Chapter 11: Davis
I tighten my grip on the stress ball in my left hand, watching it bulge comically. It was a gift from my younger sister, Julia. It’s one-part joke, one-part absolute necessity. It’s yellow, like an emoji, with a big smile printed on it. When I squeeze it, the smile blows up and stretches and usually brightens my mood.
Unfortunately, my stress ball is no match for Kieran Ridgeway, who has been chattering in my ear for the last twenty-five minutes. Answering the call was my first mistake; I should have known better. Letting the conversation drag on was my second mistake—and I even had a warning text from my sister:
Julia: DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE. WORST RIDGEWAY ABOUT TO RUIN YOUR DAY.
That’s what she and I call Kieran: the worst Ridgeway. That may seem like a pretty mild designation, but given that our father is considering divorcing his third wife because she just hit the tender age of forty, our grandfather definitely got away with a Ponzi scheme by ordering his fixer to threaten a judge, and at least one of my uncles used to invite aspiring models to his parties to snort coke off his dick in the eighties (where he would photograph them for sexual blackmail), Kieran’s title is actually quite a feat.
I pull the phone away from my ear to confirm how long my brother has been ranting at me. Exactly twenty-seven minutes. Then I see the clock and I realize that my weekly meeting with Olivia is in a couple of minutes. I still haven’t gotten to the financial analysis that she sent me, which isn’t how I like to show up in meetings. I open up my laptop and pull up the Excel file, and do my best to read through the numbers while Kieran is ranting in my ear, but it’s about as productive as arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
“—can you please stop talking for, like, two minutes so I can—”
“Davis, cut the shit,” Kieran responds at once. I can practically see him rolling his eyes on the other end of the call. “Can you just let me do the toast this year? Is that so hard for you?”
“Jesus, Kieran,” I hiss, snatching up the stress ball once again and squeezing the ever-loving shit out of it. “If you’d listen, you’d hear me say that you can give the toast at dad’s birthday. I don’t care. At all. It’s one less thing for me to do, so have at it—again, I really couldn’t care less.”
Kieran is uncharacteristically quiet before he says, “You’re sure?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure. The last thing I want to do is give a toast in front of dad’s friends. Hell, I’m not even going to be there. It’s the same weekend that the company’s summer internships end, so I have to be around to—”
“Yeah, whatever. I get it. You’re exceptionally important doing serious and important business and can’t even show up for our dad’s birthday.”
God, I want a Xanax. Either that or for the closest cell tower to collapse. That would work just as well to get me out of this conversation.
“Yep,” I say, just to piss Kieran off. He hates it when I do that—when I don’t fight him. He’s constantly looking for a fight, and I’m a big gray rock.
“Davis—”
“It sounds like we’re all set,” I continue, cutting him off before he can draw this out any longer. “You’ll do the toast at dad’s party and I’m sure it’ll be the highlight of his year. Maybe the decade. It might get you selected as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.”
Kieran has the audacity to fake a yawn. “Well, I have to go. I’m doing freelance consulting for a buddy’s new startup, so I have to run.”
Every snarky cell in me wants to ask him what he’s qualified to consult on. Philandering? Spending other people’s money? Small-scale pimping?
“Fine,” I say instead.
“Take care, Davis.”
He ends the call without saying goodbye, leaving me sitting there with my cell phone in my hand, sort of tempted to try to break it. I drop my phone into the top drawer of my desk instead, before I weave out of my seat.
When I open the door to my office, I’m surprised to find Olivia standing there with her hand hovering in the air like she was about to knock. Her eyes widen when she sees me, and she takes an involuntary step back.
“I forgot we were meeting,” I admit as I slide away from the door to give her space to walk in. The smell of her perfume wafts into the room as she enters, instantly softening my mood. I close the door behind her, taking a moment to simply…enjoy it. Enjoy her.
Fuck her for smelling so damn good.
The last time I saw her, she was stark naked in my apartment and practically quivering with need as I denied her pleasure. It was exactly as I had planned and engineered it: Olivia gone for me. Perfection.
Yet despite the success of my plan, I’d spent the next few hours pacing around my bedroom and typing and deleting apology texts to her and trying to shake off the sad and surprised look that crossed her face when I abruptly ended the night. It was supposed to satisfy me—to vindicate me. All it did was make me feel like an absolute bastard.
Villains absolutely do not get enough credit for how hard it is to maintain a constant level of malice.
“Is everything okay?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder and looking so incomprehensibly alluring when she does it.
“Fine,” I lie before clearing my throat.
I slide back into my seat, where my stress ball is still out on my desk. Hastily, I grab the thing and drop it into the top drawer of my desk, where it lands right on top of my stapler. The collision may as well be mic’d up and amplified because it’s so comically loud that I can’t even hold back my grimace. The dumbest part about this whole episode is that I don’t even need a goddamn stapler—in six years of working at this company, I’ve literally never stapled anything.
To my relief, Olivia ignores me. Instead, she flips up the screen to her laptop once she’s seated and says, “Did you get my email? I finished the financial comparison between TruEarn and FundRight and I’m convinced that FundRight has a much better return potential in the next five years.”
TruEarn and FundRight are the two companies that we’re currently considering for acquisition under our Financial Services umbrella. They both do basically the same thing: make it easier to manage investments. Because they’re so similar, we’re going to acquire one and basically force the other one into obsolescence, which is an oversimplified way of saying that this decision is a big fucking deal. Especially after our deal to acquire Libra fell through publicly during due diligence earlier this year, Financial Services needs a big win.
Needless to say, Olivia better be ready to defend her stance like her corporate life depends on it.
“FundRight has the better return,” I parrot, not bothering to look at the file that she sent to me.
“Yes.”
“Including synergies?”
Her long eyelashes bat as she hesitates and her attention drifts away from the screen. “Synergies…” she repeats, her tone betraying the confidence that she walked into the office sporting like a new outfit.
“Right. Independently, both of these companies are forecasted to have a positive return in the next five years. However, if we’re talking about buying one of them, we really should be looking at their return potential when they’re under the Davenport-Ridgeway umbrella and taking advantage of our scale as a company. So, have you factored in synergies?”
As I’m talking, I know that she hasn’t. It’s patent when her lips part slightly, but she doesn’t say a word.
“That’s an obvious no,” I conclude before leaning back in my chair and releasing an obnoxious sigh. “So, that essentially means you’re not prepared for our meeting today?”
The silence that follows my question is almost enough to send me reaching for the stress ball, but I know better. I can deal with an awkward silence; god knows this woman has put me through worse.
“I’m not,” she admits, keeping her tone steady as she speaks and a crestfallen expression passes over her face. It’s that same crestfallen expression from Saturday night, and I garner no satisfaction from seeing it on her face right now. “I’m sorry, Davis. Your feedback makes so much sense, and I’m an idiot for not thinking of it myself.”