“Jesus fuck, Cole. Don’t you have a bottle of liquor to drown yourself in? There are actual grown-ups having a conversation here.” Vicious’s words were venom spreading through the room as he chuckled.
“One more comment like that, and a bottle of something will be shoved in your ass,” Trent said, jumping to my defense.
“Listen to the guys, Vic.” Jaime pursed his lips. “I think you know Trent has the right to be here.”
“I have just as much right, Jaime. Trent has a baby. I have a baby on the way. We both need to be next to our families.”
“You have Millie. She can take care of the baby.”
“And be away from her family? After all the time she has already spent away from them? Yeah, not doing this to her. No matter your motivational speech, which, by the way, is horribly lacking.”
“You were the one who did this to her, fucker.” I laughed. It wasn’t even hostile. I was just wondering what the fuck went on in that sick head of his. His backward logic fascinated me. Vicious yawned as he took out a fat blunt and lit it, inhaling deeply. I didn’t smoke all that much these days—blame Rosie, the number one party pooper in America—and was dying for a few hits, but kept mum.
“Doesn’t matter what happened. I’m not moving away. You all knew that before you came here. But Trent is welcome to come back.”
“Who is going to manage Chicago?” Jaime frowned. “The tooth fairy?”
“We can hire an outsider,” Vicious suggested.
“Fuck that. I work seventy-hour weeks breaking my back so that some stranger can step into what we created and rule it?” I snorted out. “This is our empire. We reign it. We lead it. No outsiders. That was the rule when we incorporated it.”
“It was going to happen sooner or later, Dean.” Vicious sounded so calm, which was difficult for me to comprehend. “How much longer do you think you can keep going the way you do? Rosie is bound to get sick,” he said, and Jaime stood up, ready to yell at his sorry ass, and Trent took a step toward Vicious, too, but I held my hand up, still bracing myself against the glass desk. He continued. “It’s true. Why the fuck are you guys trying to sugarcoat it for him? Rosie will get sick eventually. I saw what state she was in last year. And Millie told me she always gets worse in the winters. Or even if she doesn’t get sick, you’ll still want kids, right? A family? A wedding? All the fancy shit. I know you do, Dean. I fucking see you with her, man. You’re going down, hard. Think you can put the same amount of hours in at work a year from now? Two years from now? You’re fucking tripping, man. Here, maybe this will make you think straight.” He got up and passed me the blunt, and I took it, closing my eyes as I let the rancorous smoke crawl into my throat.
Fuck, I missed it.
“And, Jaime.” Vicious continued, pacing across the office now. He planned it all along. Knew that we were going to corner him. Sly bastard. “Don’t you want to move back to Todos Santos? Have Daria grow up with Luna and my kid and Dean’s kid and her grandparents? Don’t you want that?”
Jaime growled. “Are you going somewhere with this speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., or are you just rubbing it in our fucking faces?”
“Going somewhere,” Vicious assured, sauntering over behind me to his desk and flipping his laptop open. “So the last six months had me thinking. Between the wedding, my future kid, what happened to Trent, Jaime living on the other side of the world, and Dean dating a girl with enough health issues to last a fucking lifetime,” he said casually, typing on his keyboard. “Why the fuck are we working our asses off? We’ve already made a sick amount of money on top of what we were born with. More than we can ever spend. I feel like we’re making something truly straightforward extremely complex. I, for one, don’t care for this lifestyle. I want to spend time with my wife, I want to fuck her three times a day like I used to, I want to work out more, to stress less, to go on longer vacations, and to live. Unlike the majority of the world, I actually can. So why am I here? Why are we all here?”
He was starting to make sense, but the concept he was offering was insane. Fiscal Heights Holdings was our baby. We got very far very quickly with our hedge fund company. Mainly because we worked twenty-four seven. The idea of not working, or working less hours, taking less responsibility, never crossed my mind.
“So, you want to retire? Be a philanthropist at the tender age of thirty?” Jaime asked.
Vicious dragged his laptop so we were all looking at a Wikipedia page without a picture. Jordan Van Der Zee.
“Fuck no. I’m still going to work, but maybe two, three times a week. The rest of the time, I will indulge. The rest of the time, I will act like the god I was born to be.”
“Bad high.” Trent pointed at Vicious, rolling his eyes. “You talk like Napoleon on crack. Why are we looking at this man, Vicious? And more importantly, did you forget that I wasn’t born into money? I can’t spontaneously decide to quit.”
