Chase

Bro doesn’t text me back. She doesn’t drop by my place, doesn’t bang on the door to wake me up at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night—bang, that’d be funny except I didn’t get any last night—and she hasn’t booby-trapped my office with glitter bombs or rotting fish or lingerie that smells like her pussy.

It’s like I don’t exist to her.

She’s so fucking good at fucking with my mind.

I spend the next morning interviewing candidates for the executive board. I’m going to have to go outside the company for some positions, but there’s a lot of talent internally, and as I explain to each of my prospective board members my long-range goals for Crunchy, I’m also getting re-invigorated. When I’m done, there won’t be any more canned baloney. No more chemicals hiding in our food and manufacturing processes to make people sick—those canning it or those eating it. Or those doing both. No more kids going hungry in schools either.

What good is being among the world’s richest men if you can’t solve a food supply problem?

And before you start throwing shit—I’m not putting people or industries out of work, either.

I’m going to buy them and fix them.

All of them.

Because I fucking can.

I’m in the middle of interviewing Tina, the world’s perkiest woman, for a position in sales management when I hear a commotion break out in the lobby. My door flings open. “Gentlemen, you can’t just go in there,” my admin assistant says as thirteen-plus feet and seven hundred pounds of Viking hockey players get stuck battling each other to get through my door first.

“They’re harmless,” I tell Tina.

I hope I’m not lying.

“Oh my god, it’s the Brute and the Force,” she whispers reverently.

Zeus wins the battle of the doorway and strolls in first. He whips out a Sharpie, signs Tina’s head, and then scrawls his name across my desk before doing a mic-drop with the marker. “We need to talk.”

Ares adds his signature to Tina’s left arm and eyeballs the front of my desk in a way that makes me think he’s using X-ray vision to locate my crotch.

To sign it or turn it into ground meatballs is anybody’s guess.

“Thanks for your time,” I say to Tina. “I’ll be in touch.”

“If we had a sex room, I’d so be using it right now,” she whispers reverently as she stumbles to her feet. “Can I get a picture before I go?”

I take her phone and snap a picture of Zeus and Ares holding her mermaid-style, then a normal one with her dwarfed between the two men. If they have time for pictures, they’re probably not here to chop my legs off.

When the door shuts, Ares sits in the leather chair Tina’s just vacated. It creaks, there’s a snap and a plume of glitter, and suddenly he’s in a crumbled pile of old leather, springs, and wood that’s seen better days.

Like yesterday, before a behemoth squashed it with his ass and released one last hidden glitter bomb.

“Dude,” Zeus says. “We talked about you and chairs. What’s the rule when you don’t know where it’s been?”

“Don’t sit in it.” Ares hangs his head.

I offer him a chocolate from the glass candy dish my admin insisted I needed. He swallows it, wrapper and all, then grabs the bowl and drinks the rest down.

I’ve mentioned I missed these guys, haven’t I?

“You’re my fucking hero,” I tell Ares.

He grunts and eyes the candy dish like he’s contemplating taking a bite of it too. We all ignore the glitter flickering through the air and coating us.

“You need help,” Zeus says to me.

I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about. “You quitting hockey to be my security guards?”

“No, fucker. But I know a few guys who retired last year and wouldn’t mind that kind of work. I’ll get you their names. They take orders well from smaller men. Sometimes. When the money’s right.”

“Much obliged.”

“He means thanks,” Zeus translates for Ares. He looks back at me. “And you need help with Ambrosia.”

If by help, he meant electric shock therapy treatments to get over this growing obsession that started in my dick and spread to my brain, I’m inclined to agree.

“Come again?” I say, then wince.

Ares snickers, but it’s his you’re two steps from fucking up and I’d be happy to use you like a nail that needs to be pounded into concrete with Thor’s hammer snicker. Dude talks in small sentences, but he does his silent communication in metaphor. It’s one of the things we love about him.

“Flowers,” Zeus says. “Wine. Candlelight. You need to woo her right.”

There’s something wrong about a freakishly large beast telling me I need to woo his sister. I rub a hand over my mouth to keep from telling him his sister is a pain in the ass and that his flowers, wine, and candlelight would all be seen as tools of psychological warfare and take me backwards in my quest to get back in her pants.

Or skirt.

Hell, I’d even take her in monk’s robes, a tutu, or a shark costume. Or all three together. At this point, I’m not too picky. I just need to do something to return to her puss—ah, the land of sane, functioning, rags-to-riches businessman.

Getting off is great, but He was a man who had sex, and lots of it, and in the worst locations, with the woman of his nightmares isn’t the inscription I want on my tombstone.

Alright, fine, it could be an addendum. Having that carved in stone over my cold, dead body for all of eternity would be pretty fucking cool.

But I also want to be remembered for changing the world. Outside of the bedroom. And elevator. And private suite at Yankee Stadium. And on a pile of hundred dollar bills at the top of the Empire State Building, which I haven’t done yet, but a man can dream.

I tug at my collar. Zeus is spot-on.

I have a problem.

“Are you imagining my sister naked?” he growls.

Now I am.

Okay, fine, yes. I was before too. “Why do you want to help me?”

“We help you, you help Ambrosia.”

“Bro doesn’t need help from anyone.”

“That what you think?”

“We are talking about the woman who once walked two miles in the woods, in the dark, in the rain, to plant fake spiders around our campsite just to hear you scream like a girl the next morning, aren’t we?”

Ares grins. “Last fall. Fun times.”

I choke on a laugh. “She did it again?”

Ares holds up four fingers while Zeus punches him in the shoulder. Glitter sparkles on both their T-shirts.

“Go on and laugh,” Zeus says. “But next time you see her, ask her about Vassar. Then tell me she doesn’t need anything.”

The Berger twins leave a glittery path of destruction on the way out of my office. The security guards are terrified, Zeus barely stops Ares from eating one of the potted plants—all for show, Ares hates vegetables—and I’ve just been tasked with fixing Bro’s life when I didn’t even know it was broken.

Three days ago, I wouldn’t have cared.

Mavis strolls in and refills my candy jar as though handling Viking candy jar murders is a standard part of her job description. “Your mother’s holding for you on line two,” she says. “If I were you, I’d buy a florist and a candy shop. Maybe a winery too. Sounds like she needs them.”

Might be time to resign from my personal life.