Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever

by L. V. Lewis

  “Keisha, you want to tell me what the fuck’s going on over there?”

  “I can’t say that we know right now, but Jada and I have our two best financial people going over the numbers as we speak. Hopefully, we’ll know in a day or two.”

  “Not good enough,” he says. “You’ve got until close of business tomorrow to sort this shit out.”

  “Hey, we’re just as anxious as you are to fix this. You don’t have to be so damned snippy.”

  “I don’t do snippy,” he says borrowing one of my phrases. “This is me being the pissed off head of the company that gave you the start-up capital to build this business, not run it into the fucking ground.”

  I sigh, knowing full well he is right. “Okay, we’re on it. Jorge and I will jump in too and see what we can dig up.”

  I hang up and go in search of my cousin, whom I haven’t seen all morning. In fact, I’ve noticed he’s been uncharacteristically running late two to three days a week for the past few weeks. I didn’t get onto him about it, because he stays later and catches up, often doing more after hours than he gets done in the morning. However, since it looks like a pattern, I think it’s about time I nipped it in the bud.

  His office is also our server room, for lack of a better name for it. He has a daunting setup of computer equipment and electronic gadgets designed to make our growing network run smooth. Because of the hardware in there, he designed a state-of-the-art optimal arrangement in the workspace, with a dedicated A/C unit to keep all the equipment cool. I knock and step into the frigid office. Again, it’s ten-thirty already, and Jorge isn’t in yet.

  At one-thirty, I see him shoot pass my door, and I call out to him. “Jorge!”

  He puts the skids on, doubles back and pokes his head in the door. “Yeah, minha patroa primo?” Cue the chicken-shit grin he wears every time he calls me “my cousin boss lady” in Portuguese.

  “Come in for a minute. We need to have a pow-wow.” The grin fades when he sees I’ve abandoned the cousin face. It is all boss-lady face today. He comes in, shuts the door, and plops down in the chair in front of my desk.

  He begins to talk before I can get a word in. “I know I’ve been keeping crazy hours the last few weeks, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to be called on the carpet for it before I had some good news to tell you. Thomas and I have been having problems.” Thomas Sanders is Jorge’s boyfriend whom he’d elevated to exclusive partner status right around the time he came to work for KSR.

  “Aw, Bug,” I say, using his nickname. “What’s going on? And why didn’t you tell me sooner, so I wouldn’t think you were using our family ties as an excuse to do your own thing?”

  Jorge swallows hard, as if he’s trying to refrain from crying. His voice shakes anyway. “I didn’t want to burden you, meu primo. His recreational drug use is out of control.”

  “Oh no.” I get up from my desk and walk around to him. I envelope him in my arms where he sits, and he wraps his arms around my torso. When I feel him shaking, I know he’s crying, so I let him have his moment.

  “We had it out last night. He left the house. I didn’t get any sleep. Up half the night worrying about him. Then he dragged his ass in this morning just before time for me to leave for work and apologized, but I didn’t let him off with just an apology this time. I told him if he didn’t seek treatment, we’re through.”

  “Good for you,” I say. “I know you care for him, but if he doesn’t get clean, baby, that’s a headache you don’t need right now—or ever for that matter.”

  “I know. So, I stayed there until he made the calls and set up everything. Fortunately, his job has an excellent Employee Assistance Program, so he was off to see his doctor when I left to get the necessary medical leave forms completed.”

  “I’m glad he’s getting help. So are we okay to talk about KSR business now?”

  Jorge nods, and gathers his composure.

  I begin our impromptu meeting. “Tristan’s riding our asses over the quarterly financial reports. Profits have dropped thirty-five percent. We’ve got to figure this shit out and quick. Didn’t you say we had something like 50,000 plus unique new users on the site this month?”

  “Yeah, the last operations report was definitive,” Jorge says. “You need me to run it again?”

  “Looks like we’re going to need to run every damn thing again,” I say.

  “Okay, I’m on it,” Jorge says and stands.

