The Bluffing Game

by Verona Vale

  “Then let me talk to your investors. Get all these big players around one table, and I’ll convince them this is all a bunch of gold diggers trying to intimidate you.”

  “Well they’re succeeding.”

  “Don’t let them!”

  He waved an arm at the meeting room. “That’s what I’ve been doing by firing all of my lawyers. You want me to continue?”

  “Let me talk to them. I promise you, this case will not ever end up in court.”

  “That may not matter. They’re already winning.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  We stared each other down, an odd place to be after what we’d done the day before. I couldn’t read anything behind the stubborn frustration in his face. But I didn’t give in. I knew what I was talking about. I crossed my arms as if to challenge him: trust me or fire me. Your choice.

  I could see him torn between the two options, but something in him wavered: he wanted me to be right.

  “Trust me,” I said.

  He didn’t look happy about it, and I wondered if he thought I had manipulated everything, slept with him to make him trust me. It was a disturbing idea, but from his end, not impossible. I shuddered on the inside at the notion of him seeing me that way.

  Finally he turned to his House Mistress. “Andrea. Get all my island-side VPs here for a meeting, and get all of the stateside ones to video conference in. I’ll contact the investors personally.” He held out his hand. “Phone.”

  I handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He met my eyes for a second, then looked at his phone as he dialed. “If you’re not a goddamn archangel in this meeting, you’re fired.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll be a fucking goddess.”

  “You’d better.” He walked away and put a breezy tone in his voice as he talked to whomever he’d called. “Yeah, it’s Victor. No, don’t worry, my lawyer has a plan. Yeah, she’s got their number, trust me. Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. PR’s all over it, they’ve got it covered. I know. No, she says it’ll never make it to court, she says they don’t have a case.” He glanced in my direction, where I sat on the couch going through my papers again, and then turned away and said, “Yeah, I trust her completely. She’s as good as they come.”

  He was lying through his teeth to reassure his investors, and I took no pleasure in hearing his voice form those words, no matter how sincere he was trying to sound. But by god I was going to earn his trust by the time this case was through. I took out my own phone and dialed a lawyer friend who did only contracts, and asked him if I could send him something to look over. Yesterday I had been a hundred percent certain there was nothing in the contract that I missed, and I was still at ninety-eight percent today, but a second pair of eyes on it couldn’t hurt.

  Everything else I had zero doubt of. They hadn’t expected Sterling to trust me, but he had—at least so far—so I had forced their hand. But this was it. They could draw it out and delay it until there was a court date and everyone’s legal expenses were piling up, but in the end, they would have to drop the charges if they wanted to get anything out of Sterling, and that was what they considered their bargaining chip: the now seemingly real threat of a trial. But it was a smoke screen I could see clear through, and Sterling’s suggestion that they knew something I didn’t was exactly what they wanted him to think, and what they were maybe hoping even I would fall for. If that was so, they had underestimated me, and I had yet to lose to someone who’d made that big a mistake.

  Bring it on.

  ~

  The meeting with the VPs and investors took place in the same fishbowl room as the meeting of the previous day. Graying men in suits and cufflinks sat around the table scowling, and a projector covered a nearly wall-to-ceiling screen with the faces of yet more VPs and investors on the mainland. Some eyes were on Sterling, but most were on me.

  “Greetings, everyone. My name is June Jansen, and I’m serving as Mr. Sterling’s legal counsel. I’ve reviewed the charges that have been filed against Mr. Sterling, and I can assure you all, as I’m sure you’ve been assured on previous occasions, that those charges are completely baseless. Any judge with even a remote understanding of contract law would throw the case out of court. But I’m here to tell you that this case won’t even make it to a hearing. The people filing these charges are making an empty play for money, and they have a good lawyer on their side who knows as well as I do that they don’t have a chance if they go before a judge. Before that happens, they’re going to fold. They’re going to come begging to us to take whatever they can get, and then they’re going to drop the charges. In the meantime, your PR department should be more than able to handle the negative press, and in six months none of the general public will even remember this happened. Stock prices may take a hit temporarily, but as public perception rebounds, so will investing. I’ve already explained all of this to Mr. Sterling, and he’s agreed that it’s a sound reading of the situation. Are there any questions?”

  I had said the same words to Sterling so many times already I felt like a robot repeating myself.

  An ancient, angry man on one of the video channels waved his hands around. “And what if they don’t drop the charges? What if the judge doesn’t throw out the case?”

  “I understand your concern. But there simply is no case. There’s no grounds for reading the contract the way they’re reading it. None.”

  The old man squinted and blinked repeatedly as he listened, and continued: “Then why are we even talking to these people? Why haven’t we told them to go fuck themselves?”

  I smiled and said, “I share your sentiments. My understanding is that we’ve only allowed them to draw out the talks this long because some parties felt the negative press of a court date would be too much to handle.”

