Fake It For Me, page 8
That’s the danger in making the whole world your oyster - you’re left with an oyster.
I loved the way Sandy’s face lit up when she got to sit in the back of my chauffeur-driven Karlmann King SUV (at 1.9 million dollars, the most expensive SUV in the world) with the surround-sound speakers and Wi-Fi hotspot. I loved the way she gawped and gasped and gaped at the fancy hotel restaurant we’d had lunch at, the way her jaw had dropped when she’d seen the prices on the menu.
I was pretty certain that some of it had been acting, for my benefit, but I didn’t care. It made me feel awesome. So I’d ordered the most expensive thing I could find. A two-thousand-five-hundred-dollar plate of Wagyu Kobe beef with seasoned vegetables to garnish for her, and a filet mignon with foie gras sauce for me.
Honestly, I’d lost most of my appetite for such things ages ago, and a turkey sandwich would have more than sufficed. Of course, it would have to be tender breast fillet inside a freshly-baked, all-butter croissant with generous helpings of Grey Poupon mustard. I mean, what am I, a savage?
Sandy, of course, had all but tripped over herself at the “absurdly-expensive” meal, as she dubbed it. She had no idea. Dad pretty much had it every night for dinner at home!
And while we ate, we talked over Sandy’s get-rich-quick scheme. Because that’s what it was, I didn’t see any point in denying it. But she’d gotten quite annoyed at me for continually using the term “get-rich-quick-scheme” and accused me of judging her. I suppose it must have seemed quite judgemental coming from me, someone who’s never had to worry about money in his life.
We went over the finer details, such as how Sandy planned to keep 100% of the profits from the deal. I had initially complained about instinct - greed was part of being rich. Rich people don’t stay rich people by being charitable, now, do we? In fact, I read an interesting study in Psychology Today about how the entire core concept of being rich is wanting more than you have, more than you could ever spend, and taking it from people who are just as poor as you. Okay, that was actually a lecture from my Dad, I don’t really read Psychology Today. But I could!
Sandy had, of course, pointed out that I spend more than a million dollars in a day, and I’d backed down. I like to be charitable once, in a while, it’s good for my karma. And my immortal soul, or whatever.
We ended up running way, way, way over Sandy’s lunch hour, but I couldn’t see her getting in any kind of hot water for it, not considering she was working for my Dad.
I’d decided to spend the rest of the day on what I called ‘Nick time.’ I went for a manicure (who said manicures weren’t manly? They’ve literally got the word ‘man’ in them), stopped by my favorite Porsche showroom and took a few of their 911 Carrera beauties in there for a test drive, watched a movie, then went for dinner at the same restaurant I’d taken Sandy.
It wasn’t at all the same without her. I’d suspected that the restaurant might have lost some of its charm since I was back by myself, but I had no idea how much.
That’s the problem with forming emotional attachments. And if I’ve said it once, I must have said it a thousand times. Or more! Forming an attachment to another person, or even an inanimate object, was a transplant. It was a medical procedure. On every level of the term. It was to connect something to you, make it a part of you. Which was all well and good except for the fact that if you were to lose that part, or if something damaged it, the pain would be akin to having a limb forcibly severed from your body.
Love was a dangerous bond and very easily severed. Back in middle school, I didn’t have many friends. I did have one, Oliver, and we’d stayed friends all the way through middle school and junior high, and even though we were as close as brothers now, we hadn’t always been that way. It wasn’t to say that we’d never fought or disagreed. In fact, I remember the first, last, and only fight Oliver and I had ever had, and it was all over a woman.
There’d been a girl in our class. The whispers going around the schoolyard was that this girl was…what’s a nice way to put this? A bit promiscuous, to say the least. And we had it on good authority that this girl was “doing certain things” behind the cafeteria with the varsity team. In telling and retelling the story, I was never any more specific than that. Suffice it to say that this girl, Monica, probably had dirty knees. Take from that one will.
