Forever Yours
10
Getting Real
DON NEGOTIATED the terms of the sale to the security software company and Henry signed the licensing agreements on behalf of the LLC. The buyer agreed to make payment after the first of the year so the group could make arrangements for taxes without being under the pressure of the year-end filing date. They needed to get their finances stabilized before they funded the corporation.
When it came to New Year’s Eve, however, they were all excited to celebrate. Carol had taken off for Cleveland as soon as the winter holiday break began, but promised Henry she’d be back for New Year’s Eve if he got them a room for the long weekend. There would still be a week of winter break after that and she planned to go on a ski trip with friends from Cleveland.
Their post-Thanksgiving reunion had been strained at first until they decided to tell each other about their encounters with their hall pass partners.
“Well, Chastity reminded me once again that she is not my girlfriend and not to get attached,” Henry said. “And when I took her out for her birthday, she didn’t want to have sex again so soon after we’d done it the night before Thanksgiving. That was fine. We went to a movie and had a good time, but she’s really my business partner. I don’t know if even those occasional get-togethers will continue anymore.”
“Don’t give up on it, really,” Carol said. “You won’t have me around forever. I can’t imagine that the few times we have sex are enough to satisfy your needs. Most of mine are sublimated into studies.”
They’d gone out Saturday evening just to have this conversation. Carol hesitated a bit before she continued with her side of the adventure.
“I’m in love,” she said finally. “And it’s frustrating as hell. I mean, we could go find a place for sex right now and it would be mostly me trying to get you to eat me to orgasm so I could forget Taylor.”
“Didn’t she… come across?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. She sure did. And I spent hours munching between her legs and sleeping with her in my bed. Then Saturday, she packed up to go back to Michigan and told me that it had been fun, but she wasn’t going to mention it to her boyfriend or he’d want to join in. She figured that would just mean we’d always have the awkward relationship of us two girls and her husband. She’d be way too jealous for that to ever work. So, she said it was nice but that was the last time.”
“Oh, Carol, I’m so sorry. And you really love her.”
“I thought she loved me. Henry, I was prepared to come home and tell you we needed to break up because I’d found the love of my life. I’m sorry. It was selfish of me to go home for the break thinking I might actually be going to meet my forever girlfriend.”
“What do you want to do, hon?” Henry asked.
“Well, now that I’ve spewed out everything, that whole idea of having you eat me until I come so hard I forget her doesn’t sound half bad. Is there someplace we can go?” she asked.
“That depends. How do you feel about meeting my parents at breakfast tomorrow morning?” he asked.
“Oh! Shit! You mean, go to your room?”
“They’ve told me often enough that I don’t need to be afraid to bring my girlfriend home for the night. They aren’t trying to keep us apart.”
“Meet your parents?” she said hesitantly. Then she shrugged. “Okay. You met mine and we survived. I’ll try not to be too loud!”
It had been a good night and not too awkward at breakfast. That was when they decided to spend the long New Year’s weekend together. Henry reserved a room at the Suites Hotel and when he went to Cleveland early on New Year’s Eve to pick her up, he and Carol came directly back to the hotel to check in. They spent a comfortable time renewing their relationship in a way they hadn’t had a chance to do since their night in his room.
The ‘First Annual Company Holiday Party,’ as they called it, was held at the Constitution Links Golf Club. Henry and Luke were members in good standing and the party were all given wristbands that declared them too young for alcohol. All except Tom.
Tom was Chastity’s date for the party. None of the others knew him. He seemed nice enough, though he was several years older than the rest of them. That might have influenced his slightly condescending attitude toward their ‘company.’ No one bothered to correct his opinion. Carol was introduced and liked Henry’s three partners.
She took a turn dancing with both Luke and Tom as Henry danced with Chastity and Isobel. Soon, Carol was next to him again and the music had begun to slow as midnight approached.
“You’ve slept with both of them, haven’t you,” Carol whispered as she kissed his cheek.
“Whatever do you mean?” Henry asked innocently.
“Well, I knew about Chastity. There are little clues about Isobel. That last dance did not require quite that much touching. Thankfully. While you were in a clinch with Isobel, I was trying to stay out of one with Tom. He’s a little creepy. And he’s definitely been drinking.”
