“What’s up!” I raise an eyebrow at Kyle when I walk into my office and see him sitting behind my desk with his feet up. “You’re late for our meeting, dude!”

“We didn’t have a meeting,” I say, setting my coffee down on the desk and taking off my jacket.

“Yeah, I know, but I have an idea I really want to bounce off you. I think you’re gonna love this.”

Over time I’ve grown a little wary of that claim. Kyle constantly has ideas he wants to ‘bounce’ off me and while some of them turn out to be incredibly lucrative—like this consulting firm we co-own with another college buddy—most of the time he just wants to find any excuse to surround himself with naked girls.

He has literally tried to get me to throw parties for college students right here in the company gym. I mean, it is an enormous space with special lighting and massive TVs lining the walls, and not to mention an insane sound system, but I’m not interested in turning this company into a hotbed of orgy activity.

“Is this another party idea? I told you, it’s not a good idea to have parties on company property. Why don’t you have it at your condo? You can have wall to wall naked girls there.” I ask, pushing his feet off my desk.

“No, this is so much better than a party! I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”

“I’m all ears.”

Kyle gets up out of my chair and turns around to face me when he gets to the other side of my desk. “Picture this,” he says with his hands splayed out in front of him. “A bunch of girls lined up outside the gym door,”

“Not the gym again. I told you, Kyle, I’m not interested in using this company to get you laid—“

“Just wait, man! It’s not a party. As I was saying …” he says as he gets back into a zone where he seems like he’s picturing the whole thing in his head. “A bunch of girls lined up outside the door, waiting to come in—one at a time—and audition to be your girlfriend.” He emphasizes the word your by pointing his finger at me. Like that is somehow going to sell his idea.

“I don’t want a girlfriend, Kyle. You know that.”

“Okay, sugar baby, whatever! What I’m saying is … we are the ones doing all the choosing.” He moves his finger back and forth between us when he says the word we, like he wants to make sure I understand which ‘we’ he’s referring to. While I watch him I wonder how many cups of coffee he’s already had this morning.

Kyle continues. “We make a literal call for an audition—you know, like for a commercial or something. We post it to sites online where the type of women we like congregate. We give out the specs—what we’re looking for down to the freaking letter. Submissive, athletic but curvy, long hair—these are just my specs, you can list your own. We’ll get responses from all over the country, all over the world, even! We can require anything we want without sounding like a couple of jackasses because it’s an audition. Then we come up with some stuff for them to do—dance, wiggle around, whatever—and sit back and enjoy the show.”

I stare at Kyle for a moment. It’s way too early for this. I didn’t sleep as well as I’d hoped after bringing the blonde home last night and I haven’t even had my coffee yet. “And what exactly is the point of all this? I don’t understand how this will be any different from picking up girls in a bar?”

“It’s different because we narrow down the playing field immediately—before they even get here. We don’t have to ask ‘are you into being spanked?’ Because they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

“Are you still drunk from last night? What kind of commercial audition would ask for girls who want to be spanked?”

“I’m not saying it’s for an actual commercial. I was just giving that as an example. Come on, think about it. These girls will all know ahead of time that the audition will lead to fucking, and we can indicate that it might lead to other stuff.”

“What kind of other stuff?”

“Well, you know, relationship stuff …” I roll my eyes and Kyle puts his hands up like he’s trying to keep me calm. “Or in your case sugar baby stuff … whatever. What I’m saying is we bring the girls we want to us and let them do the work of impressing us with their … talents … so to speak.”

“Where the hell is all this coming from? You don’t have any problems finding hook-ups. Neither of us do. Between the two of us we’re with a different girl every night of the week. What more do you want?”

Kyle flops down onto my leather couch, the wind in his sails finally knocked down a couple notches. “I don’t know, man. I’m getting tired of the whole bar scene.”

“Really? You looked like you were having fun last night.”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I mean the flirting is fun, and the fucking is fun, but … I don’t know. It feels like it’s too much goddamned work for not enough payoff. I’m getting too old for the whole bar scene anyway.”

“You’re thirty nine, Kyle, same as me.”