Every boy in our grade was buzzing about this girl, Monica, and whether or not the rumors were true. Now, Oliver and I, we weren’t like other boys in our grade, constantly fixated on sex and the doing of it. No, our interests were more…emotionally-fixed. Both of us would have wanted to ask out girls, to try and get girlfriends, but I personally was too shy. A betting man would put money on Oliver being in the same boat as I, no matter what we said.
But if the rumors were true, then that would change everything. I’m not too sure why I thought that asking out the “class hoe,” so to speak, would be easier or a less daunting task than asking out another girl (Sandy, for example), but I just did. And like with everything, mine and Oliver’s minds were in the same place. So, we both wanted to ask her out, but of course, we didn’t want to get in each others’ way. I’m not sure how we planned on avoiding that, but we didn’t really talk about it.
I knew for a fact, however, that Monica liked me. Even back then, a boy of scarcely thirteen, I’d been good-looking, and I would’ve had no problem getting female attention if I’d but had the confidence to seek it out. Not to mention that my father was the billionaire President of High Risers, the firm that most likely owned the properties that many of peers and classmates were living in. Can you even imagine? It was like I was royalty.
Once teachers started figuring out who I was and who my father was, they started being nicer to me, giving me extensions on late homework without me even having to ask. My peers and classmates had known that my Dad was rich for years, but all the way through elementary school, they’d been too young to care about money. To them, twenty bucks was a lot of money, so it was never that big of a deal if I’m totally honest. But once the kids got old enough to start caring, I started getting more attention than I could shake a stick at. And the one thing that can get you more attention from girls than being handsome is being popular with other girls.
Young girls and even young women are constantly in competition with each other, even if they don’t always realize it. And the one thing that’s guaranteed to turn a woman’s head, to get her to try and court you is if she thinks that other women have tried and failed. Because girls love to feel special. And nothing makes a woman feel more special than being that one girl that could “tame a wild beast,” so to speak. That’s why you always see girls hanging around with the jocks and quarterbacks that treat them like shit. That’s where terms like Alpha Male (men that generate attention) and Beta Male (men that are desperate for female attention) come from.
The general consensus seems to be that men are naturally primal hunters and women are not. I disagree with this, however. Women are hunters but in a much different way. In a way that marksmen as the prey. So, I knew for a fact that Monica was into me. Years later, I’m moved to wonder if it was the money that caught her eye, but it was just as likely my good looks. But I’d heard Oliver talk about how much he liked Monica, how much he’d admired her apparent beauty from afar, and I had no intentions of getting in my friend’s way in any shape or form.
So, I sat back and watched as Oliver courted her, to some degree of success. The two started dating a few weeks later. As for me, I was ecstatically happy with my friend’s success. At least I was for a time. But then I started to feel left out and left behind, especially once Oliver dropped the news on me that he’d lost his virginity to her. It didn’t seem right, good, or fair that I was the one that Monica had wanted in the first place, and Oliver was getting all the action. She’d only settled for him because I’d made myself unavailable for his sake.
So, I met up with Monica after school a few times, under the pretense of “getting to know my best friend’s girlfriend.” Inevitably, of course, we started falling for each other and ended up having sex behind the cafeteria at school. I was surprised, and pleasantly so, at how well Oliver had taken it. According to him, it’d been quite an unfulfilling relationship, and he seemed thrilled to be shot of her, at any rate.
But I, ever the fool, didn’t heed the lesson, and when Monica asked me to be her boyfriend, I said yes with barely any hesitation. So, Monica and I had started dating now. And it wasn’t long before all three of us were hanging out. It was inevitable, thinking about it because Oliver and I spent so much time together. To date, I was to see a lot of him too.
But things began to take a sour turn when Oliver began crossing lines, touching and joking with Monica inappropriately, being what I considered deliberately flirtatious and overtly sexual towards her. I did try to ignore it, at first, but it wasn’t so easy to ignore. Eventually, I let all the jealousy bottle up inside me and then finally, unleashed it all at my so-called best friend, accusing him of all kinds of things and names.
