by Tijan
“But I want to give you our best people and—”
“It’s entirely up to you,” he said. “I’m not forcing you to do anything. But if you’re going to pitch next week, I don’t want Harper on the team.”
Shit. I mean, I got it. And I thought I’d feel the same way. I wasn’t sure Harper would be so understanding. But he was a potential client, one I was desperate to land. “Of course, sir, it’s entirely up to you what team you want to work with.”
“I’m pleased you understand. I’m looking forward to what you have to say.”
I hung up and slumped back in my chair. Should I have said no? How would I tell Harper? I guess I could pull out? But this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for and Harper knew that. She’d understand, wouldn’t she? This wasn’t personal. It was business.
Crap. I stood and grabbed my jacket. I needed some fresh air and common sense. “I’m going to Joey’s for a coffee,” I told Donna as I headed toward the elevators.
“Everything okay?” she called after me. I couldn’t reply.
Harper would understand. In fact, she might be relieved. She could take some time, build up her confidence after the way she’d choked at Goldman’s.
But something told me she wasn’t going to think like that. This might be business to me, but it was very personal to Harper.
It was as if Charles Jayne had thrown a grenade, and I was left bracing myself for the explosion but hoping it was a dud.
Three . . . two . . . one.
“Can you get Harper?” I asked Donna through the speakerphone, wiping the screen with my thumb.
“Sure thing.”
I stood, took off my jacket, and rolled up my sleeves. Coffee and a conversation with Joey about baseball had helped me make up my mind to tell Harper she was dropped from the JD Stanley team and to do it as soon as possible. As it was a work-related matter, I should tell her at the office. Part of me wanted to take a bottle of wine over to her apartment, run a bath, and tell her when we were both a glass down. That way I could hold her if she got upset. But Harper had been clear she wanted no special treatment at work.
“Hi,” Harper said as she appeared in my doorway.
“Hi,” I croaked, then cleared my throat. “Close the door and take a seat.”
She frowned and did as I asked.
I took a deep breath. “I want to talk to you about the JD Stanley account.” Her hands curled around the arm of the chair. “I’m going to make a change and get Marvin to be my second chair on the JD Stanley pitch.”
I waited for the explosion.
Her gaze fell to her lap, then came back up to meet mine. “Is this because I choked at the Goldman meeting?” she asked.
Of course that was what she’d think. This was my out. I could tell her we needed a more experienced speaker. I didn’t have to tell her what her father had said. I didn’t have to hurt her.
“How am I supposed to learn from my mistakes if you don’t give me another shot?” She leaned forward a little. “I’m ready this time. I really know the material—even your sections.”
She was ready. I could tell by the way she spoke in our morning meetings that instead of the failure at Goldman’s sapping her confidence, it had fed it.
I brought my hands together on my desk. Should I lie to her? Could I?
I liked to get what I wanted. And I wanted to do the JD Stanley pitch without Harper and have Harper okay about it. But I couldn’t be dishonest to make that happen. It wasn’t the man I was.
“I know you’re ready. It’s not that.”
“I mean it, Max. I can show you. Seriously. I can give the presentation to the whole company, bring people in off the street even. I can do this.”
Fuck, this was going to be harder than I expected. She was so committed to this pitch. Even if her reasons weren’t all business, her attitude was. I nodded. “I know there isn’t a better person for the job.”
“Then why?” she asked, slamming her hands on the arms of her chair.
“Your father called me this morning.” She shifted forward in her seat and I took a deep breath. “He said he didn’t want you at the presentation.”
She flopped back in her chair, staring at my desk, her eyes glazed. I’d never experienced anything like this. In the office everything was so clear to me. It was at home that everything was gray and I always questioned my decisions. Telling Harper this brought out a different side of me. I wanted to go over to her and comfort her.
“Did he say why?” she asked.
“Just that he didn’t want to mix personal and professional. Which I can understand.”
She rose to her feet. “He employs his three male children. That’s not mixing business and personal?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. How could I make this okay? “I understand this is frustrating.”
“Frustrating?” she yelled. “Are you kidding me? The guy’s an asshole. He’s trying to ruin my career.”
I hadn’t gotten the impression he was doing anything but being selfish. “Maybe he felt a little uncomfortable because the two of you are estranged.” I thought I’d feel the same. “I’m sure he wasn’t trying to make you look bad.”
Harper laid her hands on my desk, and leaned toward me. “And so what, you just said, ‘yes, sir, thank you, sir? Who cares if I fuck over the girl I’ve been screwing the last few weeks. Who gives a shit about her feelings? As long as I’m still in line for your business, I’ll do anything you say.’ Is that how it went?”
There was real venom in her tone and she was out of line. I’d acted in the best interests of King & Associates and if she was being rational she’d see it. “No, I said that I thought that you were the best person for the job.” Had she expected me to argue with him? Ultimately he was the client. He got to choose his team.
She shook her head. “But you still told him you’d swap me out?”
“Harper, he’s the client. He can choose who he wants working for him.”
