by Zoe Brown
Since I’d opened Rhodes Multinational, I couldn’t remember a single weekend of my life when I hadn’t enjoyed myself with some hedonistic or thrill-seeking diversion, jetted across the world or blasted through the country towards one destination vacation spot or another, in the company of some of the richest men and most beautiful women on the planet, or whiled away the days close to home in the arms of my lady of the moment. The only exceptions had been when I was so sick that I literally couldn’t drag myself out of bed; that had happened only a handful of times. And apparently, the people in my company had similar memories of my past exploits – of over twenty years of my past exploits. I knew that most of the men at my firm envied the sort of reckless, heedless, live-for-the-moment life that my wealth allowed me to lead – plenty of the women, too – even if only in a wistful, ‘man I wish I could step into his shoes for a day’ sort of way. I was pretty well-liked at my firm, and by my employees, whom I paid well above industry-standards (from the Janitors and the security guards and the interns on up), and provided with some pretty kick-ass compensatory benefits packages and retirement savings funds, as well. I should admit upfront that I… didn’t really do any of that out of the goodness of my heart or a sense of social responsibility or anything, I had just sort of cracked the secret to getting good, sometimes crazy-good work out of people: pay them way more than they think they are worth, hold them accountable for the work that they do and expect results, but then when they produce results, make their lives comfortable, not stressful, and shower them with bonuses once in a while. Unsurprisingly (or so I thought, although a lot of my competitors disagreed), this attitude tended to inspire employees to produce even better results, rather than lead them to become lazy and indolent, and it made them – a lot of them, I hoped – really like working for me. That, combined with my history of playboy hedonism and larger-than-life exploits, had made me something of a mascot to them. It was like I was the company baseball team, or prize fighter, or something like that. Some of the staff followed my exploits on Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. Others had been caught (by various members of my managerial team) running betting pools on what I would do with some given weekend, or which hot supermodel or movie star actress I would take on a high-profile, luxury resort get-away next, or – the reigning and most persistently-recurring question, about which I had been assured by multiple people that the pool pot had grown well over a million dollars – when I would finally get married, and to whom. I was sure that the Contessa Violetta d’Cardona was considered a prime contender in that contest.
But this weekend, there was nothing new for my employees-slash-followers to digest. Although two new, beautiful-but-relatively-unknown paramours had recently appeared on my radar, and the Countess d’Cardona had been in the city for weeks and had shared the previous several weekends with me, for this upcoming weekend I hadn’t purchased flowers or sent invitations or ordered any tickets—to anything! As unbelievable as it must have seemed to those interested parties who worked for me, to all appearances their multi-millionaire playboy boss was just planning to go home at the end of the week and… what, sleep? Read? Eat? No one could say. But everyone seemed to want to know. The sudden shift in my behavior bred intrigue. Although no one had come right out and asked me why I hadn’t made any public plans for the weekend, the number of seemingly-casual side-ways questions that I’d been on the receiving end of had been growing exponentially as the weekend approached. And now that Friday was here, the mystery of what Ashton Rhodes was doing with his weekend seemed to be the undercurrent of every furtive whisper in my presence, every secretive glance in my direction, every discreet question aimed at me.
And from my perspective, well… yeah, I was quite enjoying the intrigue. It was exciting. After months of moping about the office and the city, just going through the motions of a life that had lost its thrills for me, it was… pretty fucking fun, having big sexy secret plans for the weekend and being one of the only people in on them.
And what a secret it was! If only they knew, I thought again, smirking with one half of my face and feeling another shock of arousal and excitement lance through me. I had to discreetly adjust my pants this time, under the conference table, to make the growing bulge in my crotch less uncomfortable, at least until I could manage to get it to go away again.