  One of the men seated at the table said, “A lot of us still feel that way.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong sir, but hasn’t this corporation quite a resourceful PR division?”

  “We do,” said another face on the screen, “and I run it. You can only control so much of the public’s reaction. A lawsuit is a lawsuit, baseless or not.”

  Dear lord, these stuffed shirts were all the same, making excuses for not being able to do a better job. “Well here’s an official quote from the legal department for your next press release: These people have no case. They’re throwing a penny into the air and hoping it will come down as a gold doubloon. It’s that senseless. The reality is, they won’t even get the penny back. They threw it so high the wind took it overboard. They’ve already lost.”

  “Mr. Sterling,” said the angry man on the screen, “If all this is true, I find it hard to believe you had to go through so many different lawyers to find one who’d tell you this.”

  Finally. What I said had sunk in, and damage control now went to Sterling. He wouldn’t like his VPs telling him this was his own fault, but to an extent it was.

  “Miss Jansen isn’t the first lawyer to tell me this, it’s true,” Sterling said. “If we had simply blown them off, told them they were getting nothing, and not shown even a hint of fear that we couldn’t handle the bad press, that would have been the end of it. But I wanted to do right by all of you, and prevent this PR crisis from ever happening. So I tried to compromise. Despite my lawyer’s best advice, I tried to make things end amicably. I thought if I could make them happy again, I could turn an enemy into a friend. I didn’t realize what kind of people they were.”

  The angry man on the screen shook his head. “These are roaches, Sterling, not people. I thought you knew better. They saw a man with a sack of cash and figured they could bully him into sharing it. I’ve seen these people all my life. I come to places like your island to get away from them.”

  Sterling remained steady in his seat, and said nothing, just put on a smile for his biggest investor.

  The PR head said, “Jesus, Victor. Next time just
let your lawyers handle it, okay? Stick to what you do best. Don’t worry, I think we got your back on this one.”

  The atmosphere of the room had completely changed now. No one was looking at me anymore. They saw Sterling the same way the people suing him did: as weak, fallible, and overconfident. Willing to bend under pressure. That wasn’t where I had hoped the meeting would go, but Sterling had brought it on himself. He hadn’t trusted his lawyers, he hadn’t trusted his PR department’s proficiency, and he hadn’t trusted his investors not to bail on him. No wonder that the day I met him he had been wound up tighter than a high-tension wire. He saw himself as alone. He trusted no one.

  Except, somehow, me. I wondered how long it would last.

  After the meeting, I found him alone by the piano in his living room. He wasn’t playing, just sitting there with his arms resting on his legs, hands dangling. He stared at the keys.

  “I finally do the right thing, and all they care about is how long it took me to get there. They trust me even less now.”

  “Distrust begets itself,” I said.

  “So you’re on their side.”

  “I’m on your side. But if you want them to trust you, you have to trust them.”

  “These days I can’t afford to trust anyone,” he said.

  “You should ask whether you can afford not to.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes at this point,” he said.

  “All we can do now is wait.”

  His phone chimed, and he looked at it.

  “The hearing date’s just been set,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “They’ll wait until the last minute. Try to psych you out again.”

  “I know. That’s why I booked you a flight home tomorrow.”

  It felt like a slap on the cheek. “Tomorrow?”

  “Until they call another meeting, you don’t have a reason to stay, do you?”

  His look was enough. So that was it, then. This was his way of saying he didn’t want to continue our affair.

  “Not if you don’t have one for me.”

  He said nothing. I left him there to sulk while I packed my things. I passed Andrea in the hallway and she smiled, the subtlest hint of malice in her smile that sent a chill down my back at her happiness to see me go.

  Seven

  I didn’t see him in the morning, and I didn’t speak a word to Andrea either, taking my own suitcase and ignoring her offer to roll it down to the plane for me. If business was business, I had no reason not to be severe. I would fly back to the island when the opposition came dejectedly into a meeting and asked for whatever they thought Sterling might be willing to pay them to make the whole thing go away. And then it would be over.

  Unless of course Sterling decided to hire his old lawyer back and fire me in the meantime. Either way, I had already billed the majority of my hours, and it didn’t matter. It fucking didn’t matter.

  ~

  When we landed in Boston, I caught a cab to my office and worked other cases until quitting time. Then I went to a bar. I downed one martini like a shot and sat with a second and stirred it, not even interested. A few guys tried to get on my good side, and I waved them away like flies. Some got angry, but that was their problem. I didn’t owe them anything.

  Finally I came home to my empty house in Cape Cod, my quiet bedroom, my bed that was only mine, and I tried not to cry as I lay under the covers. At last, I called Nick.

  “Are you gonna be okay?”

  “I wish you were here,” I said. “I wish I was in your arms.”

  He took a moment to respond. “You don’t really mean that.”

  “I’m just saying how I feel. I’m not asking you to come over.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s so absorbed in himself, isn’t he? That’s not just me?”