“He’s older, so he doesn’t have a non-alcohol wristband,” Henry said. “I hope he and Chastity plan to take a cab home.”
“Well, it’s okay that you’ve had both of them. I’d fuck both of them.”
“Hmm. I might be able to arrange that.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know if Isobel swings both ways. We’ll have to see.”
“Well, when classes start again in a week, we’ll be much too busy to screw all the time,” Carol said. “Hence, this long weekend.”
“Where are you going skiing?” Henry asked.
“There’s a little place on the lake about twenty-five miles east of Cleveland. We girls reserved it before we graduated last spring. The four of us are supposed to ski during the day and sit around drinking hot chocolate and telling stories about our great adventures at night. And maybe some schnapps.”
“Sounds like you’ll have a good time.”
“Look!” Carol pointed Henry toward where Tom was hanging on to Chastity’s arm as she tried to pull away. Carol gave Henry a little push and he headed straight for the conflict.
“That looks a little rough, Tom,” Henry said coming up to them.
“Fuck off. It’s time for us to leave this hole and start our own party.”
“I don’t want to leave, Tom. This is my party. I invited you. If you want to leave, go. I’m staying,” Chastity said, struggling to free her arm.
“I said we’re going,” Tom growled, pulling roughly at Chastity.
Henry reached out and grabbed Tom’s wrist, just as he had Chastity’s He twisted against Tom’s skin.
“Hey! Let go, you son of a bitch,” Tom said.
“You were told to leave,” Henry said. “Let go of Chastity and get your drunk ass out of here.”
“I haven’t had nearly enough to get drunk,” Tom said, pulling his hand away from both Henry and Chastity. He rounded on Henry with a fist raised, just in time to see Luke step up beside him. Isobel and Carol rushed to comfort Chastity.
“It’s time for you leave,” Henry said again. Luke nodded. The two of them escorted Tom to the door, quickly joined by one of the club security men.
“Mr. Reynolds needs to leave the club,” Henry said to the doorman. “Permanently.”
“Can I call you a cab, Mr. Reynolds?” the doorman asked. Tom spun as if to have another go at Luke and Henry, only to be met by the combined presence of the doorman and the security guard.
“You can take your filthy nigger hands off me! You two-bit punks with your whore business party. Nobody treats me like that!” Tom spent another minute shouting invective at the partners, the security, the doorman, and everyone inside, as the club employees kept him moving out of the club. Then he stumbled away to his car. As he started the car and pulled out of his parking spot, the doorman spoke into his cell phone.
“Thank you 9-1-1. This is Constitution Links. There is a party leaving the club in a blue Lexus, license plate RAD4141. It is my belief the driver is inebriated and a danger to other travelers. He declined our offer to call a cab.”
“One moment, please.” There was a moment’s silence on the line. “We’ve dispatched a patrol. Thank you for the report,” the operator said. They disconnected.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” Luke said to the doorman. “Not one of our usual people.”
“He’s been here before,” the doorman said. “He won’t be allowed in again.”
Luke and Henry went back to where Isobel and Carol were comforting Chastity. Carol was examining the bruise discoloring her wrist already.
“I told Chastity we’d take her home tonight,” Carol said immediately.
“No problem,” Henry said.
“Is he okay?” Chastity asked.
“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Henry said. “The rest of his night is not likely to be what he imagined it would be.”
“More importantly, are you okay, Chas?” Luke asked.
“Yeah. It happens sometimes. He sounded like a nice guy when he called and I thought it would be a good innocuous date for the party. We’d have sex later and then I’d go home. Quid pro quo.”
“Chas? He called you out of the blue?” Isobel said. “Why would you accept a date with a guy you don’t even know?”
“Izzy, wake up. It’s what I do. How do you think I came up with a thousand dollars to put in the company or my rent on an apartment by myself and my two cats? Seating people at the Olde Towne Inne? I don’t have rich parents. Or any parents.”
“Shit. Honey, we’ll take care of you,” Henry said.
