“So, why don’t you? Isn’t that what you’re into to? Or are you finally coming down a peg and wanting something stable?” I ask, only partly condescending.
“Look at you. All grown up.” She teases. “You’ve come a long way from fucking your assistant.”
I smile. “Fuck you.”
She rises, knowing that I only had a minute to spare, as our production meeting is in five minutes. “I’m glad you’re happy.”
“Like I said. You’re a shitty liar.”
She smiles. “Fuck you.” With a friendly wink, she walks out of my office.
My phone rings and I take a couple of quick calls from staff before leaving for the meeting. Normally, we have it in the boardroom, but today we have to get down and dirty with details of this European deal, so it’s in the shop. Bowie is in there, in her coveralls, and I slide a clean pair on, too. We go through some preliminary plans from the results of some meetings with Drummond Motors and discuss workflow. That’s when a ‘v’ forms between Bowie’s brows. She points out a flaw in the model that nobody noticed. We spend the next two hours on a workaround for it, and then we move forward with a plan that my team and I had come up with before her arrival.
As the sun starts to set, while Bowie and I, and a few team members pound out details, it eventually is just her and I, nearly in the middle of the night, still working but loving it. I look at her and see that she’s nowhere near done, just like me. “Damn, I need to put your name in our company name, somehow.” I blurt, feeling so goddamn happy for where we are.
She chuckles. “Jagger, I told you, that will just be a pain in the ass, and it isn’t necessary at all. You are letting me get my hands dirty and trusting me all the way there, and that’s all that I can ask for.” She kicks at a piece of lint on the floor and changes tack, turning slightly growly. “It’s more than I can say for fucking Boston, who I now know was just taking my ideas and the credit for them. At least you let me be a part of everything, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I am a part of this company, and you don’t let me forget it, and I don’t need my name to be in it for that to be true.” She puts a fist to her chest. “I feel it here and that’s all that matters.”
I change the subject, even though a lightbulb goes off inside my head, but I don’t want her to know about it yet. “What do you say we throw this party in a month. We’ll talk to Wesley and his crew and invite them to come. You can gauge if he wants the media to show or not. I’ll get Stevie on it. She can do all that shit and I know that she’s itching for it ever since I told her about the deal. That’s half the reason why she threw that goddamn birthday party, and don’t be fooled, otherwise.”
“Sounds good.” Bowie agrees. “I think to keep our morale around here up, we need to celebrate.”
“Exactly. And we’ll invite everyone. The team, family, friends, Wesley’s team, we’ll make it all about being a family. If you ask me, that’s why Wesley took us on, because we have a very familial culture here.”
“Yeah, something that Kruger doesn’t have. They’re all about greed. There’s no heart there.”
“I agree. And Wesley saw that. All kidding aside, he may like you more than the average Joe Blow business associate, but he invited us out there to get to know us. He doesn’t want to just do business with some paycheck or a plan, he wants to have a real camaraderie.”
“I’ll make some calls.” Bowie says.
“Yeah, me, too.”
But I end up doing more than just making calls.
...I make a call that changes my whole life forever.
Chapter 16
Bowie
Mylaptopisspreadacross my thighs as I sit up in bed, going through notes from Drummond Motors, trying to organize our production model a little more efficiently. We had a mess of a production schedule at Kruger a dozen times, and I was the only one that could make sense of it and make it into something attainable. Jagger is at his brother Rush’s, going through some things, so that Halen knows what direction to go with resources. Jinny is over there, too, since she’s the HR manager, and she’s dying to bring in new blood. A news bulletin comes across my screen, and I realize that it’s out in the open now. The world knows that Lawson and Drummond have made an agreement. That’s when my phone rings.
Heart pounding, I consider not answering it, but this is the first call that he’s made since I left him. “Boston. What do you want.” I open with. My voice is even, maybe cold, but unwavering.
“I see you hopped in the sack with both Jagger and Wesley Hopkins, huh.” He clucks his tongue.
“That’s not an answer. What do you want.”
“I just wonder how many other men you plan to fuck to get what you want. Or to get Jagger what he wants, that is.”
“Fuck you, Boston. I haven’t done anything other than do my job, which is more than I can say for you, you son of a bitch. It’s called loyalty. You could use a lesson on it.” I’m about to hang up, but he stops me, just as I hear Jagger walk into the house. I decide to put him on speakerphone, so that Jagger can overhear the bullshit.
“If you knew what loyalty was, I would never have fucked around on you, and you know it.”
“I was never anything other than loyal to you. You’re delusional, Boston.”
Jagger walks into the bedroom, hearing me speak my ex’s name, and his face goes from content to ‘what the fuck does that asshole want?’
“If you were loyal, you would never have left me and gone to that weasel Jagger.”
