“Don’t play the fool with me. I’m talking about your precious little auction that you are running upstairs. That exclusive thing that only the most important people get access to?” Penny’s hands were on her hips and she was glaring at me, still standing there in the clothes I had handed to her less than an hour ago. The tank top was barely enough to cover her breasts and without a bra, her magnificent tits were swaying as she moved. Now wasn’t the time for me to focus on Penny’s assets though.
“You don’t know anything about the auction.”
She shook her head. “Like hell, I don’t. I had a guy in there tonight. He’s got a recording of the entire thing and he made it out with your little catalogue listing who was up for auction tonight. You think that’s not going to sell us a million copies and you would be wrong.”
I was still perplexed. The entire interview series was supposed to do something so that they could do a feature on us, not some kind of story to expose us to the public in a way that could destroy the club. Then it dawned on me the first thing she had said. I didn’t know who she was.
“Who the fuck are you then? Who do you work for?”
She pulled out a badge with a different credential on it. “I work for Expose and we’re doing a story on you. We’ve got enough to break it now and I have a feeling my editor is going to want to run with this as soon as we can. Don’t bother to try and get out ahead of it. We run a weekly and it will be out by next weekend. This isn’t something you’re going to have to wait around months for. Nope, Pete. You’re going to know exactly what this is going to mean for your business in about five days. I hope you’re ready.”
I stood there, stunned and still not understanding what would motivate all of this.
“So you were just here to get this story and go? Why did it feel like something more personal?”
She lowered her eyes and cleared her throat. “I was doing what I needed to do to get to you. I wasn’t going to sit around and hope that you could give me the information I needed. I kept you busy down here while my other guy was in the auction. I made sure you trusted me and wanted me. It made everything else possible. Is that so hard for you to believe, Pete? That I, little old Penny Saxs, could make someone like you lust after me? Hell, I bet I could get it again right now if I really wanted it.” Penny took the tiniest step toward me, but I stood my ground.
I took a deep breath and felt my shoulders sag under the weight of the information I was taking in. “Listen, I’m not going to pretend that this was going to be some kind of life changing love affair, but I was really enjoying spending time with you and honestly, I don’t believe you were just here because you wanted to get some kind of dirt on me—which, by the way, is false. You don’t have the faintest understanding of what goes on in the auction room. Sure, it may sound a little sketchy to someone who is looking at it from the outside, but I promise you that everyone involved in that is just as consenting as everyone else in this building. We have built this company with that as a cornerstone. Consent is the hottest thing there is. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone who…who wants to be with them?”
Penny glared at me, her eyes flaring up like a blue flame. “You are selling women to the highest bidder. It’s prostitution, Pete. And that’s if you get the benefit of the doubt on everything. In a lot of people’s eyes, this is going to look like you are involved in human trafficking and no one turns a blind eye to that when it hits the front page of a major outlet. Not when it involves politicians. Not when barely 18 year old girls are here selling themselves for what? What do you even pay them? Do you take into account their safety? Where are they going? What about the ones that you allow to go to a foreign country or the girls who sign a contract to go stay with someone for a week or a month or something? Do you know what that looks like to someone who isn’t into your 24 hour kink fest that you’ve got going on under this roof?”
“Tell me, Penny. Tell me what it looks like.” I was challenging her now and she didn’t like it. Good, I wanted to piss her off.
“It looks like you are a perverted criminal. It looks like you are out to make a buck off some of the most vulnerable people in society. It makes you a flaming shit bag, Pete. And I never want to see you again.”
She turned and headed out the door in a fury. I didn’t bother to follow her. It wasn’t worth my time or energy. She had some balls though, to come in here and ma
ke the accusations that she did, all the while telling me what exactly she was going to do to bring the place down. What if I had been the sort of guy to snuff her out? She hadn’t really thought that through, clearly. There were plenty of men in this town that wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot her where she stood or simply twisted that little neck until it snapped.
“Penny, you’re fucking lucky it was me and not some psycho,” I said to my empty office.
Asia must have heard the commotion because she ducked her head in the door, still clad in collar only. “Do you need anything?”
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “I think I’m going to need to talk to our attorney tonight.”
The call with the attorney went about as well as I thought it would. They would wait until a more formal word was given from the magazine. Now that we knew what they were planning on doing we would contact them and ask them to release whatever information they planned to share. Of course, they could lie to us about all of it and we could be in the dark until the day the magazine was released, but we had a few backchannels we could work with and some people we could call in favors with. It wasn’t the end of the road for us and not nearly the slam dunk that Penny Saxs was acting like she had.
She didn’t know what kind of machine she was up against. We had a lot of legal help at our disposal and while I was sure the magazine did as well, there were probably a few things we could get the employees of Expose on.
“Not to mention…” I went over to the screens on the wall and found the remote. I switched to one screen and backed the source up by an hour and a half.
There she was, in all her glory, Penny Saxs. Sucking my dick. I wouldn’t use it, but I had it and it might be enough for her to call her dogs off. Surely the woman couldn’t risk having a video like that of herself out there on the internet, not with the kind of work she did. Every time someone searched for her it would show up.
I still had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that there was something more going on here. Why had it felt like it was a personal thing with her? From the moment she had first stepped foot in my office it was like she had some kind of vendetta against me. Well, maybe that was strong, but it was a kind of dislike that was easy to perceive given the circumstances. And yeah, we had fucked and it was great, but there was even more behind that. Unless that was how the woman always was her first time with a stranger.
Then, like fog clearing after an early morning, things started to become clear and the bits and pieces that I had been struggling to grasp…all started to make sense.
Video. The internet. Penny Saxs had been familiar in some way, but it was something I couldn’t exactly name. I went to my desk and sat down, typing in her name for the first time and searching to see who this woman was, how many bylines she had, and why on earth I felt like I was seeing a ghost every time she entered the room.
The results popped up quickly. Her fake page at the men’s magazine. Some older articles at Expose. Her social media accounts. Then there, about halfway down the page, I found what I had been looking for. Penny Saxs was indeed a ghost from my past who had come back to haunt me a final time.
I drove back to my building and made my way up to the penthouse, telling myself over and over that it might not be the same one. It couldn’t be. They looked nothing alike. But I had to go through my files from the time and check to see for myself.
The files were in a desk drawer in my home office. I shuffled through a few folders before I found the one I was looking for and slid the documents out. Her picture was there, along with her name and suddenly it all became clear why she was so intent on getting payback.
Penny Saxs was the girl in the elevator.
I shook my head, ashamed and not too surprised that the thing I was most sorry for in my life had come back to get me like this. Of course, it had, karma worked like that. And there was no surprise that my moment of deepest shame was going to be what nailed me to the wall with my business. I wasn’t sure exactly what they would be able to prove, but then again I didn’t know how much information they had or exactly how they planned to roll it out.