Chapter 5
Mr. Lee did most of the talking. “You’ll have to excuse our new CEO,” he gushed to the investors in his fake, buttery tone. “His father, the founder, is incapacitated right now.” A hush of sympathetic noises scissored through the air of the room as investors nodded in Aaron’s direction, offering their condolences on an event that hadn’t even occurred yet. Aaron said nothing, glaring at Mr. Lee.
As the meeting churned along, Mr. Lee’s charisma and charm saturated his words. His talk of stocks and profits were lustrous with wild and fantastical claims that Kümertech would see an upsurge in prosperity in the near future. Mr. Lee illustrated a picture of success that only existed in his mind: this whimsical, sunny view of the company’s expansion that thoroughly bored Aaron, almost conspicuously so. He was thinking about that girl, about the way she had only one dimple when she smiled, about the curve of her face and the tattoo behind her ear. Vanessa, she said her name was. Vanessa from Reynold’s.
A surge of energy raged through Aaron. It felt like someone had injected him with a drug, a pang of euphoria gone intrinsically awry. He was sitting at the head of the table, toward the back wall of the conference room. All the investors were paying attention to Mr. Lee, who was too wildly concerned with promoting this idyllic fantasy of where the company would be in the next fiscal year to notice that Aaron had begun shaking. Trying his best to minimize his distress and not completely foil the meeting, he brought a hand to his face, only to discover that his nose was beginning to drip blood. As his shivers grew into full-body convulsions, heads began to turn toward the back of the room, much to Mr. Lee’s chagrin. Aaron was jerking and jolting, barely retaining the strength to sit up anymore.
“He’s seizing!” one of the investors cried out. “Someone pry his mouth open!”
Just then, Aaron thudded to the floor, unable to understand what was happening to him. Mr. Lee walked over to where he was writhing on the ground. “Let’s all give Mr. Ridley some privacy. Please, everyone, clear out of the room,” he said, his voice caked over with gentility. “I’ll call 911, and stay with him until the paramedics arrive.”
Dutifully the investors obeyed, immediately evacuating the room and pooling outside the closed door with a cloud of curious murmuring, whispers about what could have possibly overtaken Aaron so swiftly, and at seemingly nothing at all. In what felt like just a matter of moments, Mr. Lee appeared again, a smile dotting the landscape of his genteel face. “Mr. Ridley has asked that we all reconvene sometime next week,” he said in a saccharine tone. “I’m sure you can all understand.”
The investors puffed out and away, awash in concern for Aaron. Behind the closed doors of the conference room—in what felt like a completely different world—Aaron’s eyes were clenched shut. An empty syringe lay on the floor besides him, and his face was white with pressure. It felt like a watermelon was growing inside his stomach—gripping his insides and expanding with rapid force—and all Aaron could do was lie down and take the waves of discomfort.
* * *
Aaron didn’t know what came over him. His thigh radiated pain from a small wound he didn't remember sustaining, but aside from that, he was fully functional. To have been disabled on the floor during the investors meeting seemed incomprehensible to him, so much so that he wondered if he’d just daydreamed the whole ordeal. He was totally fine now, to the point that he actually wondered if some part of him was slipping, going insane with the grief of his father’s slow and unending decline. He was sitting at his desk, completely exhausted. “Desiree,” he said into the phone on his desk after dialing her extension, “please bring me some black coffee.”
A few moments later she appeared with a mug, the steam dancing through the air and around her as she walked toward Aaron’s desk. “Anything else?” she asked him, getting a little too close. She smelled like chemically engineered flowers.
“No, just… thank you. Oh, please hold all my calls. I need some privacy right now.” He said, sipping the coffee, not looking at her.
“Okay,” she said, her pumps clicking along the floor as she walked. “Oh,” she added, turning around to face him. “I called Reynold’s to cancel the invoice and let them know about their employee’s ineptitude.”
“You did what?” Aaron snapped, nearly spitting out his coffee.
“I… canceled the invoice,” Desiree laughed, incredulously. “We weren’t going to pay for food that ended up all over the floor, were we?” Her face was twisted into a look of unmatched skepticism, her eyebrows raised with a skeptical smile across her lips.
