Chapter 9 Ethan
Ethan
What my natural charm lacks in terms of its persuasive powers, I make up for with my dick. That works well for me when my target is a beautiful woman I’m trying to hire and less well when my target is a straight man I’m trying to shaft.
I can compare the extent of my sexual interaction with Sophia earlier to ordering a full banoffee pie and merely swiping one’s forefinger through its cream.
It was a taste, a shamefully inadequate way to sample her goods.
Yet the sheer, indecent pleasure of it was just the balm I needed to embolden me for this evening’s next steps against the Montagues.
Not to mention, the satisfaction of having her accept my formal offer while still orgasm-drunk was real.
She starts on Monday.
At least I’ve closed one deal today.
And at least I know that, whatever fresh hell next week brings, I’ll have the delights of her body to take the edge off it, even if I’ll be enforcing a strict diet where she’s concerned.
The woman may be binge-worthy, but I am not a man who binges.
I’m a man who exerts self-control in all things. I’d like to think so, at least.
After she’d left and I’d gathered my wits, I lost no time in instigating emergency mode with our banking and legal teams. With Loeb’s help, I’ve drafted a preliminary letter to the Montague board, informing them of our intention to pursue a friendly takeover in good faith.
We’ve kept the tone civil and high level, focusing on the impact the two groups could have as one enlarged party and only alluding in the most vague terms to ‘economies of scale’.
It’s still not the right time to scare them off with talk of cost-cutting, and so the pitch document I’m attaching is very much a partial, look-what-we-can-achieve-together one.
This pitch has been sitting on our bankers’ desktops for months now.
I’m absorbed in reading it over for the millionth time when the door to my study opens without warning and my son Jamie pops his head around.
I blink in surprise—I wasn’t aware he was staying with me tonight.
He’s still in his school uniform, although it’s a disgrace—sleeves rolled up and tie loose and shirt creased and a large blot of blue ink on the front.
‘What are you doing here?’
He shuffles into the room, head bent. If fourteen-year-old boys are capable of any form of walking that doesn’t involve shuffling, I haven’t seen it. ‘Mum’s in Brussels.’
‘Oh, that’s right.’ I vaguely recall that my ex-wife, Elena, mentioned a trip to Brussels this week, something that evaded me pretty much as soon as she spoke the words. As a translator for the UN, she travels more than I do.
‘What’s for dinner?’
I haven’t the foggiest. I haven’t registered until right this minute that I’m famished. ‘Ask Davide to make you something. And say please.’
‘He’s gone home. So has Susan. Can I get Shake Shack?’
I glance at my phone. It’s gone eight already. Shit. How the fuck did that happen?
‘Have you done your homework?’ I hedge. I only have leverage up until the point that I agree to Shake Shack.
He looks at the carpet. ‘I did my biology.’
‘And…?’
‘I’ve still got maths.’
I hand him my phone. ‘You can get a burger. No milkshake. Order me some sushi while you’re at it. And get out of that filthy uniform and do your homework while it’s en route. You hear me?’
‘K. D’you want to watch The Rookie?’
‘I can’t tonight. I’m up to my eyeballs in work.’
We’ve been watching The Rookie together on occasion.
He got into it at a friend’s house, but now he only watches it when he’s here with me.
While I realise that watching television isn’t the highest form of leisure activity, it’s something we can do together: an easy way to hang out and bond over a common interest.
When you’re in no way a positive role model for your teenage son, this kind of cop-out is worth its weight in gold.
The only good I can do in his life is to provide for him and his mother, to ensure that they have the financial and physical security they need.
Safe, comfortable home. Round-the-clock protection.
And a household income that my divorce lawyer deemed borderline insane.
But of all the potential ominous forces in my son’s life, the most potent is also the most insidious: the toxic, fucked-up legacy of the Kingsleys, where money and optics and glory come before all else.
It stands to reason, therefore, that my ultimate role as a father is to hold Jamie at arm’s length, to do everything in my power to protect him from infection.
His mother has already been brave enough to take the first step, to cut ties with me and my family, to call time on her involvement and to take our son with her.
And so it behoves me to walk the endless tightrope between perpetuating that and distancing myself from him so fully that he loathes me.
It’s a tightrope his warm, nurturing mother will never have to walk with him.
