I saw many people bypass me on their way to the top, shady dealings and cutthroat tactics gave most of them a lift up. But now I was seeing those same people crash and burn on the way down once their dark dealings caught up with them. Case in point, her old man.
Timothy Bronson had been someone I looked up to as a business role model. Sure he had an easy start, having inherited the newspaper from his own old man. But it’s what he’d done with it in the ensuing years that made him stand out in my eyes. The fact that he’d expanded the enterprise to what it was by the time I bought it off of him, and had made it a contender among more well established organizations in the same trade, made it easy to see the man as a force to be reckoned with in his field.
I’d procured a kind of semi formal relationship with him through mutual channels, but had always stayed to the fringes. I wasn’t in his league back then and I knew it. Over the last five years the wind had shifted and I started hearing the stories. I’d ignored them at first, after all the man I’d come to know though slightly, could in no way be guilty of the things being said about him. Why would he need to steal and rob others when he’d been given so much?
For someone like me who’d had to work for every scrap, who’d buckled down and made a conscious choice to do everything on the up and up, it made no sense. Life wasn’t as complicated as some people made it out to be, and there was no need to squeeze the little man to get ahead. I had a talent and an eye for making things bigger and better than how I found them; that was my driving force. Also being able to supply people with jobs was a big boost for me.
I guess my mother’s staunch upbringing and the values she’d forced down my throat at an early age had a lot to do with that. Which brings me to something else. If the man had turned out to be a thieving asshole with the morals of a gutter snipe, just what had he passed on to his daughter? And was I interested enough to find out?
Since I was getting nowhere with my line of thought I took a quick shower and got ready for the day. For whatever reason she was plaguing my mind, I still had work to do and I wasn’t gonna get shit done by moping around my place like a lovesick teenager.
EMILY
Well shit, this stuff really works. Day two and I can barely keep up. After that first night when Simone raided my closet, once I got back from feeding mother, she kept me up all night taking strategic pictures of each piece before showing me how to upload them to a website that she literally had up and running in less than two hours.
I was dog tired by the time she took pity on me and left so I could drop into bed for some much needed sleep. I could’ve told her there was no use, I hadn’t slept through the night since daddy died. That’s the reason for the circles under my eyes, the bags I attribute to Jason Storm. I cut my thoughts off right there. That man makes me crazy for more reasons than one.
Surprisingly I’d dropped off and slept like a log only stirring as the sun came through the slats of my window shades. I’d lain there for the longest time trying to catch my bearings. Not surprisingly ‘he’ was the first thing on my mind before it cleared and I banished him to the farthest regions of my psyche. It’s been like that for the past week or so, ever since I started making a fool of myself in front of him every evening like clockwork.
That day I’d climbed out of bed feeling even worse than I had before Simone had given me hope. Sometime during that hectic night I’d caught her fever and had actually started to believe that this might be the answer. The way she’d priced my old barely used stuff would, if sold, bring in a cool hundred grand. Wishful thinking I know, but at least I was doing something purposeful instead of feeling sorry for myself. Therein lied the hope.
By the time I woke up that first day I knew it was just wishful thinking and the dream died a quick death, that is until I made myself look at the website. My heart had gone into overdrive when I saw the notices and the hits from just that first night and early morning. Almost half the stuff had been ordered. My head spun as I tried to make sense of it and I’d called Simone in a panic.
“Girl it’s fuck this shit o’clock what’re you doing up? Didn’t we just go to bed?” She yawned on the other end and I heard the sheets rustle as she sat up. “You’ve got to get over here, half this stuff has been ordered. How am I supposed to ship this stuff, where am I gonna get…”