  “Bring everything to my office when you’re done and we’ll go over it with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “You got it,” he says and goes off to do his IT wizardry.

  We burn the midnight oil and then some after the retail arm of KSR closes for the night. Jada comes into my office around one a.m., looking like she wants to kick somebody’s ass, straight-up.

  “What’s up, girlfriend?” I say with a sarcastic bite. “Besides KSR going down the tubes if we don’t find out what’s going on with the profit?”

  “I’ve been studying excel spreadsheets out the yin-yang all damn day, and tonight I’ve used up four, count them, four rolls of calculator tape, because I figure, hey, let’s go back to the manual way if technology fails us, right? I know Jorge is your cousin and everything, but he just cost us one-hundred and twenty odd man hours and almost lost us our backing because of a stupid-assed oversight.”

  “What? What did he do?”

  “You know, after the first month when the regional pilot was complete, he was supposed to open up the site to the whole continental U.S., right. Well, guess what?”

  “What? What?” I say, anxious for her to get the point already.

  “He didn’t flip the fucking switch to make the payments program live for the other states. So we had more than a hundred and fifty thousand payments sitting out there in cyberspace with no fucking where to go. Well, the money went into our bank account, but we didn’t have the accompanying data to identify where the hell it generated from, ergo the reports didn’t pick it up. If I hadn’t pulled a printout of our statements online, we would’ve still been looking for that shit until next week when we got the paper statements in the mail.”

  I sink in my chair relieved. “So what’s the bottom line looking like now?”

  Her eyes lit up. “If this month is any indication, we’re on a path to be in the black in nine months.” Then she looked pissed again. “I thought you said Jorge was the best programmer around. How could he make a mistake like that?”

  I exhale and puff my cheeks out. “He’s been going through a rough time, personally. The Jorge we’ve seen for the last few weeks isn’t the consummate professional I know him to be.”

  “That may be a satisfactory answer if we were working with our own money and we wanted to cut him some slack, but it ain’t all that when we’ve got three quarters of a million dollars of the White Brothers money we’re playing with, and another location opening up in three months.”

  “I know,” I say resigned. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Good. So, you want to be the one to explain this to Tristan?”

  #

  We’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a reason to be in Tristan’s building since we signed the contract for KSR. When I enter now, the receptionists fast-track me as if I’m a celebrity. Being members of Tristan and Nate White’s inner circle has opened up avenues for Jada and myself that catapults us into a different social stratosphere. We have been photographed with them enough that all of Chicago knows our names like we’re rocking an episode of Cheers in real life or something. Needless to say, this notoriety is a pain in the ass, but it gets me into his office now without an appointment.

  Even Darryl Sykes has a huge smile for me as he ushers me into Tristan’s office and closes the door.

  Tristan looks up, his mouth twitches into a semi-smile. I wonder what he’s thinking right now. I get warm thinking about all the delicious things he did to my body over the weekend. My Triple-G gets the image of my 3-D replay and runs and hides. My Fairy Hoochie Mama s
trips and preens. Focus, Keisha. Tristan comes from behind his desk to greet me.

  “Hi,” I say coy all of sudden in his presence.

  “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” He hugs me as if we haven’t seen each other in weeks, then rears back to look into my eyes. “You must have good news about the numbers.”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “I knew there had to be some kind of mistake. And there was—a mistake—I mean.” I animatedly tell him the story about Jorge and the payment program. Then laugh my ass off, but Tristan doesn’t laugh with me. In fact, his face is an unreadable mask, his lips drawn into a thin line.

  “You have the revised financial statements?” He says it more like a statement than a question and extends his hand to me.

  I hand him the portfolio holding the revised financial statements Jada and her shop completed this morning. I don’t know whether to stand, sit, or cuss his ass out. Talk about mercurial. He skims each page of the reports finding the bottom line he’s looking for in each.

  “Jorge’s error almost forced you to liquidate in your first quarter of business.”

