Chapter 6
“Mornin’.” Joseph walked into Edward’s office carrying two cups of coffee from the corner café. He handed one across the desk to Edward and sat down as he carefully sipped out of his own.
“Good morning,” Edward reciprocated. “Thank you.” He nodded as he held his coffee up.
“So, was your weekend as uneventful as you had hoped?”
“It was,” he said smiling. He leaned back in his chair and mentally prepared himself for his Monday morning ritual of coffee and listening to all Joseph had to say. “And how was yours?”
“Went out with a couple of sweet honeys, caught a movie and a little bit more if ya know what I mean.” Joseph was leaning forward and smiling his debonair smile.
“All too well.”
“Did you give my ideas any thought?”
“I did.” Edward looked forward at his computer screen.
“And?”
“I think we should do it.”
Joseph jumped up and slapped his hands together. “Beautiful! My man, this is going to put us over the top. Ha! Ha!” He spun around and sat back down. “I have some plans drawn up in my office. I’ll get them emailed over to you so you can take a look at what I have.”
Edward nodded, still not completely into the plan, but giving Joseph what he wanted to hear. He fiddled with his pencil, his thoughts still on the couple he saw in the park. “Do you ever think about your life?”
Joseph looked at him inquisitively. “Sure, all the time. What do you… why do you ask?”
“Do you ever wonder where you will be in twenty years, thirty years, fifty years?”
“I imagine I’ll be retired someplace on my own island surrounded by pretty ladies. You know, like Hugh Hefner.” He laughed but didn’t get the same reaction from Edward. “Why you getting all philosophical on me? What’s gotten into you lately?”
Edward shook his head. “Don’t you want to settle down some day? Find a nice girl and get married? Couple of kids, maybe a dog or a bird or something? Take family vacations and grow old together?”
“Man, you are much too young to be going through a midlife crisis.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I think I’m just growing up. I’m tired of the night life all the time, different women in my bed, not knowing who is calling me when my phone rings. I want to be able to smile when my phone rings knowing who is on the other line and knowing she wants to see me as badly as I want to see her.”
“Fuck that. I am not ready to be a one-woman man. All that nagging and bitching, expected to do shit for her all the time, remembering birthdays and holidays. Because heaven forbid you forget. You might as well march your ass out to the dog house cuz that’s where you’ll be sleeping for the next week.”
“I’m okay with all of that.” He caught himself smiling at the thought.
Joseph leaned down and looked at Edward with his eyes narrowed and his lips pursed. “Where is my best friend? What the hell did you do with him?”
“I’m still here. I guess I just want more out of life. Money and success isn’t everything.” He looked toward his window and out toward the beach. “I want to find love.”
“Now you are sounding like a cheesy Hallmark card. But hey, if that is what you want, I doubt you will have a problem finding it. I can list at least ten girls who would jump at a life with you.”
“No. They want a life with my money and the fact that it’s with a successful man. It isn’t love, true love. The kind that makes you want to give it all up for the chance to see them again. I’ll never find that in the situation I’m in right now.”
“And what sort of situation is that, exactly?”
“Rich, successful, attractive. They see all of this and they label me, expecting nothing but a lavish date and a good night of sex. But it ends there, with every one of them. I’m tired of it.”
“So what are you going to do? Go broke and get ugly?” Joseph laughed at his own humor.
“No, but I do know I need to do something different. All of this doesn’t make me happy anymore.”
“What about Sasha? She was into you. Whatever happened to her?”
“Sasha,” he chuckled. “I don’t know what she is doing these days.”
“You dated her for like, what? Six or seven months, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” His voice was nonchalant as memories of his ex-girlfriend surfaced.
Sasha was a fiery redhead with silky hair down to her waist. Her porcelain face was perfectly round with the smallest dimple on each side of her full pink lips when she smiled. Edward and Sasha had a great time together in the seven months they were together, but it felt like a friends-with-benefits sort of relationship. They never talked about getting serious or settling down. They would take trips together and get themselves into trouble by doing stupid shit and getting caught. They would make love in the strangest places and brag about it to their friends. They would take social media pictures of themselves in peculiar places and make their friends try to figure out where they were or what they were doing. Edward found himself smiling as the memories came flooding back.
“Remember the time she and I flew to Paris? We went to dinner and crashed that elegant dinner party involving some political organization. Sasha told the maître de we were with the son of the key speaker and they believed her. We ate gourmet food and drank expensive wine for free. By the time they realized no one knew us, we were running out the back door and into a torrential down pour, laughing our asses off. She was wearing a white dress that evening and the rain….” He remembered it like it was yesterday. “I could see her body perfectly through the drenched material. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The image of her body stuck in my mind for months after that. God, she was beautiful.”
“Man, you are giving me a woody.”
“We fucked behind the monument of some dead guy in the side yard of that place after that. It was some of the hottest sex I had ever had.”
“Call her up. I bet she would love to hear from you.”
Edward took a big breath and lightly shook his head. “She was crazy. Made me do things I wouldn’t normally have done. She was fun, but that was all.”
“That was all? Seriously?”
“I didn’t love her. You can’t force that.”
“With a woman like that, you could learn to.”
“She didn’t love me either.”
“How do you know that? Who broke up with who?”
“I caught her screwing one of my buddies out back of his place one night when she thought I was working late.”
“Awe, man. Did you freak out on her?”
“No. She doesn’t know I was there.”
“You never told her?”
“Nope. Dated her for a few more weeks until she decided to call it quits.”
“And you never told her you knew.”
“No.”
“Man, I would have went off on her ass!”
