Chapter 9

Quentin couldn’t sleep when Charlotte left his apartment that night. His skin emanated her gorgeous scent, making his cock rise up beneath his sheets. The smoothness of her skin, her gorgeous, bouncing breasts, her thin, taut waist had all been there, in the palm of his hand, literally bowing to his every whim.

And he couldn’t have her again. He’d drawn the line in the sand. It had to be over between them. He couldn’t fuck up the delicate balance of the office, just to bend her over his office desk and part the achingly gorgeous lips of her pussy and dive, headfirst, into her.

That had been the old Quentin. The Quentin who’d ruined relationship after relationship. The Quentin who didn’t have a little girl to care for three or four days during the week, depending on her mother’s schedule. The Quentin who hadn’t brought MMM from the trenches and into the limelight, making it one of the top-tier music magazines of the current landscape. He was an editor. He was serious. He wasn’t cocaine-addled and sex-addicted. Not anymore.

And Charlotte had been a momentary weakness, a slight stain on his otherwise incredibly clean career.

His alarm clock blared out just after six, forcing his legs to the side of the bed. He leaned heavily against the palms of his hands, his nails dipping into his skin. Jesus, he was tired. When he’d been twenty-five, he’d once spent an entire week awake, hunting drugs and chicks, fucking when he felt too fatigued and taking shots to boost his energy. And he hadn’t collapsed at the end of it either, like some kind of medical invalid. He’d slept a hard six hours and then he’d gone at it again, like a dog. Constantly chewing the life out of his surroundings.

But now, with less than an hour or two of sleep, his thirty-six-year-old body felt fatigued and strung-out.

He rose, finally, and scrubbed at his naked form in the shower, fighting back his bad boy urges and trying to cleanse himself, mold himself back into the man he’d become. Not the man he yearned to be again.

Dressing in a black suit jacket and dark jeans, he bolted toward the kitchen, rustling together a small breakfast for Morgan. He knocked on her door with two sharp kicks of his knuckles and then heard her cry out.

“All right, Daddy! I’m coming!”

She didn’t sound exasperated, or angry, or weighted. She sounded ready to face the day.

“I set out your clothes for you. Do you see them?” he called.

“I don’t like this dress!” she cried back, through the door. “It’s too pink.”

“Look in your closet, then,” he answered, cracking the door open. He caught a view of his pajama-clad daughter’s shadow, rubbing at her eyes. “Just pick a different shirt.”

“Oh, I want to wear the Iggy Pop shirt,” Morgan said, leaping toward her wardrobe. She burst open the top drawer, digging through the perfectly aligned shirts, most of which were band-related.

“You can’t dress her like this,” her mom, Kate, had said once. “She’s going to grow up and do a ton of drugs.”

“Just because she knows who Iggy Pop and Nirvana are?” Quentin had asked, incredulous. “That’s culture, Kate. Or maybe you somehow forgot your roots, as well. I seem to remember you in the front row of many, many of my shows…”

This had, of course, pissed her off. The Iggy Pop shirt had stayed in the collection, along with the other band ones. And Morgan had become the “cool” kid at school—the one who talked lovingly about Kurt Cobain and Woodstock and music-related memories that she couldn’t possibly comprehend. And it would only get more interesting as she grew older.

“Shut the door, Dad,” Morgan cried then. “I want to get dressed.”

“Oh.” Lost in a reverie, Quentin wandered back to the kitchen and filled a bowl of cereal for himself, crunching at the sugar-laden shit and trying to raise his heavy eyelids. Eventually, Morgan joined him and poured a bit of milk into her bowl. She crunched sweetly, using the teeth she had left, and didn’t bother him with chitchat. She knew he didn’t take kindly to it in the morning. She recognized his somber mood.

Together, Quentin and Morgan packed her a quick, turkey sandwich with crunchy lettuce and a bag of Lays potato chips.

“Mom never lets me have chips,” Morgan whispered somberly, her eyes lowering. “She says they’re fatty.”

“Well, your mom has never gained a lick of weight in her life. So, I suppose she knows what she’s doing.” Quentin sighed heavily, zipping the lunchbox closed. He passed it to his daughter, ruffling her blond hair. “But in my opinion, a few chips every day won’t kill you. They won’t even make you fat.”