“Yeah, exactly. And I should be starting to settle down. Or I should at least have a nice little submissive at my feet on the regular. Maybe even chained up in the basement,” he says with a grin. “I’m kidding. I’d only put her in the basement for an hour a day, tops.”

I drink my coffee and scroll through my email while Kyle sits there, regaling me with his captive girlfriend fantasies. “Then find someone online. Go to one of those BDSM sites you’re always talking about and put up an ad.”

“Yeah, but that’s no fun either. Seriously, it’s like weeks before you find out that everything they said on their profile was a pile of horse shit. And this chick last night? When we were in the bar she was all ‘Oh yes Kyle, I want you to choke me. Oh yes, Kyle, I want you to spank me hard.’ But when we got her back to your place she wouldn’t even let us tie her up. She said it was too soon. What the fuck does that even mean? I was still horny when I left your place last night.”

I sit back in my chair and eye Kyle while he pokes around on his phone. “So what did you do?” I ask.

“I wound up watching this sick Japanese horror movie when I got home. Check this out.” Kyle hands me his phone and I watch a girl with long, black hair vomit into a dog food bowl and set it on the floor for—what looks like—a crazy man, who commences to lap it up.

“What the hell are you showing me this for? Jesus, Kyle!” I throw his phone across the room and it lands in his lap.

“Nasty, right? That is one messed up movie! It’s actually where I got the idea from.”

“The audition idea? Oh, awesome. And is this vomiting chick the one that passes the audition in the movie?”

“Yeah, she’s a real nut job too.”

“And this is what you want us to do.”

“Well, it’s a movie, Graham. What are the chances of something like this happening in real life?” he says as he points at his phone.

“Okay, let’s see.” I lean back in my chair and touch the tips of my fingers together while I pretend to be deep in thought. “We do an open call for young women who would be willing to travel across the country for an audition where the requirements are that they have big tits and like to be spanked. Um, yeah, I’d say the chance of drawing a few crazies is pretty good.”

“Come on! It’s a brilliant idea, you know it is! We don’t even have to ask the spanking question. We can word it so that it’s really refined. I mean, we’re a couple of refined dudes, right?”

I smirk at him, but don’t say anything. The thing is, the idea doesn’t actually sound half bad. It sounds a hell of a lot more like a fantasy than something we could actually pull off, but he does have a point with leveling the playing field up front. I don’t want to admit that to him, though.

“You could invite what’s her name,” Kyle says with a stupid grin on his face.

“Who?” I don’t even have to ask. I know exactly who he’s talking about.

“Your girlfriend. Aubrey.”

Aubrey is the daughter of a college friend of ours. And she’s about half my age. I made the mistake of telling him once, once, that I thought she was hot, and that was enough to ensure that he never let me forget. Not that I could forget about her anyway. Especially after Kyle showed me her profile on Smackmatch, one of the BDSM hook-up sites he used to frequent.

“She’s not my girlfriend, Kyle.”

“Yeah, but you know what she is? She’s a sub.”

“Will you drop it?”

“And she’s your type.”

“Kyle.”

“And she was checking you out big time, Graham. I swear her eyes were glued to you like—”

“Kyle! Will you drop it with her, please? I am not inviting Blane Weaver’s daughter here so she can answer a bunch of your stupid questions and win the grand prize of sucking my cock.”

“Why not?”

“I said, drop it!”

“Okay, okay, no hot Aubrey. But you will consider it, right? I think it’s a seriously awesome idea. Just think about it. Let it marinate for a while.”

“I don’t know, Kyle. Maybe.”

“Listen, I’ll come up with a detailed plan. You won’t have to do a thing. What I’ll do is, I’ll draw out exactly what steps we take before hand—where we could post the audition notices, what we ask, how we get them here, etc. If you don’t like it we can scrap it. Or keep working on it until you do like it. We can do anything we want! We can totally make this idea work for us, man!”

“Why exactly do you need me to be involved in this? I mean, why don’t you just do it out of your own apartment since you’re the one that’s so jazzed about the idea?”

“Cause I want us to do this together. Doesn’t it sound like it would be fun?”