If only the four men and three women seated around this table knew what was keeping their boss preoccupied and distracted during the weekly Market Projections meeting, what was making him twitchy and fidgety as he listened to Markham blabbing on and on, what was making his skin prickle with goosebumps and his hands tremble underneath the table (whenever his knee wasn’t bouncing, that was). What was drawing his attention so frequently back to the display on his smartphone. Wouldn’t it blow their minds? Wouldn’t it shock and stun them!
A lot had changed for me in the last six months. So much more than anyone at this table would ever guess.
✽✽✽
After twenty-some-odd years of living my life to the hilt, I’d suddenly hit a wall late in March of this year, 2018. The beginnings of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Still pretty cold in San Francisco, although with my fortune I could afford to jet here and there across the world at virtually the drop of a hat, so seasons weren’t quite as impactful upon my lifestyle or my mood as they might have been for anyone else in my position. My fiftieth birthday was just around the corner, though, and I first felt the specter of disillusionment creeping up on me one Monday morning after a weekend away in Bali.
Ever since I’d struck it big, my wealth had afforded me the privilege and the pleasure of hopping on a plane whenever I wanted and running off to some far-flung corner of the world to get away from it all at the end of every work week. Thus, I didn’t really feel the need for a lengthy yearly vacation like so many of subordinates did. I’d been thinking about going away to Bali for several weeks before I’d finally made the reservations. I’d been feeling a touch grim of late, both around the office and in my leisure time, and thought that an intense dose of sunshine and sex was just what the doctor ordered to get me over my sudden malaise. As had happened on a few prior occasions during my time at the pinnacle of Rhodes Multinational, a touch of ennui had set in during the first half of the year. The corporate climate of competition and challenge and conquest seemed to lose its luster for me during the winter months. A weekend-long holiday at some expensive, luxurious resort, surrounded by beautiful and enchanting women, and with numerous exciting and thrilling activities at my disposal, was usually just the thing I needed to pull myself back out of my funk and get me back to work with a new spring in my step and a hungry glint in my eye. Only, it hadn’t really worked out that way this year.
I took the Bali vacation at the end of March, jetting off to the Java Sea, encountering a beautiful and interesting African-American woman when I arrived at the resort named Marissa Copeland, who turned out to be the thirty-eight-year-old founder of a small, left-leaning political consulting firm based out of D.C. called Capital Consulting. I spent the weekend with Marissa, me in her bed and she in my arms, and we partook of a little surfing, a little cliff-diving, and a little high-octane street racing while we were on the island. Experience told me that this was the perfect formula for a cure to my doldrums, but to my consternation, even while I was on the island, there in the arms of a beautiful and intellectually-stimulating woman, the ‘formula’ didn’t seem to be helping. I went through all the motions, just like usual: I was romantic, and charming, and an engaged conversationalist; I honestly liked her and tried to get to know her and took an interest in the things that she was passionate about, and I was fairly sure that she thoroughly enjoyed herself, but to my dismay I actually caught myself on more than one occasion… feeling bored. Once I was back in the States, holding a boarding pass in one hand and staring dully into a bathroom mirror in the D.C. Metro Airport, counting new wrinkles around my eyes that I was certain had not been there seventy-two hours before, I had to reluctantly admit t
hat getting away hadn’t helped with the sense of growing emptiness inside of me at all. My temporary pleasures had been… all-too-temporary this time around, and now that I was faced with the prospect of returning to the city, to the firm and to the work of buying and selling and wheeling and dealing, I… didn’t really want to.
