Henry's End (26 page)

He’d been in a pissy
mood for five days. And he knew exactly why. Looking at the picture on his phone for the 600
^th
time, he hated the way he felt. Obsessed. Like a little girl with a crush on a pop star. Argh. He just wanted to slap himself.

“Hey, burning the midnight oil again?” Kami Townes, his business partner at M. Silver & Associates, a boutique downtown Manhattan advertising agency, sat down in a chair across from his desk.

“I can’t believe she’s been gone five days and hasn’t called.” The ‘she’ he was referring to was their business partner and agency founder, Mia Silver, or as of five days ago, Mia Moore. Generally he just referred to her by his pet nickname given to her many years before, BBC. Short for Bitch Be Crazy.

Kami rolled her eyes and sighed. “The woman is on her honeymoon, Seth. On a boat in the middle of nowhere. Hopefully fucking her gorgeous husband into oblivion. Checking in with you should not be at the top of her list. Bravo, Mia,” she yelled in the direction of Mia’s empty office. “Bravo for disconnecting from this place.”

“Well, I need to talk to her.” Seth Shapiro was in a snit.

“You’re just feeling lost because you have no more wedding planning to do.”

Mia was the rare woman who did not possess the female wedding gene. Luckily for her, her best friend, Seth, and her mother, Lois, were both given a double dose. So while Mia attended to her thriving advertising agency and her two small children, Nathaniel and Portia, Seth and Lois had planned every detail of Mia’s dream wedding to the love of her life, Schooner Moore. All Mia needed to do was show up that day.

“No. That’s not it.” Seth’s tone was clipped.

“So, then what is it? You’ve been an absolute and total bitch this entire week.”

“I know.” Shrugging his shoulders, he pressed a button on his cellphone and slid it across the desk to Kami.

Picking it up, she smiled. “I really liked him. What a good guy. He has that centered peacefulness about him. And he’s very easy on the eyes.” She regarded the picture for a few moments. “So what are you doing with a picture of him on your phone? Did he know you took this?” Kami slid the phone back to Seth.

Picking it up to look at the picture, “Of course he didn’t know.” Putting his phone back down on his desk with an exaggerated sigh, “So how much do you know about him?”

“Probably less than you do. He was a friend of Schooner and Mia’s in college. He and Schooner stayed close. When Schooner decided to hand off day-to-day L9 operations to Yoli so that he could focus on his foundation, he needed someone to fill her spot running the west coast facilities. He reached outside of the organization to fill it by tapping an old friend.”

“I’d like to be tapping that old friend.”

“Insta-lust?” she asked.

“Well definitely, the man is incredibly handsome, but as you were saying, there’s something more about him. It was impossible for me not to be drawn to him, but I didn’t get the impression that he wanted to drag me off and fuck my brains out.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Kami disagreed.

“What do you mean? Don’t hold out on me, bitch. You know how long it’s been since anyone has even made me look twice.”

Kami laughed, clearly loving that she was torturing Seth. “You seriously didn’t notice the night before the wedding when it was just the gang of us sitting around the table out on the deck drinking champagne?”

“Notice what?” Seth had his puss face on.

“He was hanging on your every word, Seth.”

“No, he wasn’t.” He waved a dismissive hand at her.

“You know me better than that. If he totally wasn’t into you, I would say that to you.”

“So you thought he was into me?” Seth’s big brown eyes were wide, waiting for reassurance.

“I definitely do; but here’s the thing, put yourself in his shoes.”

“I’d rather put myself in his pants,” he muttered.

Kami sat back and laughed. Seth Shapiro was one amusing man. “Seriously Seth, here’s a guy who basically knew nobody there. He knew Schooner and Schooner’s parents. He hadn’t seen Mia in over twenty years. OK, and he probably knows Holly and Zac, too. But that’s it. And then there’s this extremely loud New York crowd who apparently have this very close and dysfunctional relationship.”

Although she’d been a Manhattanite for twenty-five years, Kami was a southern debutante from Birmingham, Alabama, and the sweet drawl had never left her voice. “And have you ever listened to this group? It sounds like a busload of old ladies at a chicken market in the Caribbean.”

Seth laughed, “I guess we’re not the shyest crowd on the planet.” He seemed proud.

“So as I was saying, put yourself in his shoes. He’s the total stranger in the crowd, we all have a lot of history. We work together. We socialize with one another. We’re all a family. I think he did very well under those circumstances.”

“And you think he liked me?” Seth hated how needy that sounded the minute it came out of his mouth.

“Seth, you are like the mayor. You run everything. Everyone knows you. You’re at the center of everything and you had us all marching to attention last weekend. You are a force to be reckoned with. And you just don’t give a damn what walls are in front of you, you put your head down and charge through them.”

“Ugh, you make me sound like a farm animal. Do you think I scared him?”

“No. I think he was just trying to get a read on you.”

Seth sighed, looking forlorn.

Shaking her head with a smile, “In over twenty years, I have never seen you react this way.”

“I felt like I knew him, Kami, and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t know me.”

“Wow,” she was struck by his raw candor.

“And we don’t know anything about the guy.”

“Oh, but we do,” Kami disagreed.

“What? What do we know?”

“We know some really important things,” she paused and laughed at the face Seth was giving her. “He’s been Schooner’s friend all these years. Schooner, a huge control freak, trusts this man to run his vast west coast operations, or maybe I should say, empire. We know he was Mia’s friend first in college and she introduced him to Schooner, and from the reaction she had when she saw him again, after all those years, well, the word overjoyed doesn’t do it justice. If the two of them love this man so much, then I think we’ve just met the latest member of our little dysfunctional family.”

Seth picked up his phone and looked at the picture again. “There’s something about him, Kami.”

