Page 84 of Handsome Devil
Our head of corporate security, Mr. Block—who, incidentally, resembled a block—had assured me and my mother repeatedly that his team was working vigilantly, around the clock, on this. Our lawyers had promptly threatened a lawsuit if the woman who leaked the video on a porn site didn’t take it down. She did. And now Block’s team was tirelessly scrubbing the video from every pervy corner of the internet, sending takedown notices to porn upload sites and whatever else they had to do. I wasn’t totally optimistic. Someone, somewhere still had a copy of the video. That was the nature of the internet. For all I knew, it might keep popping up on the web for the rest of my life. And beyond.
“You know Block,” I told her. “He’s so stony when he assures me he has it covered, I can never tell if it’s sarcasm or hard fact.”
“He’s still annoyed with you for that party all those years ago.”
Huh? “The one when I was like twenty-one?”
“The one at your mother’s house where the police came, you mouthed off to them while you were naked on the roof, Block tried to talk you down, and you both got arrested.”
How the hell did she know about all that?
That was old news. College bullshit. If you didn’t get arrested while naked during your college years, at least once, if you asked me, you really weren’t trying hard enough at life. And even I got a free pass on that escapade. The media hardly even picked it up. It was no sex tape. And miraculously, no one even got any pictures of me naked on the roof.
Even my mother just rolled her eyes at that one.
“You weren’t even there,” I reminded Velma.
“It’s legendary.”
“Yeah, well, my employees aren’t paid to be annoyed with me. If they are, they can keep it to themselves.”
“Moving on,” she said crisply. “I wanted to ask you how you’re doing.”
Uh… What?
Velma never asked me how I was doing. We just didn’t have that kind of relationship. It was all business and no feels. Even the casually-concerned-about-your-wellbeing kind. The first year she worked for me, Wiley gave her a Christmas card, from me, with her bonus tucked inside, and she said,I’ll take the bonus but next time save the card. I don’t do Hallmark moments.
Totally fine by me. The holiday cards for the team were Wiley’s idea.
“I’m not going to fall apart on you,” I assured her, unsure of what else to say. “And your job isn’t going anywhere.”
“Good to know. But I was asking aboutyou. It’s been a bad week. I doubt you’ve ever been in this position before.”
“What position is that?”
“One where you’re worried aboutyourjob.”
She was fucking right about that. My entire life, job included, had been roadmapped in gold since the day I was conceived. Cradle to the grave, I was already taken care of. It was never part of my job to worry about my job.
Until one week ago.
“I’m not worried,” I lied. “I do have a job. An important job that adds incredible value to this company, whether my mother and my grandmother want to hear it right now or not. They can’t just send me off to purgatory thinking it’s going to help anything.”
I knew they were disappointed in me. Embarrassed. Outraged. I would be too, if I were them. That outrage had blinded them, though. They didn’t want to see the whole picture.
But the picture wasn’t going to change just because they had me out of their sights for a while.
Velma was eying me thoughtfully. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“I tried to explain to them, Velma. I didn’tmakethe video. I was justinthe video. I also didn’t leak the video.”
No one seemed to want to believe that I, the only male in the video, had nothing to do with creating or distributing it. And worst of all: my mother and my grandmother had actually believed the women who were in the video. When contacted by our lawyers, they’d claimed—through their lawyers—that I made the video, not them.
So my family took the word of strangers. Over me.
As did my fiancée.
Tina didn’t even care that the video was madebeforewe got together. She couldn’t take the slightest whiff of scandal. My family couldn’t take it either, but since I was still one of them, they had to.