Oliver, it seemed, had been harboring some jealous feelings of his own. Apparently, he was not as cool with me stealing his girlfriend as he had claimed. Who’d have guessed? I guess, trying to see it from his perspective, he must have felt some degree of ownership over our relationship and indeed Monica by extension, given that it was only by his grace that the relationship was allowed to be continued. From my perspective, at least thirteen-year-old Me’s perspective, I was dating a girl that should have been mine from the very beginning, if I hadn’t been looking out for my friend.
And so, two friends, for a few weeks, became bitter enemies, scarcely even looking at each other in the corridors and across the schoolyard. I wasn’t without “friends” and admirers, though, large swathes of students pestered me at every turn, almost as though they were applying for the now-vacant position of my best friend. Maybe they thought I gave Oliver money for hanging around me or something. Despite being surrounded by people who laughed at all my jokes, even the ones that weren’t funny, I’d never felt more alone.
And it was in this period of solitude that I’d finally begun to see the moral of the story. I saw both sides of the conflict, and I saw that both of us had begun with good intentions, but had ended up caving in to greed and jealousy. Neither of us got much female attention, and although we’d believed we could give it up for the other, it had proved to be a different story once Monica was right there in front of us, offering us the very thing that so many boys in our year craved. And the tension had built until nuclear fallout. But Monica, the very architect of our disputes, had escaped the argument unscathed!
And it was my revelation of this to Oliver that pushed him to end the hiatus on our friendship. And on that day, we decided that never would we fall out or argue about a girl ever again. Ever. Because two long-standing friends had nearly ruined a friendship over nothing more than a primal urge, a collection of pheromones. It wasn’t worth it. And on that day, I made another promise, one only to myself. I promised I wouldn’t form any more attachments. Or, more accurately, I wouldn’t act on them. Oliver was the only friend I needed, and one extra limb was more than enough.
Transplanting more extra limbs onto oneself is just opening yourself up to more damage. And to my credit, I’d managed to keep that promise for a lot longer than I would have thought. In fact, I kept both. Two more girls would find themselves amid Oliver and my friendship over the course of the years, both in high school, when bodies were changing, and temptations ran a lot higher. I remember them like it was the other day.
Milena and Juliana. They weren’t around at the same time, of course, but still, I remember them. With both, I had real personal connections, despite my reservations about emotional connections. I couldn’t control my own feelings, I decided. But I could control whether I let them control me. And so, I refused to act on what I felt.
Oliver’s attraction to both the aforementioned girls was purely physical. He was at that stage in a young man’s life, when his hormones were at their strongest, and he was willing to do a lot of morally-questionable things in order to satisfy his desires, even to the point of going on a hiatus with his own girlfriend in order to pursue his fantasies free of guilt.
And still, I did nothing. Because I remembered what had happened last time, and the devastating fallout it had precipitated. I knew that what Oliver was doing was selfish, and immature and wrong on several levels, but I also knew that for there to be peace, someone has to be the bigger person. On those particular occasions, the privilege was mine. As it would be for every other occasion that came our way, I was determined to prove it.
The moral of the story was that emotional attachments can cause a lot more harm than good, even when everyone involved has good intentions. That lesson was hard-learned on my part, but it’s one that I felt obliged to carry with me. But, try as I might to resist, the lesson went out of the window once I’d met Sandy.
She was smart. Funny. And one of the cutest girls I’d ever seen in my life. When I was with her, everything seemed just…easy and manageable. When I was away from her, I wondered how I would cope until I saw her again. And after years of being apart, after we both graduated from high school and went down our very different career paths, we’d found each other again. And those old, oh-so-familiar feelings were creeping back up again.
Only a few hours ago, Sandy and I had been at this very restaurant, and it had been the best restaurant in the world. Now, what was it? Barely even recognizable without her. As I stood there, in the entrance hall, I was suddenly struck by a wave of inspiration. I mouthed ‘one moment’ to the maitre’d and stepped out of the line, raising my cellphone to my ear.