“What was the point? I knew we weren’t going to stay together. We were just having fun. Friends with benefits.”
“Maybe now. Maybe she has changed. Gotten her fun out of her system and is ready to settle down. Wouldn’t hurt to call her up. Hook up with her. See what happens.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were thinking of hooking up with her.”
“It’d be nice,” he said, licking his lips. “But, naw. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“We just didn’t click. Yeah, she was all of what you say, but if she doesn’t love me and I don’t find myself wanting to be with her, why bother trying to keep a relationship going? I don’t want to work at a relationship to get it to where I want it to be. Shouldn’t it be a natural thing? A natural feeling?”
“Dude, you’re living in a fucking fairy tale.”
“Maybe I am, but I know what I want.”
“Yeah, I know. You want more. Well, my friend. I don’t think you will ever get what you want.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve got a reputation and everyone who is anyone knows exactly who you are. You can’t change that.”
“So, I can’t change in their eyes? No matter what I do from here on out, I will always be a player? A gigolo? Is that what you are saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. We are a rare breed. Young, successful, sexy as fuck and a good time. People come to us for social status. It is who we are and it is who we will always be.”
“No! You are wrong.” Edward stood up abruptly. “People change all the time.”
“You are fooling yourself, man. We are not husband material.”
“I’ll fucking show you,” he said pointing at him. “I’m not going to let some God damned label rule how I will live my life.” He threw his pencil he was still holding on his desk and stormed out of his office, leaving Joseph there by himself with his mouth open at his buddy’s most recent blow up.
Joseph went back to his office and didn’t see Edward the rest of that day.
The next morning, Edward was already deep into his work when Joseph walked into his office.
“Morning. Where did you go yesterday?”
“I took off, did some errands, worked a little from home. I had to get out of here.”
“Okay, man. I hear ya. So, you all better now?” He handed him a coffee.
“Better in what sense?” he asked, still edgy.
“The way you stormed out of here yesterday, I would have thought you were PMSing or something.”
“Real funny. And no, I’m not better. I was being serious about everything I told you yesterday. Why can’t you understand that?”
“It’s part of the stereotypical cloud that society has put us under,” he said unwittingly. “We aren’t susceptible to changing the course of our lives.”
“You really don’t believe that… do you?”
“Relax, I was just bull shittin’ you.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, his eyebrows raised.
Joseph looked at Edward in a new light. “You’re serious.”
“Now he hears me.”
“You really want to do this.”
“Yeah, I do. I haven’t been happy for a long time. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do the cruise party. I figured getting out of the office would help.”
“It didn’t help though, did it?”
“No. It only made things worse.”
“Well, honestly? I think Talita had a lot to do with that.”
“I think you’re right.”
“So, what are you planning to do?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but I think I am going to take a little time off. Go away for a while. Someplace where nobody knows who I am.”
“Good idea. Clear your head. A couple of days should do that for you.”
“Actually, I am going to take a few weeks off.”
“A few weeks?” Joseph spat.
“Yeah,” he said surprised that it was even an issue.
“What do you mean a few weeks?”
“Just what I said. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Yeah, I have a really big problem with it.”
Edward sat up straight, ready to defend his decision.
“What about our new venture? What, did you think I was going to just wait until you were damned good and ready to help me get this going?”
“You don’t need me to get things rolling.”
“You know I do, Edward.” He stood up and paced back and forth in the room. “You think if I didn’t need you that I would have started this business up with you? If I thought I could have done this myself and be the sole owner of such a company, I would have.” He paused and looked at Edward, waiting for some sort of alteration in his plan. When nothing changed, he shook his head and scoffed. “Hey, man. Don’t worry about it. I’ll put my plans on hold until you figure out what the hell it is you want out of life.”
“Joseph, I think you are being unreasonable.”
“The hell I am. You want me to put my plans on hold until you go off and find yourself? Do you have any idea how long I have been working on this?”
“It’s not like that. I’m just going to….”
“You’re just going to what? Do what you want to do. I know.”
“Why are you so pissed? I need to do this.”
“You need shit,” he said, throwing his arm up at him. He started walking out of the room then quickly turned back around. “You’re a selfish bastard, ya know that?”
“I… Joseph.” Edward furrowed his eyebrows.
“No.” He put his hand up to shut him up. “This company needs you. I need you. And you just decide to take a couple of weeks off to figure out where your dick needs to be? Man, screw that.”
Edward sat up straighter as an idea filled his head. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“Oh, by all means, continue. It’s not like I’m going to change your mind anyway.”
“Do you remember Brian Spawnery?”
“Yeah,” he said passively. He had walked to the window giving Edward only partial attention, pouting over the fact Edward could and would do what he wanted.
“Where does he work?”
“How the hell am I supposed to remember that? It was over ten years ago.”
“Right, in college. He graduated with us. Took most of the same classes, and graduated top of the class, like we did.”
“But not as good as we did. Don’t forget that.”
“Of course.”
“So? What’s your point? What about him?”
“He is top CEO at Ardo.”
“That investment company in Paris?”
Edward nodded. “I figured while I was visiting there I could get some insider tips from him, bring them back here and put together a plan. Utilize them in our new company and get ahead of the competition.”
“Aw, yeah,” Joseph said with a more agreeable attitude. “You da man. Always thinking,” he nodded. “I’m beginning to think this might be a damned good idea. Maybe I should go with you.”
“No. I need you to stay here. Keep things going here. I’ll keep communication open and keep you informed on what I am doing.”
“Good deal, good deal.”
Edward nodded and smiled, content that his plan worked.