Building Us: A Gay Romantic Comedy and Adventure (Marketing Beef Gay Romance Book 2), Page 2

This time, Madeline’s arrival was clear. Detritus shot in, nosed my leg, and lurched back into the hall. His tail whipped against the wall with a whoop, whoop, whoop. His nails scratched at the glass storm door and his whining filled the hallway. My stomach soured in anticipation of what we needed to do. “Where’s Dillon?” I huffed. I figured he’d be back by now. Madeline had been with us since we started the firm. Plus, she and I worked together at Thoroughbred, my former employer, for many years before its closing—a whole other story.

  “Hi, Detritus.” Her cheery voice muffled its way in from outside. I heard her high heels tick the pavement. Deet barked. She must’ve waved to him through the glass door.

  I rose using my haunches for leverage. “God, give me strength.”

  Chapter 2

  Dillon

  My morning jog had me taking a different route this time. Closed streets pissed me off. That damn Vilhelm Strom movie being filmed took over the entire town. After a longer than planned jaunt, I turned onto Cedar Street.

  Years ago, the making of this Hollywood flick in my proverbial backyard would have piqued my interest—especially since it starred Strom, the hotter-than-Hades former teen idol turned serious actor. But as I grow older, I place less emphasis on such things. Starstruck by Vilhelm Strom in Conant, Massachusetts? Not me. Saving our business and spending quality time with my husband took precedence now.

  More than when we first got married, Evan and I love each other despite any troubles we’ve faced. At least, I’d like to think that’s the case.

  As it should, health reigns supreme. Evan’s bout with bladder cancer taught us that. And, of course, I try to stay fit. Ev worries he’s not as attractive as he used to be, which is hogwash. The treatments had raked him thin. Now he was a little chunky. Also, complications down below have placed demands on our sex life. He doesn’t like to talk about that, and he doesn’t believe me when I tell him my love for him hasn’t changed. Like I said, it’s stronger—an unconditional love I won’t let fade.

  As I neared our street, Mrs. Johnson’s decrepit house, overlooking the lake, reminded me of when Evan and I first met. I missed the old woman. She died years ago. Part of me thinks Evan feels he’ll share a similar fate. Again, hogwash. He’s cancer-free, according to his last two test results. Somehow, he hasn’t let that sink in.

  The new owners of Mrs. Johnson’s place—I still call it hers, despite a new couple moving in—have done nothing to it.

  I dashed past the Hemingways’ property and picked up my pace to sprint to the end of the road, where our house lies. When I saw Madeline’s RAV4 parked in our driveway, queasiness swept over me.

  “She’s here already? What time is it?” Slowing, I tapped my Fitbit. “Shit. How’d it get to be that late?” I bolted toward the house. Evan’s going to kill me. I told him I’d handle this.

  “Hi, Mad.” The storm door shut behind me. Contrary to her always-pleasant disposition, we’d nicknamed her Mad. “Hello?” I asked, expecting them to be in Evan’s office—the cottage’s converted dining area to the right.

  Silence, except for Detritus lumbering toward me. His nails scratched the floor as he gained traction for his all-out welcoming assault, like I’d been gone for days and not an hour and a half. His paws met my shoulders and his tongue slobbered my face.

  “Deet! C’mon now. I’m all sweaty.”

  Unlike Evan, my stink didn’t keep him at bay, and his tail swatted the door. I wrenched my head away from his drooling snout.

  “Ev?” I aimed my voice down the hall and snapped my finger for Detritus to get down. He obeyed—tail now slapping my leg. “Where is everyone? Are they out back, Deet?” Long ago, I left behind a belief that talking to my dog was strange. “Hmm.” My running shoes squeaked along the hardwood.

  A year into launching Conant Marketing, we’d converted the old boathouse out back into additional workspace. We desperately needed the room. Most of the renovation became Madeline’s office. Barry, our sales representative, spent time there too, when he wasn’t on the road. Though a few months back, he abandoned ship and signed with the competition. Rocket Marketing made him an offer even I wouldn’t refuse. Since then, our revenue nosedived.

  Detritus sauntered down the hall, toward the back, and swept through his pet door, guiding me outside.

  Wearied from my workout, I grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen and followed my dog’s lead.

  Outside, Deet waited at the bottom of the deck stairs. I followed him to the boathouse.

  He glanced back at me.

  “I’m coming, boy. I promise.” I chugged water.

  The boathouse’s door flew open. “Thank God!” Evan leaned against it, looking as sexy as usual, I might add. Over the past six months, he’d put on more weight, recovering from his sickly look.

  “Sorry I’m late.” I smiled. I thought I witnessed a glimmer in his eye—a spark like when we first met, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

  Then, bitterness swept over him—the expression he now readily wore—and a hand moved to his hip. “I thought you were copping out on me. You said you’d—”

  Madeline popped out behind him. “What’s going on? Is everything all right?” Her concerned eyes met mine, reminiscent of when we told her Evan had cancer.