“You do, Henry. We have our arrangement. When the company is open and we’re rolling in money, I’ll only do it when we need something we can’t get any other way.”
They were all silent for a moment, soaking in what Chastity had revealed. Then people started counting down the seconds until the New Year. A waiter put a bottle of sparkling juice and glasses on their table.
“Let’s forget the unpleasantness and join the countdown,” Luke said.
There were noisemakers and champagne corks flying. The lights didn’t go completely out, but they stayed low long enough for everyone to get a good kiss in. Henry kissed Carol and then turned to find Chastity waiting for a kiss as well. Of course, he still abided by her ‘no tongue’ rule—perhaps understanding it a little better. He was surprised, though, when Carol pulled Chastity around for a kiss as well.
The party didn’t officially end until one o’clock, but people spent most of the last hour giving good wishes and saying goodnight to everyone. The partners were out of the club by 12:30.
“I invited her to join us,” Carol said after they dropped Chastity at her door and headed for the hotel. “She declined. Should I have offered… like money?”
“No! God, no! I’ve known Chastity since we were in junior high school. The subject has never come up.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Maybe I’m just dense. We’ve always had an understanding. At least since our first time together at the Prom last spring. She has rules.”
“Tell me.”
“No tongue kisses. Stay away from her navel. Treat her like a goddess and always take care of her.”
“She’s really a caretaker, isn’t she?”
“I guess so. But she needs to be taken care of, too. If Isobel and Luke bowed out of our company, Chas and I would still launch it. I promised to take care of her and I will.”
“Um… About the rules… You like tongue kisses, don’t you? Not just faking it for me?”
“I would put my tongue anyplace in your body I could fit it. Just don’t bite it off,” he laughed as they reached their room at the hotel and he opened the door.
“I can think of someplace you can put it tonight.”
“Any place it hasn’t been before?”
“What? No repeats?”
“I’ll repeat, over and over,” he said.
“Good. Get my clothes off me!”
The remainder of Tom Reynolds’ night was not as happy as anyone else in the group. Even Chastity, home alone with her cats, counted out the ten hundred-dollar bills he’d given her when he picked her up. She supposed she might have to fuck him eventually, just so he wouldn’t try to trash her name. Guys always got what they wanted from her eventually.
Tom, on the other hand, cleverly decided to try to outrun the police when he saw their flashing lights coming up on him. That led him over a curb and into a fire hydrant that began spraying freezing water up under his car. He tried to escape on foot, but couldn’t get his seatbelt unfastened before officers were handcuffing him and pulling him from the car. When the belt kept him in place, they simply cut it and hauled him to the squad car.
His car was impounded. Firemen and maintenance workers were called out to stem the freezing water and repair the hydrant. His license was taken and he spent the night in a holding cell with a dozen other drunken revelers. The charges piled up against him. What would have been a simple, if unpleasant, DUI, now included resisting arrest, fleeing an emergency vehicle, destruction of public property, reckless endangerment, and anything else the district attorney could think of based on the police report.
It would be a week before he was released on bail to await trial.
Henry and Carol’s weekend included a New Year’s Day brunch with his parents who were very interested in the events of the previous evening. They’d chosen a quiet night in for their celebration and said they hadn’t actually stayed awake until midnight.
“Well, Carol, are you satisfied with your progress at the university so far?” Sylvia asked as they sat down to waffles Ryan was pulling off the iron as quickly as he could. Henry put out a plate of bacon and one of scrambled eggs.
“Yes. It’s been a good program so far. I feel I’m making progress and at least getting a bunch of fundamentals out of the way.”
“And you’re pre-med?” Ryan asked.
“Well, health sciences. Pre-med isn’t actually a defined major, it’s more of a selection of paths that will hopefully lead to med school,” Carol said. “These waffles are so good! They never serve anything this good in the residence hall.”
“How well I remember,” Sylvia said. “I did my nursing degree there and Ryan got his degree in computer science. Of course, that was long before there was an AI specialization like Henry is working on. Where do you want to go to med school?”