“Promise?” Morgan asked.

Great. Now, her mother was making her dislike her own body. Quentin formed several half-thought messages he could write to Kate when he arrived at the office, most of which worked along the theme of: “Don’t fuck her up and make her like you.”

But, of course, he’d appreciated Kate once. Maybe he’d even loved her. He’d certainly married her, in a flurry of drug-addled decisions and manic days. And according to the spread they’d recently had about him in a lifestyle magazine, he and Kate had been quite handsome looking that fateful day. Kate had worn a low-cut, lacey white dress, her tits poised to fall out at every minute, and her body bone-thin. Quentin had been rough-looking, tired, but with bright, animal eyes. His black hair had been longer, then, and falling in coils to his shoulders.

They’d been the very portrait of the rock star and the model, married young and partying wildly. And their divorce, in that sense, had followed the given course.

He walked Morgan to school, grateful that the sun peeked through the clouds and colored their faces. Morgan still gripped his hand, not embarrassed. She waved lovingly at passers-by, telling them chipper “good mornings” and immediately flashing smile after smile.

“How do you do it, little Morgan?” Quentin asked her, at the front step of her school. She clung to her piano books, gazing up at him, confusion clouding her eyes. “How do you stay so happy all the time?”

Morgan cackled with laughter, showing the darkness where her tooth used to be. “Daddy, don’t be dumb.”

Suddenly, a boy wearing overalls and a girl with a bright blue dress padded past, grabbing onto Morgan and springing her toward their classroom. Morgan cried back in shock and giggling surprise, “Daddy, I’ll see you soon! Love you!”

Quentin stretched his palm flat in a final wave, feeling the strings of his heart yank. Another parent, a woman named Melanie, stood beside him, watching the three children run wildly. She shrugged her too-thin shoulders, so reminiscent of Kate. “They have so much more energy than me in the morning,” she said, stretching out a wide smile.

“If only they could bottle it. I’d buy it, and pay more than any drug.” He paused, hoping he hadn’t gone too far—alluding to his past. “I think I’m going to go sleep at the office,” Quentin joked, trying to lighten the mood as he turned toward the sidewalk.

“Or just run coffee through an IV till nightfall,” Melanie said, waving as he left her behind.

The other parents always gave him the jitters, making him feel incompatible to the role of “father.” He’d packed a lackluster lunch; he’d allowed his daughter to wear an Iggy Pop shirt to school. Once Kate got wind of the chip and Iggy Pop combo, she’d probably grumble at him for several weeks, asking if she could really “trust him” around their child.

But the girl was happy. Happier than he’d ever been, he was sure. And didn’t that mean everything?

Quentin took a taxi to the office, arriving just after seven-fifteen and taking the elevator to the 26th floor. He was the first in his office, which was still crisp and fresh after the janitorial staff’s cleaning the night before. Papers were aligned neatly on desks; pencils and pens poked, rag-tag, from tiny holders. Even Maggie’s desk, a general tornado-zone, had been straightened and ordered.

Sighing, Quentin reminded himself that this world of responsibility, of magazine spreads, of pencils and pens, was his world, now. Not the other one. The one with Charlotte, stretched barren in front of him, crying out for his cock. No.

Quentin began to work at his desk, burrowing himself deep in magazine spreads and trying to build the interview he’d conducted the previous day into some kind of hard-hitting story. “Old band makes good again,” that sort of thing. In reality, he felt horrible for them and their inability to move on, while still feeling jealousy bleed through him. They wouldn’t have thought twice about fucking Charlotte, regardless of her position in their lives. They would have bragged about it and moved on.

But in reality, meeting and fucking Charlotte had been the most exciting part of his life in the past several years, especially since he hadn’t allowed himself to even look at other interns in the past. He’d never felt this kind of spark before. It had ignited a powerful force within him, something that forced him to remember his wild, bad boy side. He hadn’t always been a father, packing lunches and making small talk at the entrance of the school. No. Fuck no.

