21.
Levi
The second rule of vacation is that when you can spend the entire day fucking, you do it.
Isla and I didn’t end up leaving the house that day; she got up late, but after we had sex, we went back to bed and had more sex. Rest and repeat. We paused to get some food delivered around ten o’clock that night, but that was it.
Now that’s the kind of vacation I’m talking about.
But the next morning, Isla was up early the next morning to go for a run.
“You’re on vacation,” I said.
“I know.” She had on a pair of tight running shorts and a pink Lycra tank top. Damn, she looked good.
“So that means you should come back over here, let me take those clothes off of you, and get back into bed.”
She smiled, a little dryly, it would seem. Hmm. Usually such charms would work wonders, but not with her, at least not right now.
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with me being on vacation, or needing a break from it. It’s sort of like something I have to do. And besides, we were in bed all day yesterday.”
“Are you complaining about that?”
“Certainly not. But running—it’s something I just have to do. I haven’t been as good about it lately, but I need to do it.”
“You know, if you were talking about, say, I don’t know, cocaine or something, instead of running, people would be saying you needed all sorts of help.”
“If this is your way of trying to talk me back into bed, it’s really not working.”
I yawned and stretched. “But there are few finer things in life than getting to lie in bed with the sunlight pouring through the windows, knowing that you’ve got the whole day ahead of you to do whatever you want.”
“I won’t be gone that long. You’ll probably still be in bed by the time I get back.”
And she flounced out of the room.
I rolled over onto my side, my head sinking into the goose down pillow. Okay, I’ll be honest—I’d never had a woman be so nonchalant with me before. Any other girl would’ve been back in that bed with me two seconds flat if I asked. But Isla was . . . a little ambivalent, actually. Not last night, of course, but now, certainly. I wasn’t particularly bothered by it, though. Not at all, really. If anything, I found it to make her all the more intriguing. Made me want to try all the harder to really entice her, to make her wild with desire for me. Not just when I was in the middle of fucking her, but all the time. Enough so I could just look at her from across the room and she’d return my gaze with a hungry, insatiable look of her own.
I could’ve dozed for hours, drifting off into that half-sleep, half-awake zone where dreams and reality seemed a little too intertwined. In the dream, Alfie was there. He’d bought Ibiza, he said. He’d bought it and he was asking me to leave.
“But I love it here,” I told him. “I can’t leave.”
“You have to,” he said. “It’s mine now.”
I opened my eyes and forced myself up. That dream was, if anything, a sign that I just needed to get this talk with Alfie over with. I sent him a text, and he responded right away.
I’ll swing by, he wrote. I’m not too far away.
I glanced at the clock. I didn’t know exactly when Isla would be back, but I didn’t want her to walk in when I was having the talk.
OK, I typed back. I don’t have that much time, tho.
U got a hot date? he asked.
Something like that.
I tossed the phone down and pulled on some clothes. Alfie was knocking on the door less than five minutes later, and he strolled in, smelling faintly of cigarettes and some sort of botanical perfume. He probably hadn’t been to sleep yet.
“Busy night last night?” I asked.
He grinned. “Always is, mate, always is. Spent most of the night down at Sway, had a grand old time. Missed seeing you though—we figured you’d be around. I wanted to introduce you to the lovely Celeste.”
“I was a little busy myself.”
Alfie looked around. “Am I
interrupting something?”
“No, no one else is here at the moment. Here, why don’t we sit down? There’s
something that we needed to talk about.”
“Right,” he said, looking pleased, like he’d been anticipating this chat. Did he somehow guess what I was going to say? Was he actually happy about it? I hadn’t expected him to be thrilled, but if he was going to take the news graciously, well, that just made it all the easier for me. I smiled, feeling encouraged.
“So,” I said. “You know that I’ve appreciated being in business with you all these years.”
“Likewise, mate. It’s been going better than I ever thought it would. I mean that.”
I took a deep breath. “There’s no real good way to put this,” I said, “so I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m going to have to stop . . . this.” I gestured vaguely around me.
Alfie gave me a confused look. “What?” he said, which came out sounding more like, Wot.
“What I’ve been doing here,” I said. “What we’ve been doing here. I’ve got to stop.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . you know that my dad died.”
“Right. I figured if anything that would make you feel a little more free about things. You never came out and said it, but I could tell there was a part of you that was afraid your old man would find out what you were up to out here. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
I shook my head. “That’s not it. I mean, maybe on some subconscious level you’re right, I don’t know, but, I can’t keep doing this. When I get back to New York, I’ve got to get down to business. I have to get serious about shit. I have to put on a button-down shirt and cover this up.” I pointed to the tattoos on my forearm.
Alfie looked truly
perplexed. “What are you talking about? A button down shirt?”
“My dad left his business to me. Which means I’ve actually got to show up.”
