Jake

As if busting a pipe in the kitchen wasn’t enough, Reginald smirks at me as he reveals the two in the one-two punch he plans to deliver against Janie Hall and her establishment.

“Nothing hurts public image worse for a woman like Miss Hall than finding out she slept her way to the top,” he says, laughing like he’s made some kind of joke.

My stomach clenches briefly. Janie Hall? I never would have guessed it. “Where are you getting this information? Are you connected to one of her investors?”

My father looks at me like I’m too stupid to live. “What investors? No, Jake... Christ, you never pay attention, do you? Nobody cares if she actually slept with anyone; they care about the story. The suggestion that she might have. She’s a woman! Once word gets out, it’ll catch fire.”

“You’re just going to put out a story saying she slept with an investor?” I ask, incredulous. It’s not exactly a new low — Reginald has done this kind of thing before — but it seems like overkill. He could just wait to see how she handles the lost business.

But it isn’t enough for him to destroy Red Hall. No. He wants to destroy the woman behind it, wants to make sure she doesn’t just move shop and open up another joint in a year when she’s recovered from the loss of her current business.

“A silent investor,” he says. “No one specific, of course. Unless I can find out if she did. She doesn’t strike me as the type, though.” He pops a grape into his mouth, thoughtful for a moment.

“Better, we’ll say the silent investor was married,” he says after a while, nodding slowly to himself. “Nothing worse than a slut who can’t get her own man and has to take someone else’s, am I right?”

I refrain from pointing out that this demographic encompasses literally all of my father’s ex-wives and extramarital “friends.” It would be lost on him anyway.

“Sounds like a plan,” I tell him, standing from the uncomfortable chair. “Let me know how it goes.”

He laughs. “Just look for the ‘closed for business’ sign on the front of that shitty excuse for a lounge she threw together.”

My laugh is forced, but my father doesn’t notice. When you don’t have to care what anyone thinks, you don’t have to be aware of whether they’re being sincere or not. Reginald doesn’t rely on things like that. He relies on leverage.

What I plan on the walk to the garage is probably the sort of thing that would get me cut out of the will, my credit cards canceled, and my trust fund pulled. But there’s something inside me that can’t, or won’t, just let him ruin Janie like that. Undercutting her business with whatever seedy underworld tactics he typically uses is one thing. Previous competitors Reginald has crushed were able to leave town, set up shop somewhere else. In the case of one tech startup, they left the country.

This was different. This wasn’t just cruel, it was criminal. Although that word means something different to people like Reginald. And, I suppose, to me.

Once out of the house and on the road, I pull over and make a call. My heart pounds in my chest just dialing the number, much less handing down the edict. Social media management is the main function I serve for my father’s many businesses, so my network of bloggers and amateur journalists is wider than his, though Reginald’s network extends to places like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

When it’s time to smear a presidential candidate or a congressperson who isn’t voting his way, Reginald has me beat. No doubt about that. When it comes to the hottest bloggers, people with millions of readers, on the other hand... that’s the arena where I win, and it’s the arena where this feud is going to play out.

“You sure about this?” my contact, Jeffrey Shipton, asks me nervously. “I… don’t want to get into trouble with your dad, man. He’s bad news for a guy like me.”

“Don’t mention his name,” I say. “And when he has his people call you to pull the story, do it — just make sure it’s been shared and spread around first. He gets a briefing about whatever he’s working on, so he’ll find out, but Reginald doesn’t understand how the internet works. It just needs to be out there in people’s feeds. That’s all. You can do that?”

“Yeah man,” Jeffrey assures me, “I can get about five or six thousand shares by people who can get… maybe two or three hundred a piece, maybe more if it hits a chord.”

“Play up the fact that she’s a woman,” I tell him. “See if you can get it shared onto some feminist blogs, women in business, as professionals — whatever you can find.”

“Will do,” he says. There’s a pause. He’s nervous about this. Hell, so am I. “If this gets back to you — ”

“It won’t,” I tell him. “Not from you, not from anyone. If someone demands a source, say it was one of Janie’s clientele; she’s got celebrities that are loyal to her. Reginald will just assume it came from one of them.”

Another pause. Keys are tapping rapidly on Jeffrey’s end. “Gotcha. I’ll have it up in a few hours.”

“Thanks for this Jeffrey,” I breathe. “I owe you.”

“I think I still owe you, buddy, but… we’ll call this an installment, how about that?”

“You’re a good man, Jeffrey. Make sure I get a link.”

“Done and done, my friend.”

He hangs up, and I take a moment to calm my panic. It’s the first time I’ve acted directly against my father’s interests. The chances he’ll find out it was me that circulated the story are slim. But once it’s out there that Janie Hall is being specifically targeted because she’s a successful single woman, everything else that comes out against her after will be suspect, and will only support the story Jeffrey puts out there.

It only takes a piece off the board, though, as far as Reginald is concerned. Still, he’ll have to be more careful. Once the story circulates for a while and has time to simmer in the public mind, he’ll be in a tough position — if it ever comes out that he’s responsible for trying to cut Janie down, the backlash would be serious.

The link comes in about three hours later. In another two, it’s had over ten thousand likes and more than six thousand shares. The major feminist blogs are on fire, and there are even people calling for blood.

I’m happy about that, and proud, but I can’t calm my worries. Still, done is done. You can’t take anything back from the internet and that’s the truth. It feels surprisingly good, and I want to go tell Janie what I did for her, but…

There’s no way she’d believe me. Instead, I go to Ferry Lights, like it was any other evening, and calm my nerves with whiskey. It’s just the start of the evening, and it’s incomplete. What I need is a hot piece of ass to take my mind off all of this. Off of Reginald and his thug tactics, off of my own strangling inability to tell him off to his face instead of running around behind his back, off of Janie Hall and her… everything.

Like flies to rotting fruit, the women descend upon me — many of them are the same ones that do so every night and I’m even pretty sure one or two are women I’ve slept with before. They don’t make a point of mentioning that. I’m certain they remember, especially if I do, but if I’m not going to admit to knowing them then they’re perfectly happy playing that game to win.

One after the other I send them away. It’s like fishing for trout. One after the other the wrong one nibbles the bait and either gives it up or I throw them back. God, how long has it been since I went fishing? Maybe I should take the yacht out soon. My father loves to fish. Once, when I was a kid he took me…

But no; I’m five drinks in and remembering that wrong. It wasn’t Reginald — it was the guy he hired to take me out on the ocean, a longtime champion swordfish guy. He was nice enough, almost fatherly in fact, but something about the presence of my bodyguards tainted the experience with an expectation of danger. Back then, Reginald had a lot of enemies. That was a while ago.

I wonder if Janie likes to fish? She doesn’t seem the type, but then again she doesn’t seem like the sort of person who cares for hard work in general and yet there Red Hall stands, right? She’s not the sort of girl you can judge by her appearance. Those fitted dresses and sharp heels, that mane of thick hair that frames her face just right, those lips…

Dozens of women, and not one of them catches my interest for even long enough to get me to a hotel room or, hell, even the back of the Maserati I drove here for a blow job. None of them are Janie Hall.

It’s got to be that old classic, right? Every guy wants what he can’t have. I don’t remember the last time a woman played hard to get with me. I’ve been in the public eye so long now — since I was ten — that there’s never been a girl in my life who didn’t start out knowing who I was. Even Janie knew. But Janie didn’t try to sink her hooks into me.

I had my father to thank for that. And I suppose, myself. If I had just said no, for once… who knows what might have been?