by R. R. Banks
“Umm, I’ll take a bourbon and soda,” said Hannah quickly, not having a chance to think of what she really wanted and went with what she normally got. Raul nodded before stepping away from the table and heading over to the bar. Hannah crossed her legs and leaned back in the chair, adjusting her shoulders a bit against the back of the chair before looking over at Alexis with a smirk. “So, what’s really bothering you?”
Alexis bit her lip while looking away from Hannah in a shy manner, keeping her eyes hidden as Hannah looked across the table with completely wide eyes, almost in a shocked and surreal manner at Alexis’s demeanor. “Alexis Matthews, start talking,” ordered Hannah.
“I don’t know,” she replied defensively. “I just felt like we had a little bit of a connection after our brief conversation.”
“There’s no such thing as love at first sight,” retorted Hannah. “So there has to be some other reason than just a connection that you think is there.”
“Well, I really don’t know,” continued Alexis. “I mean, from our conversation, he seemed to fit most of everything that I am looking for in a guy, at least from the surface of things. He seems to be smart, successful, and charming. He appears to have a great personality, and on top of everything, he was incredibly handsome.”
Hannah looked at her best friend with a look of concern. “Alexis, what do you want in life?” she asked, posing a very serious question, which caught Alexis slightly off guard.
“What do you mean?” she asked with a slightly confused tone. “I don’t understand the question.”
“It wasn’t a very difficult question,” she replied. “What do you want to get out of this life you are currently living?”
Alexis nodded, though still slightly confused, and paused a bit to compose her answer. “I guess I want to be happy,” she started, speaking slowly as she was trying to piece together the right answer so that Hannah would not ridicule her for being too soft and noncommittal, something that she despised. “I’ve always been someone who put her career first, and to be honest, Hannah, I don’t think that will ever change. I think that if I could find a man, and have a family, I would still be career driven and want what was absolutely best my ambition, and professional life. I feel that my success is what I am judged by, not the man I see or the clothes I wear, but by what I have accomplished in my professional life. I feel that it is my duty to be the absolute best that I can.” Alexis paused a bit as she reached for her glass to take a sip of water as they continued to wait for their drinks. “I just feel that he must accept the fact that I will always put my career before anything else, opting for success in the boardroom before success in the home, and he will have to understand that my happiness is not determined by anything but winning.”
“Do you think you could handle a man like that?” asked Hannah, prodding a bit for more information as Alexis opened up about what was bothering her.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” she replied. “I know that I can be a handful when it comes to getting what I want, when I want it, and how I want it done, so having someone who was similar to me in that regard may not be what’s absolutely best for me. However, I can’t stand men who are not strong enough to realize when they need assistance. They must want someone who highlights their strengths and counters their weaknesses; everyone needs someone who does that. I think that the best relationships work, whether personal or professional, if the people involved complement each other’s abilities.”
Hannah chuckled with her judgmental eyes glaring at her best friend. “So, he’s hot?” she asked, going straight for the superficial characteristic that she tended to look for in a partner.
“He was pretty cute,” she replied, looking past Hannah to see Raul carrying two drinks as he approached the table. With a very smooth motion, he placed the drinks on the table and took their food orders, leaving within seconds of arriving. The girls enjoyed their drinks as Hannah continued to question Alexis about Nathanial. Within a few minutes, their food was delivered and after their meal concluded, they moved out onto the dance floor for the rest of the night, carrying their drinks with them, to keep themselves in a festive mood.
The girls reverted back to their younger days when they would travel out to various clubs and nightspots, dancing with each other before dancing with anyone else, catching the eye of many men with their provocative moves with one another. As various men hovered around and watched the girls dance to the electronic music, they would flag down the waitresses and have more rounds brought to Alexis and Hannah in exchange for a dance with them. With a fresh drink in hand, Alexis and Hannah would dance with the men who kept them with a full glass, spending a few songs with them before reverting back to dancing with each other.
The night moved along as the two girls drank their fill, getting incredibly intoxicated before finally taking a break after several hours on the floor. Alexis walked over to one of the tables on the side of the dance floor and look around at the club, noticing how incredibly busy it was for a Thursday night, but accepting that Dubai had a reputation for being one of the best cities to party in. With its reputation being confirmed, Alexis and Hannah were consumed by the atmosphere and culture of the city, falling in love with the nightlife and all that it had to offer. Spending their night in the city out at one of the greatest clubs in the world verified that the girls were where they wanted to be.
Alexis pulled her phone out and looked at the time, panicking as Hannah looked on. “Oh wow,” she exclaimed, showing Hannah that it read four in the morning. “We have to be at work in three hours.”
Hannah nodded. “That’s going to make for an awfully long day,” she said sarcastically. “How has your night been?”
“It’s been incredible,” answered Alexis. “But I can’t seem to get my mind off of him. I can’t shake it, Hannah.”
“Your emotions are heightened when you’ve drank a lot,” replied Hannah. “Just don’t worry about it. We can figure it out tomorrow.”
Alexis nodded. “Yeah, when we’re spending our morning struggling from either being hung over or still drunk.”
