Fake It For Me, page 2
In fact, it was safe to say that there were jobs, clients, and projects that I’d only been offered because of my good working relationship with Lord McConnery and his firm, High Risers. He was well known around the city to be one of the most demanding bosses anybody could find…pretty much anywhere.
And it wasn’t just us, interior decorators, that felt the sting of his whip or were suffocated by his iron fist. It was everyone who worked for him. According to urban rumors on the streets, he asked his lawyers to do things that could get them disbarred, he asked his bankers to approve transactions and trades that were questionable enough to get the FBI, or the Securities and Exchange Commission knocking on their door.
It wasn’t as though Lord McConnery had never been asked exactly why he ran such a tight ship, he’d been asked many times. But his answers were always kind of…vague. He never actually answered questions that he didn’t feel like answering, he just sidestepped them and instead said vague, confident-sounding buzz phrases, like “the only time success comes before work is in the dictionary.” That doesn’t actually mean…anything, but it definitely sounded good for sure.
I wasn’t actually sure how true the rumors were, but apparently, Lord McConnery had been in real estate for more than twenty years.
And the general consensus was that if you could handle working for him, you could handle pretty much anything, a thing that was known around not just Queens, but all of New York. When I turned up to scheduled interviews, and client closing meetings, throwing around the name of High Risers, and more specifically, Mr. McConnery, was like a superpower. If interior decorating was a game of blackjack, then having High Risers in your corner was the equivalent to knowing that you could double down with a sixteen and always be dealt a four.
So being associated with McConnery certainly had its ups and downs, although the downs were most keenly felt. It was almost impossible to have a social life when you worked for Mr. McConnery, no matter how hard you tried. And boy-oh-boy, have I tried! And an admirable try it was if I do say so myself.
I must admit, I didn’t lose much. I’ve never had many friends, at any rate, it’s just the kind of person I am - I move with small crowds. It’s not unheard of, but having a small social group allowed me to last longer than most at the great game of trying to juggle a personal life and working for High Risers. On the streets of New York, it’s kind of like a challenge. Nobody working for McConnery has managed to succeed. Not his bankers, not his lawyers, not his fixers, not his accountants and, proved by my own valiant attempt, not his interior decorators.
I often wondered if there would ever be one to succeed (or indeed, survive) the immense workload McConnery liked to drop on the people who worked for him. But, to be fair, I had much more important things to wonder about. For example, I wondered what McConnery would have me running around doing for him this time.
Well, no time to sit and wonder about what he might expect of me this time! Let’s get the existing projects out of the way to get enough resources on his plans as soon as we get the scope, as per his usual style, the deadlines will be tight and his expectations bordering on miraculous.
Chapter Two
Nick
New York is a bustling city filled with more than eight million people. About eight and a half, actually, to be precise. And if you asked each and every citizen what was the hardest job in New York, I guarantee they’d all give you their own jobs. Yeah, you’d get the programmers and coders who’d claim that making computers run is the backbone of the economy and therefore, their jobs are the most important.
You’d also get the doctors, surgeons and medical students who work, like, eighteen hours a day, saying that what they do literally saves lives, and doing it on minimal sleep is among one of the most dangerous and risky things a human could possibly do. Which is all very well and good, except the New York Police Department would have just a little something to say about who really protects the people.
Typical, isn’t it? Typical of humans, and of humanity at large. I read an interesting study in a magazine about how humans are all victims by nature. We spend our entire lives fighting wars, living in capitalist countries while others wallow in poverty, fighting amongst ourselves, literally victimizing each other. And when there’s no one to victimize us, we victimize ourselves, which is essentially what complaining is.
Everyone thinks that they have it the hardest. Everyone wants someone to feel sorry for them.
My point is, they’re all wrong. The hardest job in New York City is being me. Or more accurately, being the only son of the billionaire President of High Risers, a firm that deals in real estate. Yeah, I know, that sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry. In truth, it’s not very interesting at all. But there is a shitload of money in it, which is why my Dad first began investing in property thirty years ago. The rest of his family and friends told him that it was a dead-end, but their jeers and scorns soon faded out once he made a massive return on his investment and then immediately re-invested.
Once it became clear that there was a lot more money to be made, the family started being really nice. I wasn’t actually there, but Dad’s told me the story more than once. He calls his family, in particular, his two older brothers, ‘gaseous sycophants.’ Whatever that means, and apparently, that’s the reason we don’t visit any of them for Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving. Which I always thought was a little harsh. I mean, sure, they were after his money, but he didn’t have to cut them off completely. Maybe we could make a little appearance on, like, Martin Luther King day? We were all related to each other by blood, after all.
But no. That’s part of being me, which, as I mentioned, is the hardest job in the city, and quite probably the State also. Dad never listens to me. It’s like his trademark. It started off as just plain old lack of respect, but it’s kind of mutated into a gimmick, some kind of running joke. Even if I have good ideas and suggestions these days, Dad’s gotta cut me off to keep the game up.