She’s all in, overtly so. She’s Team Jamie, all the way, and I envy her for it just as much as I’m unspeakably grateful for it.
Which is to say that the occasional hour on the sofa, watching in quiet contentment as a group of professionals with impossible levels of altruism and integrity go about their jobs, is about as benign a use of time spent together as it gets.
At least in these moments I can be sure that the Kingsley demons aren’t actively at work, rotting his thoroughly decent character.
It’s my own silent way of being Team Jamie, even if it looks to everyone else like a pitiful failure of parenting.
‘We haven’t watched it for ages,’ he mutters.
‘Yes, well, I have a million balls in the air, so you’ll have to suck it up. Besides, you have homework to do.’
He doesn’t comment, but it’s only as he turns and shuffles away that I take in the dejected slump of his shoulders.
There’s bad posture, and there’s defeat, and I suspect what I’m seeing in him is the latter.
I’m acutely, painfully aware that there will come a time when he’ll stop asking me to hang out at all, and I’ll do better.
I will. But right now, I have to put this fucking Montague offer to bed.
I barely register him dropping my sushi off a little later, or eating it, for that matter. We get the email out to all the registered Montague Group board members, blind copying our own board on the correspondence. About an hour after I’ve sent the emails, I get a text from Miles.
Covering all your bases, I see. Our stock had a strange bounce in the last hour of trading. Don’t suppose you power-hungry arseholes know anything about that.
A sickening blend of anger and moral outrage curdles in the pit of my stomach.
I don’t know which accusation bothers me more: that I’ve been building a stealth stake—buying their stock in the open market—while pretending to play nice, or that I’m launching this takeover bid because I’m on some kind of power trip.
Calling me power-hungry is frankly a lazy accusation and a clear sign that Montague doesn’t know me at all.
It’s a sloppy leap from seeing someone leading the charge to assuming they’re in it for the glory.
Glory is overrated. It’s not worth its price, which is visibility, and expectations, and vulnerability.
You’ll never see me court any of those things—especially the latter.
Control, on the other hand, is worth it every single time. When you’re calling the shots, then, and only then, can you relax. I don’t do this job for status. I do it to avoid being at anyone’s mercy, to ensure that things get done properly and that the lights stay on.
Sometimes, it feels as though the wheels will come off this gilded chariot my father has passed onto me, that it will careen off into the night, dragging the thousands of people who depend on it along for the ride.
I suspect I’m as terrified of crashing the damn thing as I am resentful of being made to drive it in the first place. And if it goes off the rails, it’ll be my name on the wreckage.
It’s only when I finally stagger upstairs around eleven, brain hurting from the endless scenario analysis it’s insisted on spitting forth all evening, that I get a chance to check in on Jamie.
He’s spreadeagled face down on his bed, fast asleep and fully clothed.
He’s had a huge growth spurt this year—he must be five eleven or close enough.
His bedroom blinds are still up, ensuite bathroom light still glowing, and the room stinks of burgers.
Beside his bed lies the debris of an abandoned Shake Shack delivery, including the milkshake I categorically forbade him from getting. Fuck’s sake.
Teenage boys are pigs. Perhaps I should have discontinued the Kingsley family tradition of schooling us at Westminster School and opted instead for a boarding school. It might have knocked some basic self-discipline into him.
I gather up the various grease-streaked cardboard receptacles and place them by his bedroom door before lowering the blinds and turning off the bathroom light. I manage, with some difficulty, to extract the tangled duvet cover from beneath his prone body and cover him with it.
He stirs slightly, his face in profile and mouth slightly ajar, and a rush of love rips through my body, so great it almost brings me to my knees. I place a hand on his head and let it pass lightly over his mop of light brown hair. I can still see his two-year-old self in his sleeping face.
When he was tiny, the terror of keeping him alive may have been a visceral thing, but it was also straightforward.
The terror of fucking him up is, in many ways, far more suffocating.
Unbidden, the words his headmaster spoke at the last parents’ event come to mind.
Parenting a teenager is tough. In many ways, they need far less physical care than we’ve been used to giving them during their younger years. But it’s when they withdraw the most that they require the most emotional care.
Reluctantly, I remove my hand lest I wake him and instead pull the duvet further up over his shoulders. At least when he’s asleep my brand of care won’t threaten to destroy the very essence of who he is.