She smiled at her friend. “Well, enjoy the opportunity to find out exactly what it is. Why don’t you give Yoli a call? Find out if she’s transitioned the advertising and marketing over to him yet. She may not have, just because she probably doesn’t want to overwhelm him. But just let her know that you’ll be available to work with him directly, and get him up to speed, so that it’s one less thing she’s got on her plate as she picks up Schooner’s responsibilities.”

“Yeah, but you usually do the day-to-day stuff on the L9 account.”

“In the name of love, I am officially sharing it with you.”

“OK, I’ll call her in the morning and make the offer.”

“She’ll be thrilled. You just took a headache off her hands.

He snickered, “Well, I’d like to make his head ache in my hands.”

There was just something about Henry Clark and Seth Shapiro had to know if he’d felt anything, too.

Almost 8 P.M. on Wednesday night and Seth sat in the quiet of his office, looking at the lights of lower Manhattan and the Freedom Tower. He hadn’t spoken to Mia in over a week, arriving at the office one morning just after she’d called in. Schooner had taken her on a honeymoon sailing trip on their boat, headed up the coast to capture fall foliage and the Northern Lights.

“I just hung up with Mia,” Kami had told him when he got to the office that morning. “Try her cell, they might still be in port. The signal wasn’t great, but she definitely wanted to talk to you, too.”

“She knows my cell number.” The news did nothing to improve his mood. Sitting down at his desk, he tried her cell, but it went right to voicemail, and his mood became even fouler.

“So what did she have to say?” he asked Kami later that day.

She laughed, “I wondered when you were going to ask. She said they’re having a great time, but she misses the kids and she misses us. She sounded like she was ready to come home. You know Mia, she doesn’t do well with the whole relaxing thing.”

“BBC relaxed is an oxymoron.”

Early on in their friendship, when Seth had given Mia the nickname ‘BBC’, she returned the favor with her pet name for him, ‘Princess’. Having survived breathtaking highs and gut wrenching lows, the two had a relationship that was thicker than blood. Oftentimes words were not needed between them, yet the other instinctively knew what was being thought.

As he sat in the quiet office, everyone gone for the evening, Seth thought about how different things felt without Mia around. The energy felt incomplete. And in some ways, he felt incomplete.

He literally jumped in his chair as his thoughts were broken by his desk phone ringing.

“M. Silver and Associates. This is Seth Shapiro.”

“I somehow knew you’d still be there and would pick up the phone. I’m sure everyone else has gone for the evening.”

“Am I that predictable?” He sat back in his chair, smiling.

The soft laugh on the other end of the line felt like a caress, and he actually felt himself pressing his cheek into the phone, as if it would bring them physically closer.

“Well, I don’t know you well enough to really answer that. But my gut tells me there’s nothing predictable about you.”

Seth smiled into the phone. He had put off calling Yoli to offer help, feeling as if he’d look too transparent, so this call was a surprise. “How are you doing, is everything falling into place for you out there?”

“Oh, so you do know who you’re talking to?” he sounded amused.

I’ve been trying to remember in my head for eleven days what your voice sounded like and the minute I heard it, it felt like yesterday since I’d heard it last and there was no doubt that it was you. And now my eleven days of pissyness is officially over. You called me.

Sigh.

“Well, if you had started out with some heavy breathing I just would have thought it was the usual suspects.”

Laughing, “I’d never want to be lumped in with the usual suspects.”

Mister you don’t get lumped in with anyone I’ve ever met.

Seth laughed, “Well, that would depend on your kink factor.”

There was silence on the other end of the line and Seth immediately wanted to smack himself. Had he stepped over the line? After all, this was business even though the core executive groups of Schooner and Mia’s organizations were like one big, crazy family. He was still an outsider, the new guy. He hadn’t been privy to the way they all joked around with one another.

“See, you’re definitely not predictable.”

Phew … he took that in stride.

“So seriously,” Seth asked, “how are you doing?”

“I’m good. It kind of took me a little bit after I got back from New York to feel settled in again.”

“Why is that?” Seth wanted to know everything about him.

“Well, I think it was a couple of things. Starting a new job, and then having a break, that although the break had a business aspect to it, it was primarily pleasure and it kind of halted the groove I had going. And while it was great meeting everyone, it was also really hard to leave everyone in New York and be the sole guy to come back here. You’re all together there.”

“Watch what you wish for.” Seth tried to lighten the moment, but had the distinct feeling that Henry Clark had been feeling as out of sorts as he had since Schooner and Mia’s wedding.

Laughing, “That’s probably very good advice.”

“Well I’ve got plenty of that to dole out.”

“Good, that’s what I was hoping,” and his tone immediately became business-like. “I noticed on the calendar that there is a photo shoot set-up for three weeks from now to redesign brochures. I asked Yoli about it and she said to work with you and Kami and that you’d help me through the process. I’m not a marketing guy, so I’ve never done this before.”

“I’m just pulling up the production schedule for you.” Seth scanned the data on his laptop. “It looks like you’ve got Scott Hoover booked for a three-day shoot, multi-locations, a generic brochure and then a few facility specific pamphlets. Have you talked to Scott yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, he’s very easy to work with and has done multiple L9 projects, so he’ll need to know concepts, goals and things of that nature, but he’ll be fairly self-sufficient. I’m going to have our art department get you and Yoli some comps and once we’ve got the basic promotion worked out, we’ll start on model recruitment. Scott can help with that piece.”

“This sounds overwhelming.”

“It’s really not. After the first one, you’ll feel like a pro.”

“Will one of you be on-site for this?” The discomfort was evident in his voice.

“Kami and Mia have been handling L9 personally, so don’t worry, one or both of them will come out and take over everything. You’ll just have to follow the bouncing ball with those two little control freaks.”