12. Wallace #2
Honestly, it was really Ben he hated. Maybe Max would be easier to work with?
Ben was an upstart asshole, another bully who deliberately tried to embarrass and undermine him. Max seemed like he’d be a good asset on any team. The kind of guy who was friends with everyone.
Or at least pretending to be friends.
Wallace couldn’t forget that. This could still all be a ploy to get Wallace to relax his guard, thinking that Max was friendly and safe.
“How’s that body thing going?” he asked.
“Great!” Max chirped.
“Really?” Wallace pressed. “What progress have you made?”
“Well, uh… I’ve collected a lot of data. I’ve been going through it.”
“So, no progress is what you’re saying.” Maybe Max was just as bad as Ben after all. How could he trust anything he said?
“Hey! That’s mean.” Wallace could practically hear the pout in his voice.
“Max, we had an agreement. The clock is ticking.” Not that they’d officially set a timeline, but Max had made it sound like it would just be a few weeks, and they’d gone far past that.
“I know! I know! But I’m close. I promise.”
Wallace would believe that promise about as far as he could throw it.
“You know,” he commented, “you could just put the security protocols back in place. Then you wouldn’t have to hide.
You could leave whenever you wanted to.” Frankly, if Wallace were in Max’s shoes, that’s what he would do.
He would put the protocols back in place, then hide away where no one could ever find him.
But Max was much more like Ben—unpredictable, ambitious, and with social skills in spades. God help them all.
“I’ve got security protocols in place,” Max countered. “Nothing really bad has happened, has it? I’ve got it covered.”
This was what got Wallace’s blood boiling. Max couldn’t keep the company safe because he didn’t even understand the danger he was putting it in. “There have been two fires,” he gritted out.
“Yeah, but we got those cleaned up fast. It’s fine, Wallace,” Max soothed. “I’ve got better protocols in place now, and I’ll be out of your hair soon. No worries.”
Wallace rolled his eyes, but realized they’d have to continue the conversation later—not that anything had changed from the last time they’d chatted anyway. Wallace couldn’t afford to let his guard down and imagine that Max was actually trying to be his friend.
He was almost back to the office, Maxamillion’s voice hopping from speaker to speaker along the wooded path. A trio of employees were cutting across the lawn in front of him, and more of them sat at the outdoor tables.
So, it looked like that was the end of the conversation.
He checked his watch, realized he only had a few minutes to spare, and dashed by his office for his tablet.
Time for the dreaded Tuesday afternoon meeting.
“Hello, Marquita,” he greeted his father’s office assistant.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wollencroft.” She didn’t even look up from her desk. Losing her respect sure hadn’t taken long—and for what? He was always respectful and reasonably friendly toward her.
Whatever. He just didn’t have it in him to care today. He had an amazing, fabulous boyfriend who couldn’t get enough of him. What did he care if his father’s endless string of mistresses didn’t like him?
He walked into his father’s office.
This was the part where dread always overtook him. He would start sweating and shaking before the first words were even out of his father’s mouth, because he already knew they would be cutting.
And they were.
“What is that horrible sweater? My, my, Wallace, I thought you had better taste than that.”
Wallace looked down at his cardigan. It was from Max’s program, and he thought he looked pretty good.
Volt certainly thought he looked good, because he’d petted Wallace through the soft material all through their last date, then torn it off him the moment they reached Volt’s room.
Volt had kissed every inch of his skin while he buried his face in the fluffy pink pillows of the adorable princess bed that Volt had installed just for him.
So Wallace kind of didn’t give a shit what his father thought. Other men at his level in the organizational food chain also wore sweaters sometimes instead of suit jackets, so it wasn’t like he was being unprofessional.
It still hurt, the caustic jibes that fell so easily from his father’s lips. But he wasn’t going to let this one get to him. You should see me in my lace panties, he thought at his father’s head. My boyfriend thinks I look really cute in my pajama set.
He’d waited with baited breath to see if word would get back to his father from the orchestra concert, but somehow it hadn’t.
His father would go absolutely apeshit if he knew about any of it—the boyfriend, the sexbot, the panties, the submission—none of them were fit for a Wollencroft man. It was kind of hilarious imagining it.
“Well, boy? Got something to say?”
Ick. Hearing his father call him boy was kind of gross. Only Volt was allowed to say that.
“Not really,” he finally replied. “Ready to go over the weekly reports?”
His little run-in with Maxamillion aside, he’d been having a good day, and he really didn’t want this meeting to ruin it.
His father scowled and beckoned him over. Like he was a trained dog? Either way, he went.
He’d already emailed everything, so he just started talking, moving down his list. Timelines were pretty much on track for the major software launches they had coming up.
Two of them would need to be delayed, preferably, or scaled back if his father was being an asshole and wouldn’t budge on the dates despite all of Wallace’s evidence, but that wasn’t news.
Wallace presented both options, along with the third of hiring more people for the second project, but he knew that wouldn’t fly.
It would be his fault if he couldn’t get the project done on the original budget.
Not that he’d gotten much say in the approved amount, despite drawing up a project plan that called for more people, time, and money.
I was right, he said internally. Even if he’d initially been promoted far above his skill level, he wasn’t a total idiot. He had a fucking MBA, after all, in addition to his engineering degree.
So he kept droning on, flicking through different charts and graphs. His father would make whatever decisions he wanted to make, and then when they didn’t work, Wallace would get blamed. It was pretty simple.
Usually he cringed when his father talked down to him. It made him sick to his stomach, and left him shaking even after he got back to his desk.
Today, he was out of fucks to give.
He’d had a difficult conversation with his boyfriend, just like a real grown up, and it had gone pretty well. He hoped it would even make their relationship stronger.
Work was just… work.
“How’s Ben doing?” his father asked. “Any new patents coming up soon?”
Ben is apparently getting dommed by Orbit’s resident knowledge, whom you’ve decided you don’t believe in because you don’t trust me and he doesn’t want to talk to you, Wallace answered mentally. He wondered for a moment how Ben and Max’s relationship actually worked. Like… phone sex?
Nope, he really didn’t want to know.
“I think he’s close to something on that vision project with Dr. Sasaki.” That was even possibly true. Not that Wallace ever really had any idea what Ben was working on or when it would be ready to patent, despite his attempts at gaining said information as Ben’s direct supervisor.
Since Ben never worked on anything that was going directly to market, it didn’t really matter except for making Wallace look like an idiot.
Unless Maxamillion came through with the clothing app and wanted to put Ben’s name on it, which… seemed pretty harmless?
Oh, and the Dom app.
It was kind of funny thinking about it now. If Ben hadn’t been fucking with him, of course.
Ben’s supposed kink app was what had originally sent Wallace to Prism, giving him the opportunity to meet Volt, yet he’d all but forgotten his assigned side project of setting up a mod to emulate submission.