Suddenly, someone banged at his door. He lurched his head up from the magazine spreads, realizing he’d been in a reverie for the past fifteen minutes, without making a single edit.

He cleared his throat. “Come in.”

Maggie appeared in the crack of the door, looking hesitant, frightened of him. She pressed her lips into a smile, waiting for his “okay.”

“I said come in, Maggie. Don’t hang around out there all day.”

Maggie scurried in, clicking the door closed behind her. She bowed her red head, her bangs fluffing over her eyes. She hadn’t been this way as a teenager: a rough and wild woman, stripping her top from her breasts and rushing through the city streets.

“I’m sorry to bug you, Q. But we have a few advertising meetings early this afternoon. I was hoping to bring a few of the new interns into the meetings, as well. Just so they can get a feel for the business side of things. So many of them are just writers, coming out of college.” She rolled her eyes and laughed nervously, her shoulders quivering.

Interns. Shit. That meant Charlotte, didn’t it?

“How many interns?” Quentin asked, closing his magazine spreads with a swift motion. “I don’t want to fill the office. These ad meetings are kind of delicate.”

“Right, of course. I mean, I’d obviously like to bring in the sales interns. Maybe a few of the social media ones, so they can get a sense for what our brand image is and which advertisers we promote, which we don’t.” Maggie paused, leaning heavily upon his desk. She swept her breasts toward his face, pushing them just over six inches from his nose. He could see the darkness between; he could imagine fondling them.

“I’d like to bring in a few of the writers myself,” Quentin said then. “Some of the aspiring music journalists. Because I know they want all of this life. They crave it more than the others.” He swept back on the wheels of his chair, moving away from her breasts. He looked at her sternly, making eye contact.

“Oh. Do you want me to just handpick a few, then?” she asked him.

“No, no. I took a look at their writing samples,” he lied.

Maggie looked shocked. Her eyebrows rose high, recognizing a difference in him. “You’ve never done that before.”

“I want to take a vested interest in my interns this time around,” Quentin said firmly. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Of course not,” Maggie said softly. She swept a single leg over the front side of the desk, showing a bit of her inner thigh. “Do you have a problem with this?” She began to move her skirt upward, revealing the paleness of her skin, the softness of her pink underwear.

“Yes. I do,” Quentin said gruffly, not moving a muscle. He didn’t want to alarm her, didn’t want to enrage her. His heart hammered in his chest. “I have the no-fraternization policy in place for a reason. And you know that.”

“I know that I can’t resist you,” Maggie said, her eyes flashing. “I know that I think about fucking you and sucking your cock during business hours, every fucking day. And I know you’re lonely. You aren’t the man you used to be.”

Angered, Quentin burst from his chair, causing Maggie to back away with shuffling steps. With a single motion, he swept past her, blasting the door open, and standing, huffing, in the center office. His writers stared up at him, sensing his dominance and anger over them. A girl in the center of the room dropped her notebook and leaned down quickly to get it, revealing a large, unattractive ass to the air. Calming himself, inhaling slowly, Quentin raised a hand.

“Sorry, everyone. Adrenaline about this next issue. It’s going to be a fucking great one. Thanks for your hard work.” He continued his trek down the hall, toward the intern office. He sensed a growing strength in his chest, one that insisted he make a scene, cause disaster. One that wanted him back on his bad boy streak.

Maggie rushed up behind him, taking small steps and whispering, “I’m sorry about that back there. Won’t happen again, sir. I totally understand.”

But as she tittered, Quentin burst open the door of the intern office and strode to the front of the room, forcing all eyes upon him. Ten in all, the interns were mostly women, with a few high-fashion, writerly men, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and suit jackets. Charlotte sat in the center of the room, her brown hair flowing evenly down her back, her smile faltering as she eyed him. She’d been speaking in whispers to one of the men, beside her, whose bright yellow hair burned holes in Quentin’s eyes.

“Hey. You. What’s your name?” Quentin asked the boy, who was probably around twenty-three and unaccustomed to being spoken to so gruffly.

Maggie looked on, aghast. Quentin knew she hadn’t seen him so riled up. Not since he’d taken the first writing gig at MMM. Not since he’d made it his own.