“I’ve had worse days,” answered Hannah playfully. “Hell, we’ve all had worse days.”
Chapter 5
The next day came sooner than preferred with both Hannah and Alexis, as they struggled to find their bearings. Though incredibly tame, the long night out took a toll on the two, causing them to be a bit sluggish and temperamental. Hannah sat in Alexis’s cubicle as she laid her head on her desk, groaning softly from the subtle headache that accompanied a night of heavy drinking and lack of sleep. Her blonde hair was in a tight ponytail, as was customary, though somewhat oily and draped over the side of her head forming bangs at the front. Her mouth hung open with slight, inaudible noises emitting from it while she clutched her knees in agony.
Alexis sat at her desk, attempting to organize her desk as best she could, though much slower and to no avail. In a state of haze she sat in her chair with her eyes opened wide, staring at the desk to try and make sense of where everything should go as she slid the various organizational devices around the desk in a slight panic, unable to gain the organization she required to make her day fruitful.
The girls were unable to perform even the basic functions of their jobs without a hint of dizziness, nausea, and the regret from staying out too late the night before. They were reminded of their nights in college, though attending different universities; the nights of awful decadence and disregard for their bodies were quite similar. Hannah, who was in much better shape than Alexis to begin with, struggled much more than her friend. She picked her head up slightly, drooling from the corner of her mouth as she tried to regain any sense of what she had to accomplish that day.
Alexis, on the other hand, was much more focused, yet still thinking about the previous night and how she turned down several men because of her current preference. Though she just met the man, and only spoke to him for a matter of minutes, her intrigue was drive
n by lust and curiosity. He seemed very intelligent and ambitious; the kind of man that she wished she could find a bit more often.
“Are you still thinking about him?” groaned Hannah, muffling her voice with her head buried under her arms.
“Perhaps,” replied Alexis, standing up from her chair and moving the rest of her things around. “You know how I get after a night of drinking.”
Hannah groaned in disbelief. “I know how amazingly annoying you get after you drink.”
Alexis chuckled before sitting down in her chair, looking out at her desk with approval as the sides of her head continued to throb. “And sometimes you just have to suffer to keep your sanity,” she replied, smiling softly as she leaned on her desk. She crossed her arms in front of the trays, leaving them on the desk as she placed her head down on her forearms, prompting an awfully sinister snarl from Hannah.
“I guess that pain doesn’t want to go away, does it?” asked Hannah rhetorically, leaning back in her chair as she looked around the office, watching the men and women of the consortium work tirelessly for their respective companies while the two of them tried to recover. “Don’t we have something we have to do this morning?”
“We have a conference call with one of the board members in New York in about twenty minutes,” stated Alexis between her forearms, still muffling her voice unintentionally as she tried to compose herself. “They’re going to ask a lot of questions about what happened yesterday.”
Hannah smirked. “Good,” she said. “I’d love to give them all of the details.”
“What details?”
“Well, not all of them; just the important ones,” continued Hannah, smirking a bit while leaning back in the chair.
Alexis looked at Hannah with a perplexed gaze, staring at her friend as she tried to read between the lines of what she just said. While she knew Hannah was not the most promiscuous of all of her friends and colleagues, she knew how to tell when her innuendos were much more than that. “Do you mind explaining?” she asked, pondering what the true meaning behind Hannah’s words. “What exactly do you mean?”
“I don’t know how much I can tell you without getting into the morbid, provocative details, but what I can tell you is that I secured the biggest deal of my professional life,” she answered. “Alexis, I will tell you everything after this next meeting, but we have to be focused. As hung over and tired as the two of us are, we have to stay focused when that conference call begins.”
“Why though?” asked Alexis. “I don’t understand why we have to be focused.”
“Because if I tell our bosses the wrong thing, it could potentially end poorly for us,” she answered, causing Alexis’s look of confusion to change into fear. Hannah paused, thinking a bit before frantically waving her hands in front of her face. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “I did not mean for it to sound like that. I just mean that our trip has been fruitful and he doesn’t need to recall us yet. We are not in danger of losing our jobs at all.”
Hannah panicked, causing Alexis to chuckle lightly in relief once she realized that her job and career were not in jeopardy. “It’s not often I get to see you back pedal,” she quipped, jabbing her friend a bit while she watched her calm down. “I saw your reports and your success in the field, and while I wanted to talk to you about it last night, that would have been against the rules. So, before our boss calls us in the next few minutes, please, tell me what happened.”
“It’s going to take a lot longer than a few minutes,” she replied, dropping the corners of her mouth a bit while looking to the side and talking softly. “Alexis, I slept with one of the owners of that company. I don’t know how it got to that point, but it did and I don’t want our bosses to find out about it.”
Alexis’s eyes opened wide as the phone beside her started to ring, alerting her that their conference call was going to be starting a little bit sooner than expected. “This was the last place that I wanted a cliff hanger,” she said, looking at Hannah with her eyes incredibly wide as she hovered her hand over the phone. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to get through this conversation in one piece.”
