1. A Not so Empire State of Mind （Ryan） #2
“Mr. Hellerman was his father. This here’s Ryan,” Brady barked, sending spit flying in every direction.
“Excuse these men,” I said, waving my hand, and then gesturing to the door. The woman followed me as we walked away from the chaos. “Yes. What is it?”
“Mr. Hellerman, I was sent here by Stacy to ask you if you need me to call the janitorial staff,” she said.
“Stacy couldn’t ask that herself? Where is she?” I asked, feeling a bit irritated. Stacy was my secretary, the Donna to my Harvey. Yet she wasn’t here but was sending interns in her stead.
“I’m her trainee, Mr. Hellerman. She’s been training me to be a secretary to Mr. Grisham.”
“The writer?” I asked jokingly.
“No, the head of acquisitions,” she said, only realizing too late that I was messing with her.
Her face broke into a brief smile. Up close, I could see that what I’d mistaken as jet-black hair was a dark shade of chestnut.
There was no mistaking that her eyes were a true shade of green.
This was no woman. This was just a girl, barely in her twenties.
“I know, I know,” I said. “Tom Grisham’s one of our finest. He got us Lil Skeezy, Simon Latham, and Everwinter, the K-Pop star. And that was just last month for Tom.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call you the janitor, Mr. Hellerman?” she asked, looking past my shoulders where my friends stood. They had gotten their hands on my golf clubs and were going about smashing things.
I sighed and shook my head.
“Leave it. Someone will come in the morning and deal with this,” I said. “You have yourself a nice evening, mis….?”
“I’m Melissa,” she said.
“Well, Ms. Melissa. Thank you for checking in on us. We don’t need anything for now,” I said. I watched her walk out of the office into the dimly lit corridor. Then, turning my attention to my friends, I glared and asked, “Golf clubs, really?”
“Well, we couldn’t find brooms, so we thought to clean up this ‘mess’ with what we could find. Hope you don’t mind, huh?” Jeff stammered, then went back to smashing the broken table into even tinier pieces.
“That’s it, you idiots. You’ve done enough for one night.
I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I blurted out.
That coffee table they’d collectively broken and were playing with various pieces was a gift from Hoffa.
He had made it with his own hands in his workshop.
Tomorrow, I had a meeting with him. How’d I look him in the eye and tell him that the African Blackwood coffee table he’d gifted me on my thirty-eighth birthday last year had been turned into rubble by my friends?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, where’s this hostility coming from?” Brady asked, putting down the club, all jest disappearing from his face.
“It’s…forget it.” My fist unclenched, and the terrible wave of anger that had overcome me dissipated as I saw their alienated faces.
“No, I want you to say it,” Charlie insisted. “You’re ashamed of your bros, aren’t you?”
“It’s not like that.” It was exactly like that, but I couldn’t let them know that, could I?
“It’s exactly like that, Charlie,” Ronnie affirmed. “Or…it could be that our once wild friend has been tamed so much that he’s chickening out of dares.”
“Hey! You know it’s not like that,” I said, my finger wagging threateningly. I was banned for life from a half-a-dozen bars around Harvard because I’d partied too hard back in the day. I had the disciplinary committee verdict letters to show for it.
Ronnie might have been the guy backflipping off frat house rooftops, but I had actually climbed on top of Harvard Hall at midnight.
I jumped off the tallest point, tried to land on a makeshift trampoline, landed in the bushes instead, broke my leg, and landed in the hospital for three weeks.
“You better come strapped and armed if you want to challenge the Dare King!”
“The Dare King’s retired, his claws have been clipped. Once a fierce lion haunting the savannahs, he’s no more than a neutered pet at the zoo. Ooh, don’t break my fine table. Don’t spill my wine!” Clearly, Jeff had had too much to drink.
“Oh, so it’s like that? A mutiny, is it?” I raised my eyebrows. This was not good for business. In a pack setting, the wolves only respected their alpha if he was good for it. If he could walk the walk. It seemed that my pack was beginning to doubt my ability to walk the walk.
“Go on then, geniuses. Give me a dare. Make it a fucking juicy one. I’ll put you all to shame.”
“What’s the wager?” Charlie asked, a crazy grin appearing on his face. I had walked into his trap. Into all their traps. They’d gotten me to play the game, and now it was too late to back out.
“Depends on the dare.”
“Fine,” Ronnie noted, wiping spit and whiskey off his face, aimed drunkenly at the door. “That fine piece of work that just came walking over here. What did she say her name was again?”
“Hey, no. My employees are off-limits. You know that’s not how we do this,” I insisted, shaking my head.
“Hey, Jeff, do you remember ordering a huge bitch, cuz I didn’t,” Brady said, sniggering loudly.
God. I hated them. I hated them all at this very moment. Encumbering sons of bitches. Hairs disheveled, eyes red, and manic grins on their faces, their bodies reeking of smoke and spirit.
“Oh, come now, we don’t want you to do something nefarious,” Brady said, thumping hard on my shoulder.
“I’m surprised you can manage to say the word nefarious given how hammered you are,” I retorted, pushing his arm off my shoulder.
“Listen, man, we get it. We’re cramping your style and all. But we’ll get out of your hair lickety-split if you…you know.” Brady’s voice trailed off, but I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. The others were making obscene gestures with their hands to elaborate on what the dare entailed.
“You guys are sick,” I announced.
“You never asked about the wager again,” Charlie said.
“There’s no amount of money that could convince me to do something like that,” I replied sternly.
“Not money. Freedom. We’ve been noticing how you’re acting so distant lately. Like you were never one of us to begin with. As if you’re better or something,” Jeff said. There was genuine malice on his face.
“And if we can remind you just for one night that you’re the same beer-guzzling, spliff-ripping, casual fucking prick that you were back when we were tight in college, then so be it. In return, we’ll get out of your hair,” Ronnie promised.
“It’s not like we’re going to break up. We’re not chicks, Jesus,” Charlie added.
“You guys had me at getting out of my hair. So, go on. Get,” I ordered, standing by the door, waving my hand at the doorway.
As I watched them leave my office in a single file, Ronnie, the last to leave, grabbed me by my collar and pulled me close enough that I could smell the stench emanating from his mouth.
“Don’t think we won’t find out if you phone it in. We’ll know, Ryan, boyo.” Then he put his warm hand on my cheek. “In Gaia’s never-ending tapestry, all men are connected.”
I shook my head and thumped him once on the back as he left. As for why I had pursued the dare…well, it’s complicated. Seeing that sorry parade of drunk has-beens defeatedly trailing their feet toward the elevator made me feel bad. Bad enough that I wanted to make it up to them.
Starting with honoring the dare.
The idea might have been theirs, but there was a thing known as the thrill of the chase.
Ever since I’d laid my eyes on that girl, I hadn’t been able to forget the way her hair curled over her shoulders, how supple her body felt to my eyes, and how her perfume had been a welcome reprieve from the pungency of my office.
He might be nearing his forties, but the Dare King wasn’t one to let a dare as tantalizing as this slide.
There it was again, that remorse-filled fraction of a second that made me look at myself and loathe the person I was, hate the things I did, and abhor the people I hung out with.
But as I ventured out of my office in pursuit of the mysterious new secretary, all that remorse was muffled by a much more raw and primitive emotion.
Desire.