She shifted, putting her hand on her hip. “Guess what, asshole? You can choose who you work for, too. Don’t you see? He was testing you. Seeing if he asked you to jump, if you’d ask how high. He’s a piece of shit who’s determined to make me miserable.” She covered her face with her hands and my heart squeezed. Fuck, I hated that she did that to me. I hadn’t done anything wrong. The last thing I wanted to do was upset her. I desperately wanted to go to comfort her, but this was business.
She smoothed down her skirt and pulled back her shoulders. “He asked you to choose between him and me,” she said, her voice quiet. “And you made your decision. So good luck.” She turned and headed to the exit.
I wanted to run after her, make her understand, but she was out of my door before I’d stood up. The last thing I wanted to do was make a scene, escalate the situation. I’d leave early, but instead of going back to Connecticut tonight, I’d go to her place and we could talk.
Chapter 15
Harper
I arrived at Grace’s apartment straight from work, tearstained. On the subway ride over, I’d tried to figure out why I was upset, who I was most upset with—my father or Max. I hadn’t come to any conclusions.
“Do you think he knew?” Grace asked.
I sat on her gray five-thousand-dollar couch in Brooklyn, stroking the velvet arm, which was providing me with some small comfort. Grace handed me a huge glass of red wine and sat.
“What? That my father was testing him?” I asked. Was that what it was? A test? Or a show of power?
I’d left Max’s office, gone straight back to my desk, printed out my resignation, put it into an envelope, and given it to Donna to deliver to Max. I didn’t have a lot of personal items in the office and I’d managed to get them all into my work carryall.
I’d cried all the way to Brooklyn.
“No, do you think your father knew Max King was fucking his daughter?”
I lifted my head. “How could he? And anyway, why would he care?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Fathers are protective over their daughters.”
I snorted. “Yeah well, sperm donors aren’t.” I was pretty sure Charles Jayne hadn’t had a parental instinct in his life.
“I just think it’s a little strange that he accepted the lunch invitation and then didn’t want you working on the account.”
A lot of what Charles Jayne did didn’t add up. He must have known JD Stanley was a big account and if he requested I was dropped from the team it would look bad on me. “He just doesn’t want me anywhere near him.” I dug my fingernail into the pile of the velvet.
Grace took a sip of her wine. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I asked.
“It just feels like we’re not seeing the whole picture.”
Jesus, since when did Grace give my father the benefit of the doubt? She knew what an asshole he’d been over the years. “Are you taking his side?”
She twisted the stem of her glass between her fingers. “No, not at all. There is no side for me except yours. I’m just saying things don’t add up.”
I glugged down some wine, desperate for the liquid relaxation to do its magic.
“Okay, so your father’s an asshole. Let’s just take that as read. And, for whatever reason, he didn’t want you working on his account.” She rolled her lips together as if she was trying to stop herself from saying what came next. “I’m worried about how bothered you are by it. And that you resigned from a job you worked so hard for. Aren’t you just letting your father control you?”
When the JD Stanley pitch had come up, I thought it would be an opportunity for me to finally be free of my father. “I just thought I had the upper hand this time. I was going to get my chance to press his nose up against the glass and show him what he’d been missing.” I should have known better. I never had the upper hand as far as my father was concerned.
“I’m guessing he knew that and didn’t want to see. Most assholes don’t want to be reminded of their assholishness. They either reinvent reality so they’re not assholes, or they avoid any situation where they could be reminded.” Grace was talking from experience and suddenly I felt bad for being here and dumping all this on her. Her father had cheated on her mother more than once, and she always said afterward it was as if he’d used an imaginary chisel and gone through people’s memories, re-carving history. “Your father’s a powerful man and powerful men don’t like to be wrong.”
“But he was okay to go to lunch.” I wiped a nonexistent drop of wine from the outside of my glass. Why had he agreed to lunch knowing I would be there and then had a problem with me working on the account?
Grace nodded. “He was probably curious, wanted to see if you’d forgiven him.”
Lunch had been fine. Polite and professional. Had he really expected anything else?
“And he probably didn’t give any thought to how you’d feel about it,” Grace continued. “I’m sure he’s like most men—too focused on themselves to worry about anyone else.”
Selfish was exactly what my father was. When I was little and he didn’t turn up when he said he would, I would pretend to my mom it was no big deal. I remember understanding he made her cry, a lot, and that she’d cry more if I was disappointed. So I learned early to mask my hurt and upset. But it was soon replaced by anger and frustration I wasn’t so good at covering up.
I looked up from my glass to find Grace poised with a top up. “I’d be surprised if he was trying to sabotage your career,” she said as the wine glugged into my glass. “I’m sure he could have stopped you from getting a job on Wall Street very easily if that’s what he’d wanted to do. Did he tell Max to fire you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Just said he didn’t want me working on the account because he wanted to keep the personal and professional separate.”
Maybe Grace was right and it had been less about my father trying to ruin me and more about him protecting himself. Tears welled in my eyes. I covered my face with my free hand in some kind of futile effort to stop them from falling.