I snorted to myself at this thought. My Dad thought that everything was a game because he was what we, in the real gaming community, called a “noob.” Short for a newbie, but it’s supposed to be much more offensive. Like, calling someone a noob is a very serious allegation, and should always be backed up by appropriate evidence. This, however, is a special case. Anyone who knows my Dad knows that he’s a noob. He likes to play games with people, whereas I like to play actual games on actual games consoles. Call me old-fashioned. To my Dad, video games are the biggest waste of time that humanity is actually capable of. I’m never actually listening when he goes off on one of his forty-minute rants about technology and how it’s rotting our brains, devouring our souls and “we’ll have a Skynet situation on our hands soon if we’re not careful.”
I could try telling Dad that Terminator isn’t real, but why bother? He doesn’t listen to me, after all. So, I save a remarkable amount of energy by just not trying.
So why do I like video games so much? Well, if I’m 100% honest, I mostly play them all the time to get on Dad’s nerves. It does wonders for my attitude, to be frank, seeing him agitated. Also, they’re actually fun to play. So, it’s a double whammy, I guess you could say. Killing two birds with one stone, if you will.
I tend to prefer first-person shooters, like Call of Duty and Battlefield One. I guess it just provides a much-needed escape from the hardest job in New York City, which I definitely deserve. A few hours online getting slaughtered by twelve-year-old’s in France with ridiculously-quick internet connections never hurt anyone, strange as that may seem.
According to my Dad, there was a myriad of things I could be doing instead of gaming. I was technically only an intern at his firm, another fact which irked him, as he’d always hoped to have a son to take over his Empire one day. To be honest, I was getting a little bored of being “the disappointment,” so I stopped trying so hard a long time ago.
And not trying meant being lazy. And the laziest thing I could think of was to stay up in my office (why I got an office when I was only an intern, I couldn’t tell you), playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered after hours. It was getting late into the night, so late that only Dad and his secretary were still in the building. Oh, and me, of course.
I still had command posts to capture!
Just as I reached the checkpoint, the saving screen came up, and a new series of cutscenes started to play. I was used to the finer things in life, i.e., good technology, super-fast Wi-Fi connections, and bandwidth so impressive that it would make the nerds in Silicon Valley in California look noobs. But even I had to admit that this new game was so…interactive. Yeah, that was the word I was looking for. Interactive. Realistic. In fact, it was so highly realistic, I could probably have gotten lost in it!
With that thought, I glanced at my silver wristwatch and winced. To be fair, most people wince when they see my watch, but when other people do it, it’s most likely because of the price. For some reason, in movies and TV shows, rich people are always wearing Rolexes. As a billionaire myself, I can confidently confirm that rich people do not wear Rolexes. How much does the Rolex Pearlmaster go for? Forty thousand? Fifty? Chickenfeed.
My watch was a customized Hublot Classic Fusion. Titanium body, set with five sapphires, it was linked to the atomic clock in Colorado, which made it about as accurate as a watch can be. The price? Just South of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Now that’s a watch, not a god-damn Rolex. But when I gasped at my watch, it wasn’t because of the price, but because I’d noticed the time.
“Shit!” I cursed under my breath. I’d forgotten to keep a close eye on the time, my pool party at home was about to start, and here I was. Stuck at my father’s empire, for want of a better word.
I thumbed the power switch on my laptop, closed the lid, and left my cubicle, keeping my head low, slightly arching my back as I tried to sneak past my father’s office window. I imagine that this would seem like very odd behavior - sneaking around one’s own father. At least, it’d seem odd to anyone who didn’t know Dad. When I was a kid, I used to think my Dad was overbearing, or condescending, or maybe patronizing, even supercilious. Now that I was a grown man, I realized that I’d been an idiot. My Dad wasn’t any of those things. He was all of them. All the time. Every day.
He was the kind of person who, in an argument, would tell you what your point is, and then proceed to explain why “your point” is wrong. In fact, his favorite expression when I was a kid was “if I want your opinion, Nicholas, I’ll give it to you.” Let that sink in.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times - you never win where my Dad is concerned. You may be right, on occasion, but you won’t ever actually win. So, after years and years (really, an entire childhood) of learning that lesson the hard way, I decided that from that moment on, I would avoid my Dad wherever possible. It’s really the only way to get along with him.
So yes, I snuck past his office. Snuck? Sneaked? I think snuck is a word.
I passed the first obstacle without raising even a blip on the radar; years of practice makes perfect, is what I say. The next step was ever so slightly more problematic. How to make it past Dad’s goody-two-shoes secretary? What was her name, again? Lin-something? Linda? Lindsay? It could be…Liza? That sounded right. In any case, I’d unwittingly made myself what was shaping up to look like a permanent enemy where Liza was concerned.
I was almost certain that she was still angry at me for kissing and telling on her, an accusation that I considered hugely unfair on her part. Firstly, I only tried to seduce her because the girl never stops talking, and I was curious if putting my dick in her mouth would shut her up. Full disclosure - it didn’t. Which was quite impressive, I must say. But, honestly, what in the world did she expect? Not to be an asshole, but when you bend a lady over her desk after-hours and fuck her until she can’t walk straight, I’m of the opinion that that kind of implies what kind of relationship that the two of you are likely to have. And it’s certainly not one with mutual respect and consideration, at least it doesn’t seem like it to me. But hey, what do I know?
