, said she loved me and hung up.
I was still chuckling to myself when Anton entered my office. “Hey, boss. Kim said to take over. Is she alright? She looked like she was going to break my neck for jamming a coin in the vending machine.”
“She’s on a mission,” I explained.
Anton gave a big nod of someone who understood everything completely and needed no further explanation. He crossed the office to the chair Kim had recently occupied and lowered himself into it. At twenty-three, he was the youngest person on my small personal team and, right after Kim, the most capable. He swiped at the screen of his tablet, inhaled a deep breath of air, and began to recite my agenda.
These were the things I loved. Relegating the duties of running the data protection company, which some news outlets labeled as my “brainchild,” to more passionate and knowledgeable people, allowed me to focus on seeking young talent, investing in new ideas, and helping brilliant inventors secure the capital to make their dreams come true. I detested the term “venture capitalist” for its negative connotations, but at the end of the day, that was what I was. My driving principle, however, was to give back to the world that had given me so much when I had been a broke college student with nothing but a good idea and plenty of hope.
Anton and I outlined my day and I followed him to the meetings, but my mind kept wandering. The longer I waited, the more I feared this had all been a terrible mistake. Kim was out there, looking for someone to pretend to be my boyfriend—for two weeks.
I was beginning to think that it was preferable to simply admit that I had lied to get out of a family function rather than go through with this. If anyone was going to play the part of my boyfriend, he needed to be convincing, he needed to be close to me.
I didn’t want anyone to get close to me. Despite Kim’s attempts to schedule some dating time for me and her not-so-subtle downloading of Grindr to my phone, I didn’t want anyone.
“Excuse me,” I said to Anton, sweat breaking over my brow. “I need to make a phone call.” I slipped out of the conference room during the Q&A part of the sixth presentation of the day and headed to the restroom. I called Kim, who picked up instantly. “Hey, don’t bite my head off, but I’m having second thoughts about this whole fake boyfriend thing. How about we just…don’t do it?”
“Oh. Hum. That’s a little tricky since he’s on board with the plan already and I had everything arranged.” Kim’s words left a tiny little opening for discussion, but her tone did not.
I swallowed hard. “So…I have a boyfriend?”
“As of Sunday morning, you will. Trust me, Percy. It’s a good plan.” Her words were somewhat comforting. I never knew Kim to offer a bad plan. “Look, just meet with him on Sunday. I’ll have him onboard your Dreamliner an hour early. If you get cold feet again, we’ll fall to plan B. But see him first.”
“We have a plan B?” I asked.
“You had your straight awakening, you misspoke, and I’m your girlfriend,” she cited.
I barked out a laugh and thanked her for the work she had done. With that out of the way, I shrugged to myself and accepted my fate. Then, as I hung up, I realized I had forgotten to ask what his name was.
I guess I’ll ask him myself when I meet him , I thought, and I returned to the conference room with something in my stomach that resembled giddiness.
It wasn’t until the evening of the next day that I put the pieces together. What sort of a person would be available on such short notice to act as a date? Which occupation provided the exact set of skills necessary to pull off this ruse? That night, as I awaited the morning of our flight, I couldn’t sleep because of the small boulder I must have swallowed, and it sat heavy in my stomach.