  “It was an honest mistake brought about by stress in his personal life. It won’t happen again.”

  “I know it won’t,” Tristan says. “Because you’re going to fire him.”

  He moves back to his desk and lays the portfolio on it. It takes a few seconds for me to digest what he just said. I use the breathing exercises my psychologist taught me. Finally, I am calm enough to respond.

  “I’m not going to do that, and you can’t make me,” I say like I’m still the petulant little girl in the hood fighting with my friends over a game of double-dutch.

  “Your cousin is careless. If he allows his personal life to stress him out to the point where he makes a mistake of this magnitude, we don’t need him working for Kente Studio Records.”

  “We? Tristan, you’re an investor in KSR, true, but you don’t get to tell us how to make our personnel decisions.”

  “What he did could’ve had KSR on the selling block. Is he who you want to control all your business systems?”

  “There were extenuating circumstances. Jorge’s skills are solid. He made a mistake, because he’s human.”

  “As are we all.” Tristan says, his face hard and implacable. “I want him gone.”

  “No.”

  Tristan’s eyes narrow and he adopts his Dom demeanor. “If Cisneros isn’t gone by Friday, we might need to discuss finding you an alternate backer.”

  I don’t kowtow to it for once. “Just like that?”

  “Yes, Keisha, just like that. I’m in an advisory role as well, lest you forget. I advise. You take my advice. When someone becomes that much of a liability, you have to cut your losses.”

  “That may work for you because you don’t seem to have a fucking heart when it comes to business, but I do.” I turn and walk to the door. “I suppose we’ll be discussing alternate backers on Monday.”

  As I leave, I turn back, and he looks, for a second, as if I’ve slapped his face. Then his nostrils flare, he turns and stalks back to his desk chair. I close the door.

  #

  For the first time since we’ve had our arrangement, I don’t look forward to going to Tristan’s condo on the weekend. When I replay what happened to Jada, she surprises me with her response.

  “Tristan kind of has a point,” she says. “If Jorge had made that kind of mistake with his previous employer he would’ve been out the door, no doubt about it.”

  “We’re not some fortune 500 company who doesn’t give a shit about people, Jada. Jorge deserves a second chance. If there’s one thing I know about my cousin, he won’t make that mistake again.”

  She raises her hands as if I’m about to mug her. “I was just saying.”

  I tell her the other part about us discussing alternate backers next week. “What the fuck? Keisha, you said you wouldn’t let your relationship with Tristan affect our business.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I just stood up for Jorge. If Tristan wants to drop us over that, let him. The model we created works. If it works with White Enterprises’s money, it’ll work with someone else’s.” I say that shit and know full well, I don’t mean it.

  Jada shakes her head. “I’m not so sure, Keisha. Part of what’s driving all the interest in KSR is Nate and Tristan’s name recognition.”

  “Maybe Nate won’t pull out just because Tristan wants to.”

  “Do you really want to take that chance?”

  I give her my best stubborn, steady eye. “Hell, yes.”

  Friday at five, I’ve changed my mind at least fifty times about going to Tristan’s place as per our usual agreement. I’m still pissed at him for demanding I fire Jorge over one mistake, regardless of how costly a mistake it could’ve been. And if I’m honest, it hurt to have him say he wanted to discuss handing us over to someone else after one problem. Jada will work the late management shift at KSR, and I pop my head in her door as I leave.

  “I’ll see you later at the house, okay.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Aren’t you going to Tristan’s?” Jada hops up and pulls me into her office, closing the door.

  “What gives?” Concern creases her brow.

  “I just don’t want to see him right now,” I say. “What am I supposed to do, go there and let him work me over and act like he didn’t just tell me he wanted to pawn KSR off on someone else?”

  “That’s business. But you have another arrangement that you’ve contracted to fulfill.”

  “Maybe I just don’t feel like being his submissive anymore, Jada. I should probably get out now while the getting is good.”

