by Nella Tyler
“Laziness will get you nowhere, Tyler. You have to have things in order first before you can start taking people’s money into your hands.”
I decided to break up the dispute by knocking on the side of the door and announcing my presence. I felt bad for my brother; I knew he didn’t deserve a lot of the scrutiny he got. It was mostly because Dad wouldn’t let him live his dream, and I could sort of understand that.
Better now, anyway, after Briella.
“Dexter, come in,” Dad said. “Tyler, get back to your office.”
Tyler turned around and made a face at me on his way out that suggested we would be having quite the conversation later. I walked past him and sat down in the chair in front of my dad’s desk. It still made me sink into it uncomfortably, and I struggled to sit up a bit better to look less like I was trying to take a nap.
“It’s good to have you back. The company runs slower without you,” my father said.
So it had been my absence that caused all the fuss. I felt a little proud of that, at least proud that I did well enough at work that my absence worsened it. I didn’t like that everyone had to deal with the repercussions of me going on vacation for a week for no good reason, but I could deal with that later. I knew how to make it up to the secretaries. “It’s good to be back. Did you need to talk to me?” I forgot, suddenly, why I’d come in in the first place.
“I actually did want to talk to you,” his father said. “The situation with Tiffany didn’t work out, I remember the talk we had about that. You said you didn’t see you two working together.”
I was surprised he’d remembered, or even thought about it. “Yes, I did say that.”
“Well, I’ve considered it a bit, and I’ve decided that I won’t force it on you,” he said.
I sighed with relief. “Thank you. That’s a relief.”
“I will find a suitable match for you,” he continued, leaning back in his chair. “It might take a bit more poking around the families here to find someone more inclined to your interests. The Bernard and Thomas families have daughters, though I’m uncertain as to their status and age.”
I shook my head. “Actually, Dad, I was thinking that maybe it would be best that I didn’t try to date anyone currently. If I devoted my time and energy to work instead of romantic endeavors, I might be able to get more done.” If anyone could understand sacrificing emotions for work, it would be my father.
He laughed, though, actually barked a laugh and grinned at me with his strange, rodent-like smile. I thought of the things Tyler had told me about him and found it hard to keep my stance that he was not altogether a good person. “Come now, Dexter. Don’t be a child about it. We’ll find you a suitable wife who doesn’t drive you entirely crazy. That’s what you wanted, right? What’s best for the company?”
I didn’t remember ever telling him that, but I was certain that I’d spent most of my life embodying that principle. Now I worried that I was working for someone I couldn’t support. I didn’t want to get married to someone I didn’t like. I wanted to find Briella, I wanted to tell her how I felt. I couldn’t. I was stuck in this spot and unable to move.
“I think I really could benefit from focusing on work,” I repeated. “It might make up for any addition that another family could make for us.”
He waved his hand. “Nonsense. I won’t hear of it.”
I stood up, realizing that the effort to persuade my father of a different viewpoint was probably unbelievably foolish of me. “I’ll get back to work,” I said. I left his office and saw Tyler standing in the hallway. I waved him over to come with me into my office.
When I closed the door, Tyler nearly exploded with emotion. “He’s such an ass, Dexter!”
It occurred to me that at that moment, I could really only take two sides. I could agree with Tyler and betray my father, or I could agree with my father and betray my brother. I chose the cop-out. “I can’t believe he’s still going to try and set me up with someone.”
“What, you didn’t tell him about your new girlfriend?”
I glared at Tyler. “I do not have a girlfriend.”
“Um, okay. There’s a girl who regularly hangs out with you and who you have slept with more than once. Isn’t that exactly what a girlfriend is?” Tyler leaned against my desk, and I sat down in my chair.
“No. I don’t have a girlfriend, and you’re not going to tell dad about it.”
“Of course not. But don’t you think you should tell Dad about it? After all, she is your girlfriend.”
“Tyler!” I furrowed my brow. The pain that I felt about Briella hadn’t faded, and this only hurt more. “That’s enough. I’m not seeing anyone. I’m not going to see anyone. Between the two of us, someone has to take a single goddamn thing seriously, so I suppose I’ll be the one to do nothing but work for the rest of my fucking life.”
Tyler rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll go do some serious reassessment of my commas and shit.” He made his way out of my office, and I tried to put my finger on exactly the look on his face.
It was the same look that he gave Dad when he was giving Tyler a hard time.
Had I sounded like my father? It was just like him to push away someone’s emotional needs and harshly cut them off. I looked down the hall and thought about the man who sat behind that desk. Someone I barely knew on an emotional level, but had learned to fear. A silhouette of a man who built an empire from hatred and discrimination and couldn’t be bothered to feel affection towards his wife, let alone the sons she’d borne him.
I didn’t want to be that person. I looked at the piles of paper on my desk and thought about what I’d said to Tyler, what I’d said to myself.
Was it already too late for me to stop becoming my father?