“Um… Johns Hopkins,” Carol said. “It’s a difficult program to get into. The university here was my second choice, actually. I got wait-listed at Johns Hopkins for the Public Health program. That’s a surer way to get into their med school. There’s still a chance they’ll call me this spring and tell me there’s an opening.”
“Really?” Henry said. “You’d just leave our university and go off to… isn’t Hopkins in, like, Maryland?”
“It’s in Baltimore. And yes. If they call, I’ll go. I don’t know if there’s much chance of it, though. I thought they’d call all fall semester and I’d be able to start spring semester there. Not yet, though.”
“Wow! I don’t know what to hope, except that of course I hope you’ll get in. That’s what you really want. I’d miss you, though,” Henry said.
“Yeah. You’d be the hardest part of leaving,” she said. “And there’s no golf program at JHU. I might have to take up tennis.”
“I’m glad I rank right up there with golf,” Henry laughed. She’d made a similar joke on their fall break weekend.
It was a real shock. Carol had never mentioned that she wanted to transfer to Baltimore, but he supposed she considered it a hope but not a likelihood. He wasn’t going to let it disturb him. He was very fond of Carol, but neither of them was really treating their relationship as if it was more than a convenience.
“When does spring golf start?” Ryan asked.
“First competition is the first of March,” Henry said. “That’s probably how I’ll be spending spring break. The matches are in Georgia and North Carolina. Those are the only B-Team matches this spring, so unless I miraculously knock another four strokes off my game, those are probably the only matches I’ll be playing in.”
“Same here,” Carol said. “I already know I won’t be knocking enough off my game to make varsity.”
“Well, at least you’ll have a nice week traveling together, won’t you?” Sylvia said brightly. The two looked at each other with a big grin and nodded.
Henry and Carol enjoyed the rest of their weekend together, going to an indoor driving range, seeing the new Dune movie, and spending plenty of quality time in bed. Then he drove her back to her house in Cleveland where her three girlfriends were waiting to start their ski trip.
When Henry got back home, he went straight to his room. He admitted to himself that he’d been distracted a few times over the weekend when stray thoughts of Tom Reynolds crossed his mind. He seemed more sinister than just a guy who got drunk and tried to rough up his escort. There was only one way Henry could think of to find out if he should be worried.
When he was in high school, he’d spent time getting to know computer hackers and testing his own skills against them. Most of their conquests were like counting coup. A hacker had to show that he could get past the firewalls of this or that corporation without getting caught in order to be accepted among the people who led him to the dark web. There, Henry found several tools that were useful for other than nefarious purposes.
Henry had a search engine he’d modified with his own AI—the one he’d just filed the patent on. With it, he could search for just about anything that resided in the cloud. The cloud was really just a bunch of servers on a ranch in Utah or Arizona or Montana or wherever else one of the big guys had set up shop. The server farms had thousands of servers with petabytes of storage each where innocent (and not so innocent) people believed their data was securely stored. For Henry, it was all exposed.
He searched for everything he could locate on Tom Reynolds.
Tom’s private email was filled with messages coercing coeds at the university to sleep with him in exchange for him getting them the financial aid they applied for at the office where Tom worked. One had threatened to report him and had mysteriously disappeared. Henry packaged that evidence and sent it to the VP of Financial Services at the university. He was pretty sure that would get Tom shit-canned, but it still left him a dangerous person to people Henry cared about.
Even Tom’s banking records were an open book for Henry to search. He paused. Police would need a warrant to seize his banking records and simply sending the records to the police would not be enough. But Henry found transfers of funds on the days female students received aid, meaning if a woman hadn’t acquiesced to his sexual demands, she ended up paying him out of her financial aid package, whether she knew it or not. Reporting the suspected fraud to both the university and the bank would be enough to freeze Tom’s accounts.
People like Tom always had a back door to escape through if they were discovered. Henry searched further. He discovered the address of property in Upstate New York registered to Tom as owner and figured that would be where he would escape to. He alerted police there to the suspected behavior and asked them to be aware of any APB that came out.
It took the better part of the week before Henry had dug up as much as he could on Tom Reynolds. By the time he was released on bond, he had no car, no job, and no bank accounts. There was only one thing left for Henry to do.
He called Luke Riordan’s father.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