  “I never met him, June. But billionaires do tend to get that way by focusing on themselves first.”

  “I just can’t believe it’s over. For some reason I was really hoping for... something long-term.”

  “I know, it sucks.”

  “Will you have lunch with me tomorrow?”

  I could almost see him rubbing his forehead. “I don’t know, June.”

  “Come on, Nick, I’m not trying to make you my fucking rebound.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  He sighed. He had a right to be a little unsure after we had talked about my possibly pursuing a relationship for its own sake regardless of whom it was with. But he said, “Okay then. We’ll have lunch tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where you wanna go?”

  “Anywhere. No, make that anywhere except seafood. No lobster.”

  He laughed a bit, as I hoped he would. “Good night, June. You’ll feel better.”

  “I know.” And somewhere I did. Here I was nearly in tears over Victor, though. Like a schoolgirl. I had fallen for him way too hard. Way too hard.

  I woke in the morning having slept poorly, feeling for the first time that my already expensive bed was not up to snuff. Damn that resort.

  Unable to fall asleep, I got up and walked down the stairs through my graveyard-silent house and into the basement I’d turned into a gym. I put on workout clothes and ran on the treadmill until I couldn’t think or move anymore. That jumpstarted my autopilot mode, and I was able to shower and go to bed again exhausted, with a completely empty mind. Finally I could sleep.

  ~

  At work the next day, lunch couldn’t get here quick enough, to the point that I packed up my briefcase by ten in the morning and worked from the restaurant until Nick got there.

  I stood up and let every last word of my work fall away, and sunk into his arms, felt them around me, warm, strong, familiar, kind.

  “June?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  I let the professional part of me wake back up and let go of him, my hands and arms empty without his body held tight in them. I sat down and closed my computer and put all my papers away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t sleep very well.”

  “I can imagine.” He met my eyes only in little flicks of movement, quick acknowledgements that showed me he wasn’t ignoring me, but made it all too clear he couldn’t handle staring into my eyes the way he used to.

  “It’s really kind of weird,” I said. “My house never felt so...” I thought for a second. “…dead.”

  He picked up the menu. “Why do you think I got my dogs?”

  “I know, I’ve thought about it, but I travel so much, it just seems unfair. I’d need a nanny.”

  “Lots of people do it.”

  “I’d rather come home to a person.”

  “Wouldn’t we all.”

  Why was he cold? He hadn’t seemed jealous or bitter in years.

  “Nick, did something happen?”

  He looked at me for a longer second, but still broke contact. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like there’s something you’re not saying.”

  He shook his head. “Not that I can think of.”

  “How are the dogs?”

  “Good.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Great.”

  I couldn’t stand the formality. “You seem down.”

  He put the menu back on the table. “I’m just waiting for a shoe to drop.”

  What did he mean by that? “Are you expecting me to drop one?”

  “Don’t you want me here to listen? That’s all I’m trying to do.”

  His defensiveness made me suddenly defensive too. “Listen to my sob story about losing a billionaire crush? I think I’m done sobbing about it.”

  “All right, then why am I here?”

  “I don’t know, why are you?”

  “Because you asked me to lunch.”

  “And isn’t that enough? Isn’t it fine to just
have lunch with me?”

  “Sure. Lunch is fine.”

  “Then let’s eat.”

  “Fine.”

  We looked at our menus. Nothing looked appealing.

  I put mind down. “Nick, I just need some human comfort. I just want to have a fun lunch with a dear friend. Is that so hard?”

  “No, that sounds great.”

  “Then why are we snapping at each other?”

  “I wish I knew. I just wasn’t expecting this lunch to be a whole lot of fun.”

  “Then why did you agree to come? You don’t owe it to me.”

  “How could I say no, when you were so upset?”

  “Well if you don’t want to be here, leave. I’ll call someone else.”

  “I want to be here now, I just didn’t want to before.”

  “I get it. You didn’t want to hear me vent.”

  His eyes flicked to mine, flicked away. “No, it’s because I thought you might try to make it more than that.”

  I crossed my arms. “Really. You thought that.”

  “You seemed desperate last night.”

  “I am desperate. But that doesn’t mean I want to ruin our relationship by trying to resurrect the past.”

  “So you’re not trying to imply anything when you complain about how your house feels so empty? You’d genuinely agree with me that it would be a bad idea if I came over tonight and made it feel less so?”

  That was brutal, but I understood his need to hear me say it. I looked away from him. “It would feel like heaven. And then I would regret it in the morning.”

  “Yes, you would. Which is why it’s a bad idea.”

  I still couldn’t look at him, even though he wouldn’t hold eye contact. “I know.”

  “Then we agree.”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why you had to describe it so temptingly.” I knew why he did, but I thought he still deserved to be called out on it.

  “Look,” he said, “this is what I didn’t want to deal with. It’s just so much easier when we only talk on the phone. Seeing you in person is just… too much.”