As I suspected, Sandy answered on the third ring.
“Can I help you, Nicholas?” she asked, somewhat sternly, but I could tell she was pleased to hear from me. I guess I just have a sixth-sense where Sandy is concerned.
“Sandy,” I said in my usual charming tones, brimming with just the right balanced equilibrium of cockiness and charisma. “How’ve you been, it’s been so long since we’ve talked.”
Sandy paused, and I could tell she was confused. It took all my powers of self-control to not snigger. “What are you talking about, Nick, you saw me literally earlier today.”
I cocked my head quizzically, even though she couldn’t see me. Acting is everything. “That was you?” I asked, putting on my best ‘puzzled’ tone.
“Oh, very funny,” Sandy said, and I could tell she was rolling her eyes.
“Why, thank you,” I accepted the fake compliment with grace.
“So, might I ask why you called me?” Sandy asked. “Or was it just to share your comedic expertise?”
I wasn’t too sure I knew what half of those words meant, but I foraged on nonetheless. “Just a quick question,” I said innocently. “What did you have for dinner?”
“Nothing, I haven’t eaten yet,” Sandy replied.
“Good,” I said promptly. “Because if you had, I wouldn’t be able to invite you out to dinner. Or, rather, I would, but you’d have to sit there and watch me eat.”
“It’s half seven in the evening, Nick!” Sandy said, her tones full of surprise.
“Don’t worry,” I waved this away. “I’ll send my driver to come and get you. It’s no problem.”
“I take it you’re not taking ‘no’ for an answer?” Sandy asked, dryly.
I frowned. “No? What does this word mean?”
Sandy sighed. “Alright, Nick, I’ll be there in a bit.”
I grinned as I hung up. Excellent. She’d be about an hour, maybe an hour fifteen. Just enough time for me to run home and change. A two-piece suit would not do, not at all.
About an hour later, she finally arrived. And boy, did she look different. Earlier, she’d been dressed for work, but now? Sandy was dressed to impress. Dressed to turn some heads and drop some jaws. And above all, she was ready to shock and awe.
She wore a spotless white dress with long sleeves that hugged her body from her shoulders down to her shapely hips. The dress sported a long parting that streaked all the way from the hem up to her left thigh. Beneath the hem of her dress, she was wearing four-inch stiletto heels. She’d been stunning before, but seeing her like this…she was a knockout.
Sandy saw me mere moments after I saw her, and she couldn’t resist a cheeky little smile. I said a silent prayer to whichever God happened to be listening that I’d had the foresight to go home and change. Being seen here, with this gorgeous goddess, in a two-piece suit, would’ve been embarrassing. Instead, I was wearing my second favorite tuxedo. The first was being cleaned.
Oh, how I love the tuxedo. Such an elegant, debonair garment, most famously co-opted by the one and only James “Double-Oh-Seven” Bond. The novels by Ian Fleming and the movie adaptations were perhaps the only things that my Dad and I saw eye-to-eye on. When I was younger, my greatest disappointment in life was that I wasn’t British, something Dad and I share. One needs the English accent in order to use words like ‘mate,’ ‘tea,’ ‘wanker,’ and ‘taking the piss.’ It just sounds ridiculous if I were to say it.
I may not have been Agent Bond himself, but I certainly looked the part on that evening. I wore an impeccable, crisp black jacket over a white shirt with black buttons that was so expensive it would have fed a family of four for two months. A silky, velvety, black cummerbund separated my shirt from my pants, so neatly pressed that the two long creases down the front could probably have cut the tension in the room if I’d felt so inclined.
I wore two five-hundred-dollar Christian Louboutin Oxford loafers, and to cap off the look, a perfectly tied black bow-tie, which I’d left at a slightly wonky angle so people would know it wasn’t fake. I have far too much respect for the tuxedo to ever wear a clip-on, of all things.