“You can’t just sell it?”
“I’m not going to sell it.”
“But you don’t know anything about running a business! At least not one like that.”
“What do you mean?”
Alfie shrugged. “Don’t think I didn’t look your dad up online,” he said. “Bassett Capital Management. I wanted to check it out. See what you were all about. You didn’t look me up at all? I don’t have my own website like that or nothin, but I got a Facebook.”
“Uh, no, Alfie, I didn’t look you up. And we are friends on Facebook.”
“Only because I sent you that request though. So you mean you wouldn’t be friends on Facebook if I hadn’t sent you the request?”
I stared at him. “Are we really having this conversation right now? Who the fuck cares about Facebook?”
“You’re right—that’s not
really my point. My point is that I do know a little something about your
history, even if you’ve chosen not to share that with me. Don’t get freaked
out—it wasn’t like I was being a stalker or anything.”
“You sure? That sounds a little stalker-ish.”
“You mean to tell me that if some bloke you barely knew wanted to bankroll an illicit operation you had in mind, you’d just go for it? You wouldn’t give a toss who the guy was or where the funds were coming from? That sort of thing might work for you, mate, but I needed to know at least a little bit.”
“Then you shouldn’t have looked up my dad’s company, because up until recently, that really didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“I’d say it had plenty—it’s not like that money was yours.”
I took a deep breath. This wasn’t the conversation I wanted to be having, It was pointless what Alfie thought of me or where I got my money from anyway, since we were no longer going to be doing business together.
“It’s yours,” I said. “I’m giving you my share of the business. I mean, it’s not like it’s even that formal, it’s not like we own stock in it or something. You’re the CEO now, man. The sole CEO. It’s up to you. And you can bring on whoever else you want, you can shake things up, or you can keep everything how it is, which seems to be working just fine.”
Alfie shook his head. “It’s not, though, actually. That’s why I thought you wanted to talk to me. Because you’d heard.”
“Heard what?”
“That we’ve got
competition. There’s this chemist in Rotterdam who has apparently managed to
make something virtually identical to Lush, but with zero comedown effects. The
people who have taken it have confirmed this. And it’s bloody cheap! There’s no
way that we’re going to be able to compete with that, unless we can get the
stuff off the market. And to do that, we need to flood it with Lush, at a
cheaper price than what they’re pushing. We need to move about three times what
we’re currently doing.”
I nodded. “Okay, well, it sounds to me like you’ve got it all figured out. I
have all the confidence in you, Alfie. You’ve always done a stellar job; it
really hasn’t had anything to do with me.”
“It’s had everything to
do with you,” he said. “You’re the bank.”
“But you’ve made plenty,” I said. “You’re living pretty comfortably, aren’t
you?”
“I’ve gotten used to a comfortable life, yes. But I’ve also made some bad
investments. Now is not a good time for you to bail, mate, is what I’m trying
to say.”
“Maybe get yourself a
partner, then,” I said. “Someone’s who’s good with money.”
Alfie did not look pleased with my suggestion, but I knew he just needed a
little time to let the idea settle.
“It’s going to be fine, Alfie,” I said. “You’ll see. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know when Isla’s going to be back from her run, and I’d rather she not walk in on us having this conversation. She doesn’t . . . she doesn’t know anything about it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “You should be proud.”
“It’s nothing at all to me anymore,” I replied. “It’s nothing to be proud of or ashamed of—I’m done with it. I have to be. I’m sorry if that wasn’t what you were expecting to hear. But believe me, you’ll be just fine.”
And he would, I knew it. In fact, he’d probably come to enjoy it even more once I wasn’t involved, because then he’d have control over the whole thing.
“I think you’re making a
mistake,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to do this. Are you planning to
never come back here again?”
“No, of course not. I’ll be here as much as possible. I just can’t continue to
do this. There’s really nothing else to say about it, okay? I’ve made up my
mind and I’m not going to change it.”
He frowned, but he stood up and started to walk to the door. I followed him.
“Hey,” I said, holding my hand out. “We had a good run together. You said it yourself.”
He waited so long that I didn’t think he was going to shake my hand, but then he finally did, as though doing so pained him greatly. Alfie could always be a bit dramatic.
“Cheers, mate,” he said, and then he left.
He’d only been gone a few minutes, though, when Isla came back, her face flushed, a thin sheen of sweat making her skin glisten.
“Hey,” she said. “I just ran into your friend out there.”
“Oh, Alfie? Yeah, he just stopped by quickly. How was your run?” I asked, eager to steer the conversation in another direction.
“Good. It’s nice to be somewhere different. I’m going to hop in the shower, and then maybe we can go out and do something? Whatever you want.”
I smiled. “Well, whatever I want doesn’t actually involve us leaving the house.”