“R—Randy,” the yellow-haired boy said in a sweet, flamboyant voice.

“Randy. Hello. Welcome to MMM,” Quentin boomed. “What brings you here? What was your dramatic path that led you to this coveted internship?”

As he spoke, his eyes barreled into Randy’s skull. Charlotte’s perfect, pouty mouth parted in shock. The tension in the room was palpable, causing Quentin’s blood pressure to rise.

“Come on, Randy. We’re all waiting,” Quentin said.

“Well, I—I grew up in Maryland,” Randy began, his voice trembling.

“That’s not a good start,” Quentin said.

The other interns laughed, causing a nervous smile to stretch across Randy’s face.

“If you’re going to tell stories for a living, why not tell me the story of you, Randy? Why not tell it to me in a way that gets magazines into the hands of our readers? Why not tell it in a dramatic, beautiful, heartbreaking way?”

Randy’s nostrils flared. “My mother died when I was fifteen. She died of cancer and requested that I play the Who on repeat on her old record player until she died. She loved music more than anyone I’ve ever met. She introduced me to everything. And even though it still hurts to listen to the Who, I do it. And I do it constantly, just because I recognize that emotion isn’t something to be feared. It’s something to celebrate.” Randy stabbed his finger against his desk, his eyes flashing. “And I want to celebrate the emotion of music here. At MMM.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Maggie’s mouth hung wide, clearly shocked that Quentin had yanked such an emotional response from the little intern. Quentin bowed his head in recognition, giving Randy two firm claps.

“That’s fucking right, Randy,” he said. “That’s fucking right.” He swallowed, turning his eyes toward Charlotte, who looked as if she might begin to cry. “I want all of you to approach this gig just the way Randy is. With an idea of why you’re doing this, every single day. With an idea of what you want to say to the world.”

“And what about you?” Charlotte said then, her voice raspy and far away. Immediately, it yanked at Quentin’s dick, causing it to drum up against his pant leg. Beneath her low-cut top, he imagined her gleaming, white breasts and those soft, kissable nipples.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He felt the tension in the room mount.

“How do you approach this job, every single day? How do you throw your soul into it? What story do you tell yourself?” she asked him, her eyes flashing with anger. He’d told her it couldn’t happen again; he’d told her it wouldn’t.

“You all know I was lead singer of the band Orpheus Arise,” he found himself saying, stupidly.

“But that was a million years ago,” Charlotte said, almost challenging him. “That was before you quit the drugs. The sex. That was before you married and then got divorced. That was before you were a father. Who’s to say you can even tell that story to yourself, now, if you’re a completely different person?”

The other interns tittered, obviously anxious. Why was she challenging the boss? Their eyes glanced to-and-fro. Maggie clapped her hands, sending their eyes toward her in a dramatic movement.

“Hey, there,” she said, scowling. “Let’s try not to put each other down, now.”

“Nobody’s ‘put me down,’ Maggie,” Quentin said gruffly. “To use a kindergarten term that, yes, my daughter often uses. I am a father. That is correct, Miss—“

“Charlotte,” she answered, biting her bottom lip. “Charlotte Barracks. Remember, we met yesterday?”

Jesus Christ. She was toying with him, now. Wasn’t he supposed to have all the power? He felt his groin rush with blood. Setting his jaw, he turned to the other interns, gazing at their glossed-over faces. Several of the female interns wore too much makeup, trying to make themselves look older, wiser, despite their twenty-three years of age.

Another redheaded girl, similar looking to Maggie, if over ten years younger, thrust her hand into the air.

“Hello. Yes. Introduce yourself, please,” Quentin said, gesturing.

“Pamela,” the girl said primly. “And I can tell you exactly how I approach the work day, here at MMM.”

Quentin had already forgotten this charade and was growing bored of it. He swept his eyes toward his watch, recognizing that it was nearly time for the advertising meeting. The seconds ticked on, with Pamela itching to ask. Her tongue was literally poised in the air, like a turtle’s.

“We’ll have to halt this meeting just now,” Quentin said, moving toward Maggie. “We have an advertising meeting. Charlotte. Randy. I’d like for you both to come.”