Aaron inhaled, looking around his desk in agitation. “I specifically told you that we’d talk about it later,” he said, controlling his anger. “And you undermined me.”
Shocked, Desiree put a hand to her billowing cleavage. “Sir, I… I didn’t mean to undermine, you, I just… I wanted to save the company some money…”
“And yet you did undermine me. You deliberately disobeyed what I told you. You went behind my back, you called Reynold’s, and you probably cost that girl her job,” Aaron whispered, his voice laced with muted rage.
“Sir, I… you know I never meant to—”
“Desiree,” Aaron cut her off, shaking his head. “Desiree, you’re finished. If I can’t trust you in a situation as small as this one, how can I trust that you’ll carry out more important tasks for me?”
“Mr. Ridley,” Desiree began, more skeptical than worried. “Sir, you’re not thinking clearly. After your seizure earlier, I think it’s best that we just take a little bit of time and revisit this issue later. Now, in the meantime, I’m very, truly sorry for what happened.” She walked over to him, behind his desk and placed a hand on his shoulder. Leaning over to put her face to his, smirking her glossed lips, she continued, “I’m very, truly sorry. It’ll never happen again.” Her breasts quivered in front of him with every word she spoke.
Aaron turned away from her. “That’s incredibly unprofessional,” he quipped.
Desiree kept smirking, “You’ve never had a problem with it before.”
“I’ve always had a problem with it,” Aaron said, getting up from his chair and turning to the window. “I’ve never said anything about it, because to acknowledge it is part of the problem. But Desiree, it’s gone too far. Pack up your desk and go downstairs to HR. I’ll call them now to get your termination paperwork ready.” His hands were in his pockets and he had his back to her, lost in the air outside, in the to and fro of people walking on the sidewalk below.
“Mr. Ridley… I… I can’t believe this,” she replied in a voice shaken by consternation. “How can you do this to me? And just because I snapped at one girl? Why do you care so much about her? I’ve been your secretary for almost five years now. Shouldn’t that be significant to you?”
Aaron turned to face her. “Desiree,” he began in a lackluster tone. “Your incessant flirting with me, your subpar work performance, and your inability to follow even the simplest directions has led me to this decision. Don’t make it worse for yourself. Stop crying and follow directions for once.”
Desiree raced out of the room as her voice was swallowed by sobs. The sound waves ricocheted down the hallway as her weeping grew further and further away. Aaron sighed, standing in the silence of his office for a solid minute before picking up his office phone and dialing the number for Human Resources.
After the paperwork to terminate Desiree had been squared away, Aaron lingered at the window, realizing he didn’t have very long before his paperwork began to pile up and his meetings went unscheduled. Should I take a leave of absence? He pondered to himself, thinking of his father wilting in his hospital bed.
Aaron banished the idea almost as soon as it slipped through his mind. There was no way he could leave the entire company on Mr. Lee’s shoulders. Though he’d been working with Charlie at Kümertech since before Aaron was born, it was simply too much to ask that he should take over right now. Aaron didn’t have the budget to increase Mr. Lee’s salary, and there’s no way he’d take the job (even just temporarily) without a raise.
Sighing, Aaron took his cell phone from his pocket. Following a quick Google search, he placed a call and held the phone to his cheek, smearing mid-afternoon grease over the glass display.
“Thank you for calling Reynold’s, this is Christina, how can I help you?” a woman answered, flatly and rushed.
“Hello,” he replied, not knowing how to begin. “I… uh… is Vanessa there?”
The voice on the other end hesitated for a moment, faltering between keeping her professionalism in the forefront and decreasing her bubbling agitation. “Employees aren’t allowed to take personal calls at work,” Christina replied. “And anyway, we had to let Vanessa go today. What can I help you with, sir?”
Disconcerted, Aaron pressed on. “Oh, I’m… sorry to hear that. Listen,” he said, leaning to hold his phone with his shoulder and grabbing a pen from his desk, “…is it possible to give me her contact information? It’s imperative that I speak with her.”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but that’s a violation of our company policy,” Christina spat at him.
“I see,” Aaron replied, crestfallen.