When we’d arrived at the D.C. airport after our return flight to the states early Monday morning, I’d kissed a coffee-flavored farewell to the woman with whom I had just shared a relaxing and romantic weekend getaway, and then headed to my gate in another terminal for a connecting flight to San Francisco. But instead of relaxing while I waited, feeling invigorated by my brief escape to an Indonesian island renowned for its sun and sand and refreshed after taking comfort in the arms of a beautiful and intelligent woman with whom I had enjoyed a pleasurable, even invigorating connection, I suddenly found myself standing alone in front of a bathroom mirror in that same airport and wondering just… what the hell I was doing with my life. I felt hollow, and empty after Bali, like something was missing from me. It was nothing to do with Marissa: she had been warm and lively company on the island; my feelings of boredom and ennui were not her fault. We’d swum in the sea, we’d made love on the beach, we’d gone cliff-diving off of waterfalls and motorcycle racing in Jembrana, and through it all, I’d just felt like I was going through the motions of what I was expected to do, things that I was just… good at. And then at the end of our trip we’d exchanged no numbers, made no promises or offers to see one another again. We’d simply smiled, kissed, and parted as friends. The entire getaway was supposed to have been a fun, comfortable, relaxing… and ultimately recharging bit of fluff, just like every other romantic and adventurous getaway that I’d shared with a woman over the past decade.
Only somehow, this time, the opposite effect occurred. Instead of returning feeling recharged, I stepped off of that plane, back onto U.S. soil, feeling exhausted by my own disillusionment.
And so, the bathroom. The mirror. I stared at my reflection in the polished surface, feeling older, suddenly, than I had ever really admitted to myself before. My life, I was suddenly realizing, had run out of thrills. It had been running out of thrills for several long years now. All of my ‘first time’ new adventures were well behind me now. What man, other than myself, could claim to have done and to have had all the experiences that I had? After fifty years, I had tried everything of interest to me, everything ‘cool’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘thrilling’ or ‘adventurous,’ in the realms of business, extreme physical activities, or romance, that I cared to set my mind to. And in most cases, I hadn’t just tried them; they had become a part of the normal routine of my life. Where most men my age or younger might spend their weekends playing golf or hanging out with their families or showboating in some local clubs, I had made a routine out of running around the world on the weekends seeking casual encounters with beautiful women and flinging myself off of a seemingly-endless succession of both real and metaphorical cliffs in search of cheap thrills, only to return to the office on Monday and drive myself ever harder to climb just a little bit higher on the endless ladder of corporate success. And somewhere along the line, in the process of having all those thrills and chasing even more of them, the thrills had just… stopped being thrilling. And once the thrills had gone… well, was there anything meaningful to the activities themselves? Anything worthwhile, to any of it? Why did I crave more success? For more money? But what did I spend that money on? Meaningless sexual affairs and limitless death-defying adventures? Was that really all that I craved out of life? Wasn’t there anything more? Where had all the fun gone? The sense of adventure? The thrill of it all? And when it all stopped being fun for me, did I have anything left?
It was like I was in the grip of a general malaise of disillusionment with my entire life. The endless grind of capitalist competitiveness, the perpetual stream of empty, hollow hook-ups with beautiful and enchanting women who… chiefly wanted me for the money and the thrills and the access that came with me, the increasingly forgettable party scenes… I was starting to have a hard time remember what the point to it all was supposed to be. I mean, there had been a point to all of it before, right? Something more than just the endless stream of pleasure and winning? Something other than just the thrills? I just couldn’t seem to remember what it was, and I was feeling less than enthusiastic about returning from my vacation to go back to the regular rhythms of my life.
I did return, of course. What else was I going to do with myself? My whole life’s accomplishment had been attaining the level of power, wealth, and prestige that being the CEO and owner of Rhodes Multinational afforded me. I was successful on a level that few other men in the world had ever been, or would ever be. I had the kind of wealth, and success, that allowed me to recklessly and haphazardly indulge myself in death-defying, thrill-seeking pursuits and come out of them alive, further proving that I was a man among men, and to woo some of the world’s most beautiful and incredible women in some of the world’s most exotic and luxurious locations. So what if I felt like something was missing over the long term? Perhaps it was better to just go on as I had always done, just focus on living for the now. I’d had off-periods before. Surely this, too, would pass?