Chapter 22
Briella
I woke up in my childhood bedroom and looked up at the ceiling. My father had left for a business trip a few days ago, and I had the house to myself, which meant that I needed to get up and make breakfast. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to lie in bed and deal with my suffering by doing nothing for the rest of my life.
It was a dramatic view, but then, that’s the way I couldn’t help but feel. I pulled myself out of bed and went to the bathroom to get ready for the day. There wasn’t really any point in looking cute. I only needed to meet with one couple today, and that wasn’t until later. I put on a clean shirt and some clean pants and went to the kitchen.
This home felt unbearably lonely. I couldn’t help the loneliness I felt. I missed Dexter, specifically, and every time I stood still too long, I could practically feel his arms around me. I wanted to call him, ask him how he was, or maybe get on a plane and go running back.
My phone buzzed. A text from Nina with a flexing emoji, with the message, ‘You got this, Bri.’
I took a deep breath. I could manage this. I’d never thought that I would leave Jason; I expected to stay in that apartment forever. If I could leave him and everything I’d ever known, I could recover from a few days of dating some random person in Florida.
I tried to run through what Nina told me about Dexter and I not being compatible. It helped me to believe that we wouldn’t work together. If he wasn’t desirable, I wouldn’t be sad to miss him. Every time I thought of something Nina said, I thought of something Dexter did.
He wasn’t in my socioeconomic class.
He held me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
When I finally did get to work, I was more than eager to delve into it and lose myself in the work. That was another thing I would need more of: distractions. I thought that it was an appointment with Stephen and Greg, but instead, it was a new couple, a girl named May and a boy named James. They were incredibly clingy and could hardly keep their hands off each other.
“Do you think we should do two other cakes? I mean, your family’s going to be there, and there’s like, a thousand people in your family,” May jabbed at James.
James
laughed. “If you want 20 cakes, I’ll make it happen. I just feel bad that we didn’t invite your cousin.”
“My cousin is an ass,” May replied. She kissed his cheek. “And I don’t want anything to ruin our special day.”
James pulled her into his lap to tickle her sides. “Do you think there’s any way we can get two cakes made? Besides the main one, anyway?”
“Some people will get a few others done,” I said. “The bakery that I tend to use most often will do taste tests and things. If the bride’s cake is vanilla, you could do a chocolate cake and another a different flavor. You’ll have variety and quantity.”
“That sounds amazing. Do you think they’ll let us sneak in later today?”
I sent an email off to the bakery to get the appointment scheduled. “I can certainly see about it.”
“Oh my God, this is going to be perfect!” May squealed.
James kissed her cheek. “Only because you’re going to be there, sweetie.”
Usually, I didn’t care about couples being affectionate. But watching these two fawn over each other, watching them endlessly declare their love for one another and talk about floral arrangements and cake companies like every decision they made was the most important decision that they would ever make… it was hard for me not to feel jealous. Further, it was hard for me not to see Dexter.
I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of wedding he would want. Something classy, of course. Something simpler than what his class would suggest, but far more extravagant than what I could afford. Something breathtakingly beautiful. Gold and white as the colors, fine decorating on the cake.
It was completely absurd. I nearly kicked myself in the head on the way home for thinking those things. We weren’t even in love! I certainly didn’t love him. I’d been in love before, and this wasn’t what it had felt like. It was more certain than this, more inevitable than this. With Dexter, I felt like I had to make a million exceptions to fit him into my life.
Love was supposed to be easier than that, right?
When I pulled into the driveway at home, my father’s car was there. I was grateful that someone else was going to be home to make the house feel a little less empty.
“Dad?” I poked my head in the door.
“Briella! Hey, honey!” My dad came out of the kitchen with an apron tied around his waist. It was ridiculous, that apron, but he always insisted on wearing it. I was glad to see it because it meant he was making dinner.
I gave him a hug and felt a little better already. “Hey. How was your trip?”
I walked with him into the kitchen and smelled something delicious cooking. Homemade food was fantastic. It reminded me, again, of Dexter, and of how excellent of a cook that he was. I didn’t know that I’d ever find another man who could cook that well or that willingly again.
“It was more of the same,” her father said. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but assumed it meant boring business stuff that he didn’t want to tell me. “Tell me about Florida,” he said. “Did you do anything fun there?”
This was my dad. I told him everything. “Yeah. Yeah, I met someone there, actually. The first night. And we went on a few dates; it was, um, it was weird.” I shook my head. “His name was Dexter.”
My dad looked at me with a bit of surprise. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you and Nina would go partying all week.”
“That was the plan,” I said. “But then I met Dexter, and Nina was all over me trying to get me to go on a date with him. So I did. And he was really, really nice, Dad. He was kind, and compassionate, and he listened to me. He cooks.”
“He cooks!”
“And I just really liked him.” I shook my head and felt almost like I might cry. “And I had to leave, you know? I had to come back to Houston. He’s not the guy for me, I don’t think, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
“Aww, there now.” My dad leaned over to give me a hug. “It’s all right to go out and meet people. Even if it’s just for fun. You needed to see that men aren’t all awful. Now you know that if you ever need to go looking for someone, you’ll find someone.”