“I will give you every juicy detail if you just let me do most of the talking,” replied Hannah. “Just hit the button and let me talk his ear off.”
She nodded. “Fine,” said Alexis, pressing the small red button on the side of the receiver. “Good morning, or should I say evening?” announced Hannah, beginning her charm offensive with her supervisors by acknowledging the time difference. It was eight am for the girls, meaning it was eleven pm for their supervisors in New York City. “How has your day been?”
“It’s been very productive,” announced a man on the other end with a very gruff, scratchy voice. “Sorry, I dosed off for a few hours in the recliner and my wife had to wake me up for this conference call. If I seem a little distracted, it’s just because I am.”
Hannah and Alexis laughed as they looked at each other, seeing a great opening. The man on the other line, Richard Dover, had been with the company since the 1980s, knew all of the ins and outs of the oil world, but was unfamiliar with many of the new practices and procedures. He had many contacts, all connected to the old oil industry, all incredibly powerful and wealthy. “It’s fine sir,” stated Hannah, trying to sound coherent for her sleep deprived supervisor. “I know you want to get to bed, so I’ll make sure this is brief.”
“No, that’s fine,” he countered. “Please, I want to hear about this accomplishment. Don’t spare any of the details; I want to be impressed.”
Hannah and Alexis both glared at each other while shaking their heads simultaneously. “Well sir, it really wasn’t that exciting,” started Hannah. “In all honesty, everything can be traced back to our efficiency and ability to handle large quantities of crude oil. They realized that we were an incredibly gifted distributor, and that with our vast network and internal connections, we were the best and most reliable partners they could link up with. It wasn’t anything special, really. We were just at the right place at the right time.”
The two listened to their boss scoff over the phone, not buying into Hannah’s story about her dealings yesterday. “I’ve worked with that family for the better part of twenty years and I promise you that they do not work like this,” he stated plainly. “Don’t feed me a load of mess. Tell me how you were able to convince him to drop every other contract they were in upon completion just to give us all of their product?”
Hannah looked at Alexis with a sense of panic, pondering her next move without making her boss wait too long. She shook her head and licked her lips while she shrugged her shoulders. “Sir, I used my wit and guile to charm him into this deal,” she said, partially confessing without giving any of the details about the encounter. “I overheard that he hated Americans and thought of us all as ugly, rude, and a few other things that I really can’t remember, so I made sure that when I walked into his office, I was the exact opposite of his beliefs. I was incredibly sweet, sincere, and charming, while also pushing up my boobs and unbuttoning the top two buttons.”
“Ha!” laughed Richard from the other side. “That’s my girl! Use what you have to so that you can get the job done! Those grease bag Italians are nothing but perverts if you ask me. Way to play to that and get the job done. I’m really impressed,” he replied, pausing a bit while clearing his throat. “Alexis, how are we going to handle the logistics of this move?”
“Honestly sir, they’re not producing enough crude to hamper us in anyway right now, but by Hannah being able to negotiate the release of crude to our sister companies in the consortium, the logistics won’t be an issue,” she explained politely, rubbing her temples while she tried not to lose focus. “For now, we can use supply trucks and flat beds to carry most of the oil to the coast and use the same tankers we were using before. We still have warehouse space in Jebel Ali, so any excess that we get from these guys, we can store it there and not have to worry about it until we need to. Our reserves wil
l grow a bit because of this deal, but it will ultimately help us in the long run.”
Richard made an inaudible noise on the other end of the line, prompting both of the girls to lean in a bit. “Alexis, you know how much we don’t like to pick up our products.”
“Right, I know, but Hannah was able to negotiate in a pick-up fee,” she quickly replied. “They’re paying for the shipping; we’re just picking it up.”
“Ha!” he laughed again. “That’s genius! So, we charge them a little bit extra to pick up the product at their fields and take it to the port?”
Alexis rolled her eyes, thinking about how this man got to be as powerful as he was. “Sir, it’s something we offer to all of our smaller clients. Many of them just choose not take us up on it.” she explained.
“From what I gathered, sir, they don’t want to have to hire drivers or any other staff to specifically handle freight,” continued Hannah. “It’s honestly a win-win scenario for both parties. We make a little bit more money and they don’t have to spend any more money.”
Richard continued to chuckle. “Ladies, I’m incredibly impressed by that deal. The fact that you were able to tie up someone who, while not incredible, has a very large inventory of crude is an extremely big deal for us. Combine that with how you were able to tie in the sale of their excess inventory to the rest of the consortium makes us look heroic. Even if we can’t use their product, the fact that we secured oil for the other companies makes us look like an even bigger player. They will flock to our aid if we ever need them to now, and it’s really thanks to the two of you.”
“In all sincerity, the two of you heading to Dubai may have very well been the greatest move of your careers,” he praised. “You two are regarded here in the office as the future of this company. Your passion, aggression, and perseverance are unmatched by your peers and we commend you for it. I want the two of you to enjoy the next week and a half. I know you’re there on business, but try to get some time in for some pleasure. I can’t wait to see you two again soon. I’ll talk to you next week.”