I was still young and naïve, after all, and how was I to know that her reputation could take such a knock from sleeping with the boss’ son? Liza had endured teasing for months after, although perhaps ‘teasing’ is too tame a word to describe the office’s treatment of her. Her friends stopped talking to her, started cold-shouldering her, which I thought was a little extreme. But then again, as they say, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. And pretty much every woman in the office was scorned when they heard about Liza and me.
And who can blame them, at the end of the day? It’s no secret to me that I’m good-looking, and there’s no shortage of young, female interns who want to get on my Dad’s good side, and the easiest way is through me. Nick. The quote-unquote “serial womanizer”. I’ve always hated that label, I don’t “use” women! If anything, women keep using me! Okay, fair enough, I have sex with a lot of girls. But the way people talk about me, you’d think the girls didn’t actually want to do it too!
But, like I do with anything, rather than getting offended, or letting it get to me, I decide to see it as an opportunity. I saw it as a door opening for me, a way to get more female attention than ever before. Because no matter how many disdainful looks I got in the corridor, I knew that the girls and women in the office couldn’t help but wonder if I was as good in bed as the rumors were.
And the joke was on them if they thought I could help them get into my Dad’s good books because he hardly noticed that I existed on a good day!
With that thought, a voice inside my head asked, then why are you sneaking past his office like a naughty schoolboy instead of the smug rich boy that you truly are?
I took a sneak peek past the corner of the wall and saw what could only be a blessing from whatever God was watching me from up on high. Liza, Dad’s chatterbox secretary, had her back to me, and her feet up on the filing cabinet behind her as she nattered away on the phone, probably to her sister. Which, fortunately, was exactly what I needed. Liza’s sister, from what I remember, is just as talkative as she is, those two can chin-wag all day long, for hours at a time and not even notice the Big Bang itself and the end of the Universe happening outside their window.
I purposefully strode past Liza with a straight back, knowing full well she won’t even see me. I reached the elevator and pressed the down button. The lift was on the third floor, and it started moving ever so slowly. I glanced uncertainly around me - only a fool would believe he was out of the woods just yet. Once the elevator got to the twelfth floor, where I was, it would open with a ping loud enough to shatter the sound barrier itself. Once that happened, I’d have to be on the elevator and going down within the next point-0-seven seconds, because that’s how much time it would take my Dad to hear the elevator from his office and realize that I was sneaking out.
I glanced at the neon display. Did the elevator seriously have to be moving this slowly? What was it carrying, gold bars? As the number ‘11’ lit up the display, I grinned, only to have my moment of triumph die in its infancy. I felt a rough hand grip my shoulder in a very familiar way.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I’d been caught in the act. Again.
Just smile and wave Nick, just smile and wave.
I turned around to face my father. He was still the daunting figure that he was when I was a kid, and even deep in his fifties, he still had a few inches, nearly a whole head of height, on me.
“Well, hey, Dad!” I said with very obviously phony enthusiasm. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Where I work?” Dad drawled.
“I know, right?” I chuckled. “Small world, am I right? Anyway, I was just going back to prison-oops, I meant my desk. So easy to confuse those two, you know what I mean?”
Dad did that thing with his lips that parents do when they’re disapproving of something you’ve just said. “Nicholas, it doesn’t have to be a prison, you should see it as an opportunity, something that is given to you on a silver platter. It’s a privilege, not a death sentence. I’m not your warden, I’m your father, but I’m also your boss. Until such time as you accept the responsibilities of running a company and having all the employees look to you for direction and guidance, you’ll do what I say.”
I doubt if I could’ve put into words, at that moment, how not in the mood for a speech I was. My own pool party was imminently about to start, and without me, no less. How was that fair at all?
“Dad. Seriously. Thank you so much for the wise words of wisdom. You must value your opinion quite a bit since you give it so sparingly.”
With that, my father just looked at me sternly, “Do whatever you want to today, but you will be in the office in the conference room tomorrow from five to nine. I want you to lead the next project, and you’d better be there if you want to know what it is about, at the very least.”
“Wow Dad, I didn’t know you worked till that time in the evening!” If anything, I was stressed about having to wake up at the ungodly hours of eight AM. In fact, I was tired already. Or pre-tired, if you will. That’s what I call it when you’re experiencing fatigue for the effort you haven’t expended yet. Retro-casuality?
My father frowned at me, and then I saw he’d realized what I was implying and he just sighed and said, “AM son, the meeting is in the morning. Enjoy your last day of freedom.” With that, he turned around and went back towards his office.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Liza sticking her tongue out at me. How childish is that? I stuck my tongue right back at her and blew a raspberry too. Okay, so it might be childish, but I’m damned if I’m not going to one-up her. One-upping is like my signature move.