  “Here,” Jada takes my purse and laptop bag off my shoulder. “Sit down.” She puts my stuff on her desk and perches on the edge of her desk facing me. “Why do you say you should get out now while the getting’s good?”

  “Because it’s true. I’m just a submissive to Tristan. One he could replace in a heartbeat.”

  “Why would he want to do that? I trained you. He shouldn’t have anything to complain about.”

  “Tristan has been through a parade of submissives to rival the United Colors of Benetton.”

  “So has Nathan.”

  “Oh. Well, Tristan told me he had more in common with Fifty Cent than Prince Charming.”

  “Are you falling for him?”

  I didn’t want Jada to think I couldn’t do this and keep my feelings in check. “No. This Dom/sub thing is just foreign to me. Normal dating relationships move toward that goal of liking one another with the hope of eventually falling in love. Tristan doesn’t want that, but I do someday.”

  “I know you do, sweetie.” She says, smoothing my hair back. This is quite the tender gesture for Jada. “Not all Doms want to keep the emotion on lockdown. If you like the lifestyle, there’s always other options.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll stay in the lifestyle when Tristan and I are through. I just need to do some serious thinking about this now. So, you seeing Nate later?”

  She frowns. “No, he’s got an away game this weekend.”

  “You and Nate seem to have a real connection that could become something else.

  “Nate and I get along so well because we’ve both been in the lifestyle before, we know what to expect of each other, and we know what we want.”

  “But you like him a lot, and he likes you.”

  “We do, but Tristan likes you a lot, too, Keisha.”

  “Well he’s got a funny way of showing it if the first thing he wants to do when we make a misstep is to drop us.”

  “He’s wound a lot tighter than Nathan, that’s for sure, but don’t hold his business decisions against him.”

  “I’m not, but I’m also not going to his place tonight like I’m desperate or something.”

  “Your going there as you agreed wouldn’t be an act of desperation, you’d just be keeping the letter of your agreement.”

  “That’s all well and good, b
ut if he can threaten to renegotiate the terms of our business contract, then it’s my prerogative to renegotiate the terms of our Dom/sub agreement.”

  “At least call and tell him you’re not coming. Give him that courtesy.”

  I stand and take my purse and laptop from her desk. “I’ll think about it.”

  #

  Stupid bitch, my Fairy Hoochie Mama says to me for something like the fourth time in the last hour. I’m dressed for bed, but I’m in the living room on the sofa flicking channels on the TV, and eating icecream like the biggest damn cliché of a woman who’s ever had man troubles. I guess like most girls, I use negative emotion as my excuse to indulge. Even we sisters have to represent sometimes, so I’m just doing my bit for lovelorn women everywhere. You just said the L-word.” My Triple-G says as little hearts circle her head.

  “I just used a form of the L-word, chick. Don’t get your fucking hopes up.” I tune my duo of muses out and flip to another channel. That movie, The Secretary, with James Spader is on the tube. I watch it to the end. Well, I’ll be damned if his name isn’t Edward like that sparkly vampire and Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, which I watched earlier. But his last name is Grey like that Fifty Shades character. Hmmm. Talk about subliminal messages through movies.

  Even if they are, I ain’t trying to be Julia Roberts or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character in either movie. I’m not some ghetto prostitute Cinderella, and I’m not about to let Tristan tie me up for days until he decides he wants to come back to me. I pick up my cell phone and look at it for something like the hundredth time. He still hasn’t called. What did you expect? You left him, fool, My Fairy Hoochie Mama says. I scowl at her. This little heifer is working on my last good nerve, and I know just the thing to shut her ass up. I open up a bottle of wine.

  I’m on my second glass before I wonder if it’s going to agree with the Ben and Jerry’s I consumed earlier. Too damn bad. When the bottle is empty, I’m all hopped up on enough liquid courage to be the bigger woman. I punk out and call Tristan’s after hours car service. Thank goodness he hasn’t told them not to pick me up anymore. After a shower and three changes of clothes, I’m ready just as my phone rings, signaling me that the driver is there.