“You’re already a millionaire,” Jaime barked at Trent, and that meant that he was actually considering Vicious’s idea. Whatever Vicious was offering, Trent was against it. Jaime pro.
This made me the deal-breaker.
“Millionaire or not, I’m not interested in retiring at thirty,” Trent spat every word, his eyes narrowed slits. “I don’t have a wife, and I don’t have a girlfriend. I have a daughter, and right now, she’s going through a ton of issues. I need a distraction, an outlet. And fuck,” he kicked the coffee table underneath him, and the thud rang in our ears, “am I the only bastard around here who enjoys working?”
“You can still work,” Vicious stressed, pointing at the screen. “This dude is buying out all of the investment companies around this area. He started with San Francisco three years ago and worked his way down to SoCal. Multi-fucking-billionaire. Forbe’s darling boy. Savvy as hell, and, let’s not forget—his deep pockets like us. A lot.”
“We know who Jordan Van Der Zee is.” I put a lid on his speech. “You’re not the only one to pick up a business magazine once every full moon, Vicious, but thanks for the useless info.”
I went to Harvard. So did Van Der Zee. Not at the same time, obviously. He was much older. But he was a legend there, because he was one of those rare self-made people. You know, worked his way up from a scholarship in an Ivy League university, interned, busted his ass, and became a mogul in his own right. I watched a documentary about him after I graduated from business school. Dude came from a Dutch working-class family. His father was a shoeshiner, for God’s sake. “Do you wanna sell out your shares? Is that it?” I probed.
“I want to sell most of them, and I suggest you do the same. Let’s sell out, keep fifty percent of the shares between us. We’re at a point where we can negotiate a very good deal. If Trent still wants to work, he can. I do, too.”
“I’m not retiring,” I said.
“Me neither.” Jaime’s voice was unconvincing.
Vicious looked between us all and smiled. “Then why don’t we expand Los Angeles and all work here?”
“Let’s start with the obvious reason—he’ll want to buy us out with fifty-one percent shares.” Trent leaned his massive shoulder against the wall. Vicious tsked.
“That would be the obvious thing to do, right?” Pretty much. It was Business 101.
We all stared him down impatiently. Vicious grinned.
“But as I said, he is savvy. He wants to control us enough, but doesn’t really give too many fucks about FHH. He’d buy fifty sharp.”
I knew then and there that the fucker had already drafted a contract with him. He sounded too cocky to make this sort of assumption. The looks Trent and Jaime gave me told me that they knew it, too.
“This shit can take months, even years to negotiate,” Jaime argued.
“Van Der Zee had already asked if we wanted to meet him.” Vicious continued, and all eyes darted to him.
Passing him the blunt as I coughed on a chuckle, I asked, “How long have you known that we were going to ask you this?”
“Enough time to make adequate plans.”
“Fucking fucker came to you first, how come?” Trent grabbed the blunt and inhaled, his eyebrows bunched together. Vicious tipped his head back and blew rings of smoke to the ceiling, his eyes hooded and evil.
“I’m in California. He’s in California. I handle the legal shit here. Who cares? You’ll get what you want, Trent. Time to wipe that miserable expression off of your goddamn face.”
We all looked between each other. I was smiling, and I didn’t even know why. No one promised me that Rosie wanted to move back to Todos Santos. In fact, she loved New York, which was why she lived so far away from her parents. But the ability to give her that option made me unreasonably happy.
“I’m in,” I said.
“For the right contract—and money—me, too,” Jaime added.
Trent blew out air, laughing. “Luna’s gonna be a Cali girl.”
Vicious grinned. “Let’s fucking do this.”
What makes you feel alive?
Being loved. Wildly. Under the open sky. Under the pouring rain. Under a spell that never, ever ends.
“No offense, Rosie, but I don’t want anyone to leave me,” Dean said when I confronted him about asking Emilia to never leave. At the time, I thought it was because he was a cocky douchebag. Now, it was crystal clear.
He had abandonment issues.
He had abandonment issues, and Millie abandoned him.
It made me irrationally mad at my sister, but also grateful that she did.
Flopping on the bed after Thanksgiving dinner, I thought about the afternoon, about that kiss in the rain—like we were in The Notebook and he was Ryan Gosling and I was obviously delusional—and started giggling. The giggling turned into coughing, which wasn’t that surprising.
But then, the coughing turned into blood.