After dinner, I felt significantly better. I went to go back to my room, and then the loneliness started to creep in again. I missed Dexter’s hands, I missed his mouth. I laid down in bed and closed my eyes, wishing that I could will away this incredibly juvenile feeling of angst. I was stronger than this. I wasn’t some ditz who needed a man to be happy—I’d always held my own, even during a horrible relationship.
I set my hand on my phone and ran my thumb across the screen to light it up. I didn’t know why I expected him to call. He had no reason to. He’d gotten what he’d wanted—some sex from a girl he’d never have to see again, one outside of his social group. It wasn’t fair of me to think of him that way, but it made the pain a little less obvious.
Just as I was about to go to sleep, the screen lit up. I checked the Caller ID to see who it was.
Dexter. I felt myself beginning to smile.
Chapter 23
Dexter
“Biscuit?”
“Nah, not if we’re gonna work out later.” Tyler shook his head and took a sip of coffee.
I shrugged and set the biscuit back into the basket. I rarely skipped work, and last week had been entirely disorienting for me. For the entire week, I’d done nothing but struggle to keep my head above water and try to manage piles and piles of work. It didn’t help that I had to redo a lot of what Tyler did, because my brother’s skills simply did not lie in investment firm work, but I couldn’t hardly get angry with Tyler. Tyler was more than aware of his own shortcomings.
“I still can’t believe I let you convince me to skip work this morning,” I said. Especially after having had the entire previous week off.
“You have to skip sometimes,” Tyler said. “And not just when Dad gives you permission. Honestly, there’s no point in showing up anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even if I’m there, I’m just doing a fuckup job. I might as well stay home where I can get a little sleep. He doesn’t want me there, but he doesn’t want me to leave, either.” Tyler rolled his eyes and stabbed at an egg with his fork. “It’s bullshit. I’ve done everything I can to blow him off.”
That wasn’t really true. Tyler could technically quit and walk away. He could move somewhere else, he could do a thousand things to distance himself from Dad. I knew, though, that he wouldn’t like the departure from this comfortable lifestyle. On his own, he wouldn’t be able to afford lavish parties and probably would have to get his own much less pleasant job.
Perhaps it was resentment towards himself that led Tyler to lash out towards Dad. “I definitely see why you’re upset,” was all I said. Dad wasn’t easy to work with; quite the opposite. He was harsh, demanding, and as I was growing to see, he didn’t have a very good character.
That being said, it was reasonable to expect a mean, harsh, demanding boss in a top-quality investment firm. The work we did was high-profile and required a huge amount of perfectionism. That’s where Tyler floundered, it seemed, and nepotism made him resentful instead of grateful. He was acutely aware of his own inadequacy.
“He’s just been such a prick,” Tyler muttered into his mug. “I mean, like that account you walked in on him yelling at me about. I misplaced a comma on the sum, and lost a client.”
I cringed. I had assumed that Tyler had messed up a comma and made a grammatical error, not a mathematic one. It sucked that he’d been barked at for an error of that sort, but I could only imagine the damage that he’d caused. “Shit, you lost a client?”
“Yeah. I know, it’s a big deal, but… in my defense, Dad put me on the client. I mean, of course he’d put his shittiest employee to work on a black man’s case. Because he’s fucking racist on top of everything.”
My initial reaction was to bristle at the tone he took about Dad. I knew that Leonard Mason had hi
s fair share of flaws and I was beginning to see him for the person that he really was, but my instincts still told me to protect him. We continued the conversation when we got to the gym, and Tyler started grunting out his complaints between weightlifting sets.
“Doesn’t help that the client is in fucking Houston, so it’s not like I can do anything to remedy the situation.”
Houston. My mind, as it tended to do involuntarily over the last week, leapt to Briella. I wondered how she was doing and whether she thought about me. We’d talked on the phone before, and it hadn’t seemed too forced. I could only hope that she wanted to try and keep up whatever we had going, even if now it seemed difficult to do.
We switched places so I that I could lift weights and Tyler could spot me.
“So now we’ve lost a client in Houston, and I can’t do anything about it. We’re in Florida,” Tyler explained. He took a long drink of his water bottle.
I considered the implications of going to Houston. I wondered if it would change anything. It probably wasn’t a good idea to even think about it, but I got so distracted that I nearly dropped a weight. Tyler caught it before it could hit my head.
“Careful,” he warned me.
When I got to work, I’d made up my mind about what I wanted to do. It might be a terrible idea, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss out on. I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t at least try to get this spot in Houston and see Briella again. Seeing that my father’s office door was open, I walked in with only a small tap to announce my presence.
“Dexter, good afternoon,” he said.
I offered him a smile. “I wanted to ask you about the Houston account.”
My father raised an eyebrow. “We have a few accounts from Houston. Which are you referring to?”
“The one Tyler lost,” I said. “I talked to him about it.”