“And Pamela, and Emily,” Maggie whispered afterward, gesturing to the social media girls. “We don’t have room for all of you, but we’ll switch you guys in and out throughout the semester. You’ll all get to have the excitement of being in a real, live advertising meeting.”

“Bunch of no-nothing fucks, is what it is,” Quentin joked, his eyes flashing toward Charlotte.

Her eyes cast toward the floor, avoiding him. Quentin’s lips parted in pause. What kind of relationship was this going to be? Would they perpetually dance around each other, trying to forget, while continually making the other remember?

“Come along,” Quentin finally said, leading his crew of interns, plus Maggie, into the conference room. He watched as each of them took a seat, with Charlotte sitting as far away from him as possible. The advertisers from a famous Brooklyn clothing and street wear shop entered the room next, having been let in by his secretary. They wore tight-fitting business suits with expensive, bright tennis shoes, and they spent the better part of a minute shoving their thousand-dollar sunglasses into sunglasses cases before removing their advertising proposals.

As they took their time, Quentin’s eyes drew across the table, making penetrative, intense eye contact with Charlotte. As she’d walked to the conference room, she’d unbuttoned a single top button, revealing the darkness between her breasts. She looked at him bleary-eyed, as if she peered out from beneath his bed sheets.

The men from the street wear store spoke the language of stoners, making a meeting that should have lasted just twenty minutes into over an hour. Randy, Pamela, and the other girl—Emily?—took notes evenly on a notebook, while Charlotte watched on, her chin centered upon her fist and her elbow on the table.

Finally, after a long pause, just before wrapping up the deal, Charlotte banged her fist upon the table. The other interns turned toward her, panic-stricken. But her lips parted, proving her brain had been whirling all along.

“I just don’t think the copy’s good enough,” she said then, her voice still timid, but holding truth.

Quentin peered at the street wear design, with its slogan: Street whore.

“It’s a play on words,” one of the owners told Charlotte, his thick eyebrow rising high. “Don’t you get it, or you need me to explain it to you?”

Charlotte’s cheeks grew hot. After a moment of panic, she righted herself, glaring at him. “I have a better one. Want to hear it?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“We’ll wear you out,” she said. “It’s sexy. And it’s not name-calling, like yours is. I think it would look better with the photo you chose, as well.”

There was a long pause, with the two owners of the street wear company pulsing their heads together and whispering. One of them was hear saying, gruffly, “Man, she’s right. We could get flack for that name-calling.”

“Let’s just take it. I want this to be over with.”

They parted and looked at her as if she were a marketing angel, a guru. One shrugged, beginning to roll up his advertisement mock-up. “I think we can agree on that.”

“Sure. Fuck it,” the other one said. “And we’ll pay what you asked, since you threw in some creative.”

They turned toward the door, both of them shaking Quentin’s hand before they sped out. As they shifted at the elevator, the team watched as they slid sunglasses over their eyes with a dramatic, swishing motion, bowing their heads at the ding of the arriving elevator.

“Jesus, those guys were a piece of work,” Quentin said, rising from his chair and leaning heavily against the table, his fingers spread out. His eyes ticked from Randy, to Charlotte, to Pamela, to Emily, and then to Maggie, before drawing back to Charlotte. He assessed her, recognizing that she was even more than he’d bargained for.

“Charlotte, honey, what you did back there,” Maggie began. “It was out of line. It wasn’t approved by any kind of committee on our end. And what if it didn’t align with our brand?”

“But it did,” Quentin stated. “She saw how shitty their design was, and she offered a solution. That’s what you have to do in this business. Quick thinking. I appreciate a mind like that.” His nostrils flared. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to see you in my office.”

“All of us?” Pamela piped up, lifting her notebook from the table. Her knees creaked.

“Perhaps later, Pamela. But just now, only Charlotte. Thanks,” Quentin said, taking swift steps toward the door. He listened as Charlotte lifted her thin frame from the chair, allowing her heels to clatter onto the floor. She followed him slowly, almost as if she were walking to her death.

In some ways, Quentin thought then, any new beginning was a small death of all that came before. They couldn’t have planned for this intense attraction. But perhaps they could make the best of it.