So, I tried. I returned to the office, I plugged myself back into my work, I carved up smaller companies and bought and sold the pieces off for hefty profits to other, high-powered buyers and sellers like myself, I invested my firm’s money heavily in the stocks that Mrs. Markham believed would coup us the greatest short-term rewards, and then sold hard once the market prospects for those same stocks came back down. I wheeled, I dealed, and I profited. And every weekend, when the job was done, I dashed off across the globe in search of my next wild adventure, my next intimate encounter, my next thrill-seeking high. But there was never anything new in any of it; it all just kept on feeling hollow, empty, and boring. None of it gave me a charge anymore. And without that recharging effect that my thrills had once given me, I became steadily more and more exhausted with it all.
If someone had asked me, at the time I’d have wagered that the whole thing was probably just a manifestation of some kind of midlife crisis. With my fiftieth birthday right around the corner and new wrinkles staring back at me every time I glanced into a mirror, the sense that my ‘youth’ was now increasingly behind me was beginning to become unshakable. I was starting to feel trapped by the various routines of my life, even the ones that had been designed to help me ‘escape,’ and the sense that all of my accomplishments were ultimately empty, hollow victories was growing – even though I couldn’t understand what I needed to make me feel complete. Love and marriage? I’d taken my shots at those, and come up wanting – the only arena in my life where I felt that could honestly be said to be true. Well, that and street fighting. They just… hadn’t been for me. But where other men in my position might have sprung for an obvious attempt to reclaim their fading masculine vitality in some showboating, flashy way, for me the solution to my dilemma didn’t come in the shape of a super-fast new car, or a hot new girlfriend, or another amateur run of street fighting. Instead, it came in the form of a simple, sexy suggestion made to me during a passing chat that I shared with a beautiful young bartender down at Eden’s Lounge, in the Marina district, one late night at the end of July.
Chapter Two
Timestamp: Friday, 27th of July, 2018. Sixty-three days ago.
One of the hottest new singles’ spots in the district, Eden’s Lounge was the kind of place that combined smoky, intimate lighting with strong drinks, celebrity DJs, live music, and a sextet of crowded bars spread out across three floors of close-sat stools and shrouded booth nooks. There was some space for dancing, but mostly the floors and the lounges were configured to maximize shadows, privacy, and intimacy. There were plenty of dark corners and shrouded balconies and beneath-the-stairwell spots for people to do more than just ‘meet’ there – hook-ups and heavy petting had their own place among the entertainments offered the
re.
I hadn’t come alone that night, but the pair of card-game celebrity ‘buddies’ that I’d accompanied had both disappeared into the arms of one willing woman or another shortly after we’d walked in, and that was something of a problem for me, because the malaise that I’d been feeling ever since March had only steadily increased throughout the summer months in the city, and my drinking had taken a turn towards the less-sociable and more-intense as I’d struggled to cope. Now, without my ‘friends’ around me to keep me occupied, I had no reason not to drown my disillusionment in the bottom of a shot glass or… several. Or at least, that had been the plan.
Brrzzzzzt! …Brrzzzzzt! …Brzzzzzt! I ignored the vibrations coming from the phone under my left palm and tapped my shot glass against the bar top instead, making eyes with the girl behind the taps. “Another vodka, neat, please?”
The lovely young bartender with dark chocolate eyes and long, flowing hair in a matching hue took another look at me, listening to the buzzing sound of my phone’s persistent vibrations, and then nodded and poured me a double, instead. She set the two little glasses in front of me and then tapped the back of my phone with one elegantly ovular, bronze-painted fingernail. “You gonna get that?”
I sighed and shrugged, flipping the phone over beneath my hand and taking a moment to check who the incoming call was from.
Violetta. Again.
Wincing, I scrunched up one side of my face and stared at the phone for a moment, knowing that I owed my oldest and dearest friend the courtesy of answering this, her… like, fourth call of the month? … feeling guilty for not wanting to, and debating whether I or not I should. Fortunately, however, the phone stopped vibrating almost as soon as I turned it over, relieving me of the need to make that decision, and the incoming call notification went away.