If I wasn’t so embarrassed by the fact my father hadn’t wanted me working on the account just like he hadn’t wanted me when I was born, things might be different. A regular client requesting a team change would have been bruising but I’d have gotten over it. My father requesting I didn’t work on his account if we were on good terms may have been bearable, but it was the Max element that made it so humiliating. Somehow, having told him about my father, having confided in him, I found his decision to accept my father’s wishes without question rusted the knife, made the cut deeper.
I’d wanted to work for Max King for as long as I could remember and I’d ruined it by sleeping with him.
“It’s such a betrayal,” I managed to choke out.
The cushions beside me dipped and I moved my hand as Grace took my wine from me. She grinned. “I’m sorry. I can’t have you spill red wine over this beautiful couch. Let it out, have a good cry, but don’t hold red wine while you’re doing it.”
I laughed, her concern over her couch breaking me out of my misery. “You’re right. This couch is too good to spoil for a man. You pretend you don’t like the finer things in life, my friend, but you can’t help generations of breeding.”
She took a sip of the wine she’d just taken from me. “I know. However hard I try, I can’t help reverting back to type. I have such good taste.”
I laughed. “You do. However much you fight it, you’re always going to be a Park Avenue princess.”
“There, you see? At least I can make you laugh with my ridiculous life choices.” Grace shifted, sitting cross-legged on the couch facing me, giving me her full attention. “Speaking of ridiculous choices, tell me about the resigning thing.”
“Max had a decision to make. He knew how I felt about my father and he didn’t hesitate to pick him over me.” I shook my head. “If he’d just been my boss, if I hadn’t told him how my father had abandoned me, I might have been able to swallow getting kicked off the JD Stanley account. But the way he so easily chose business over me was just too much.” It was as if he’d drawn a line in the sand and said my feelings would never be more important than his job.
“I didn’t realize it was that serious between you two,” she said.
“It’s not serious.” Perhaps it had become more serious than I’d realized.
“But serious enough that you want him to pick you over his job,” Grace said. I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to say. “What did he give as an excuse?” Grace asked.
“He just said that the client can pick the team.”
Grace winced.
“Don’t you dare say he’s right.” He wasn’t right, was he? “It would be different if Max and I weren’t fucking, but we are. Were. I’m not just his employee.” I wasn’t sure what we were to each other and I supposed it didn’t matter anymore. But he’d owed me something. Some kind of loyalty. Hadn’t he?
“I’m not sure you’d be quite this upset—so upset you handed in your notice—if it were just ‘fucking’. You say it’s not serious but it sounds like it is from your perspective. Do you have feelings for him?”
I scraped my hair back from my face as if it would help me see more clearly. Did I have feelings for him? “I feel like I want to punch him in the face; does that count?” I asked as Grace rubbed my back.
But I didn’t want to punch Max, not really. I wasn’t angry. I felt broken, as if I’d taken a right hook to my stomach. Somewhere along the road, I’d let him in, enjoyed being with him—I’d been happy, and not just when we had sex. I couldn’t remember a time when that had been true of any of my other relationships. My father had ensured I grew up heartbroken, the scars of our relationship creating a barrier between me and other men. No one had ever broken through. No one except Max. It had just been sex—amazing sex—and then somewhere along the line, as he’d revealed himself to me, I’d been forced to do the same. He’d opened me up and I’d let myself care.
“I think maybe you feel more for him than you’re admitting to yourself,” Grace said.
Of course I had feelings for him.
Max was the only experience I’d had of being with a man where I’d not worked out how or when we would end before anything started. I knew I would leave my college boyfriend when we graduated. I knew the guy I saw occasionally at Berkeley would never leave Northern California and I’d never stay. I always saw the end before anything began. And that suited me. It meant I didn’t get attached, didn’t have any false expectations. With Max, I’d never seen the end and so I felt cheated of all the time we could have had together in the future. My expectations of him, of us, had been too high because they hadn’t had limits.
I wanted so desperately for Max to have told my father if he didn’t want me working on the account, Max didn’t want his business. Finally, I wanted a man to put me first. Ahead of money, ahead of business. I wanted Max to stand up and claim me as my father never had.
I understood now my heart was closed to any happy futures. Shut down. Every man who came after this would always have limits.
I stood in Grace’s closet, surrounded by her designer wardrobe I’d been pilfering since I arrived a little over a week ago. She might not wear them often, but she sure had a lot of beautiful clothes. I couldn’t avoid going back to Manhattan any longer. I figured there was no running into Max if I went back on a Saturday. I needed to go back to my apartment.
“This is Gucci,” I yelled from her bedroom, pulling out a black pencil skirt.
“Jesus, your voice carries three blocks. I think I prefer you mute.”
I hadn’t had much to say for the first few days of my stay at Grace’s. It was as if the pain of walking away from my life had stolen my words. But after my third day in bed Grace had literally pulled me into the sitting room and forced me to watch TV and join in commentary on episode after episode of Real Housewives. Things got a little better after that and I was able to contain my gloom. But it was still there, lurking, waiting for me to be on my own so it could take over.