The look on Kyle’s face gives me a bad feeling. A pang in my stomach that I get whenever he asks me a favor. The pang that is almost impossible for me to ignore and that makes it really hard for me to say no to him. “I don’t know if I would use the word fun—“

“Besides, can’t you picture the gym all tricked out with special lighting like when they do the hip hop cardio classes in there? Maybe a stripper pole set up for one of the audition numbers? You and me, sitting there, sipping some cold ones and having a bunch of girls doing everything in their power to impress us. Can’t you see it?”

“Don’t you think they’re going to want money?”

Kyle quickly sat forward on the couch. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. The winners get a prize of some sort in addition to sex with us. Now you’re thinking! I don’t know why I didn’t come up with that earlier.”

“Hey, it wasn’t a suggestion. It was really more of a con—like as in a list of pros and cons? Con number one: girls might not be interested in stripping for us for free.”

“Point taken. I’ll get back to you on that. It should probably be something big. But that’s nothing we can’t handle. In the meantime, business as usual.” Kyle stands up and heads for the door, then stops and turns back. “I’m telling you, Graham, you won’t regret this. I think this could be my best idea ever.”

“Yeah, sure. What about Peterson. Don’t you want to involve him in your big sex scheme?”

“Eh, he’s never around. I haven’t seen him in the office for, like, a week. Have you talked to him recently?”

“No. I was wondering where he was with that indie whisky company out of Arkansas.”

“What did they want?”

“They hired us to do market research and ad consulting. Also revamping their website. That’s why Peterson was taking care of it. It’s a small gig, but they seem like a pretty cool little company. He told me he was putting a team together and we’d all be having a video conference sometime this week. Are you planning on talking to him?”

“Yeah, I guess. He owes me money from last month’s poker game and he hasn’t paid up yet.”

“What do you need his money for? You’re a freaking millionaire, Kyle.”

“Hey, money is money. And I gots to get what’s mine,” he says as he spins three-hundred-and-sixty degrees in front of me, then gives me two finger guns when he’s facing me again. “Actually, I wound up having to shell out a lot more this last month than I’d planned. I paid cash for the Lambo, then had to pay off my Amex and totally forgot about a bunch of charges.”

“Seriously? You don’t keep track of that stuff?”

“Not as well as you and Peterson. I can only hope to be even half as responsible as the two of you one day.” Kyle gives me a mocking bow, then stands up. “Anyway, I’m gonna be glad when we go over the last quarter and get our payouts. I need money for my condo fees and my rent. How much do you think it’s going to be this time around?”

“I don’t know. This was a really good quarter. There’s still some accounts being settled, but I think we’re looking at at least two-fifty.”

“Million?”

“Yeah.”

“Each?”

“Yep.”

“What?! Holy shit, Graham. I never would have guessed that this business would be pulling in almost eight-hundred million a quarter back when we started it. Seriously, it blows my mind. This is five times as much as we pulled in last quarter. We’ve only been at this for five years and we’re killing it. What are the projections for the whole year?”

“Well, if things keep up with the way they have been with new European accounts we should be looking at just over three billion.”

“How is that even possible! Jesus!”

“Well, it’s not just income from the accounts. The projections include investments too. Especially the crypto-currency trading we’ve been doing lately. We’re gonna find out more about that at the meeting on Friday.”

“Awesome! Okay, I’ll catch ya later.”

“See you later, Kyle.”

Kyle walks out the door and for the next hour I can’t get the conversation we just had out of my head. Not about the money. After the first million, the money that was pouring in just became numbers on a page to me. What I can’t stop thinking about is that damned audition idea. And Aubrey. I’d tried to wipe the memory of her out of my mind over the last couple years, and for the most part, I’ve been successful. Except for the part I don’t even want to admit to myself. That whenever some random chick is sucking my cock, it’s Aubrey’s face I see.

I’m left sitting there at my desk with the image of me and Kyle sitting in a dark room that’s lit with swirling, multi-colored spotlights, and a line of girls waiting to strip for us. Girls that all have Aubrey’s hypnotic blue eyes and long, dark hair. And as much as I complained when Kyle brought it all up, I don’t hate the idea. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I kind of love it.