  “Um.” I fiddled with the cap on my water. “We’re all healthy.” Stupid thing to say.

  Evan rushed past me toward the house. “I need to lie down.”

  Madeline’s heels clacked down the two-step. She was a busty woman who wore her plus-sized frame well. A green dress with a thick, black belt cut her curves. “He’s acting strange. Is he feeling okay?” In the height of Conant Marketing’s success, Madeline’s sales management kept us all on our toes. ‘You two need a powerful woman in your lives,’ she’d once told us.

  “Hello?” She tapped a manicured nail on my forehead.

  “Ev’s just…ah.” I raked a hand through my hair, the way I do when I’m nervous. I peeked her way. “I wanted to…um, talk to you for a minute.”

  “Wa’sup?” The phone rang and she hustled inside.

  I followed her into the boathouse.

  “Conant Marketing,” she said into the phone, then held out the receiver. “Another robo- call.” She hung up.

  “Unknown number?” I leaned over her desk to check the caller ID.

  “Must be a telemarketer.” Madeline wheeled herself to the file cabinet and opened the drawer. Its metallic rumble couldn’t match the annoying sound of me toying with my empty water bottle. “Dill, a shower might serve you well?” She pressed a knuckle to her nose.

  “Oh, sorry.” Sweat stained my T-shirt. I gave my armpit a quick sniff. Ew. “You going to be here long?” As soon as I said it, I knew it sounded stupid.

  “You guys are acting weirder than usual today.” The cabinet closed with a thud.

  I jumped.

  She moved to her desk. “We have an upcoming meeting with the sales team from the Hawthorne, you know. We planned to prep today.”

  “Right.”

  “Go check on Evan. Make sure he’s all right. And take a quick shower. We can meet in a few when you’re settled.”

  Head hung low, I stepped out of the office. Deet stayed with her. The door closed. The phone’s annoying pulse rang out, and she answered cheerily—obviously clueless that we needed to terminate her. Evan’s gonna kill me. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  Inside the house, I found Evan resting in the bedroom. I beat him to the inquisition. “I’m showering first. I can’t fire her smelling like the locker room at ManFit.”

  He opened an eye, hand draped over his head.

  “I know. I know.” I rushed. “I stink. She’s still on the clock. Just give me a minute.” I peeled my wet clothes off.

  “My head’s throbbing.” He flipped on his side.

  “Meds?” I knew his medications’ side effects by heart. His morning Lisplatin caused migraines, but they usually dissipated after an hour. The aft
ernoon pill caused mood swings.

  He didn’t answer.

  I showered and dressed in jeans, a brown ribbed Henley, and boat shoes. I left Evan napping and proceeded onward to play boss man—chief marketing officer for Conant Marketing, LLC like my business card touted.

  My head throbbed too. Perhaps I experienced phantom pain for Evan, either that or I worried too much about the health of the business. Also weighing heavily was how to lay off Madeline politely. I determined terminating our beloved employee caused me the most grief at the moment and headed out back to do what was, unfortunately, necessary.

  Evan and I had planned a generous severance package for Madeline. It included two months full pay and insurance coverage throughout the remainder of the year since we’d already prepaid for the discount. We also incorporated payment for her unused personal time—she never took time off—and a promise to help her find a job. In all, it would save us in the long run. We had to think about the business’s future.

  As I approached the boathouse, a spot of nausea consumed me. I flung open the door with a crash.

  Startled, Detritus barked and Madeline placed a hand to her heart. “Jesus, Dill. You scared the—”

  “Madeline, we’re laying you off today.” I was never good with words—failed Etiquette 101.

  She blinked with her mouth agape.

  “We’re giving you a very good severance package.”

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “Termination package. We need to let you go.”

  Her lips curled to say something; oddly nothing passed through them.

  My hand trembled against the door. “Business is tough. Evan and I have elected to manage the company on our own for a time.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Once we get over the hump….” I didn’t want to give her false hope of us hiring her back in the future. She needed to think about her own career.

  Tears formed. “My new house.” A hand covered her mouth.

  “What?”

  “The other day we placed a down payment on our first house.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I was going to tell you guys the news.”

  My bowels lurched. I wanted to vomit. I hated doing this and wanted to soften the blow. Somehow the “generous severance package” Evan and I had discussed tripled in my mind. We can’t just let her go! Perhaps a dose of sympathy, a touch of insanity, and a pour of whatever-the-fuck propelled me to do it.

  But I did it.

  I wrote her a check for triple the amount.

  After tearful goodbyes to Deet, Evan, and me, she drove off with her personal items in a box previously used for copier paper. I staggered over to my husband with a metaphorical tail between my legs, matching Detritus’s literal. The dog apparently took blame too. After all, he’d watched me write the check without fussing. I wanted to blame it on him—like I do when I have bad gas—but this time I took the brunt and told Evan about the financial slip of the pen.

  “You what!”

  Chapter 3

  Evan

  It took a couple days after before I started talking to Dillon again. He meant well, but tripling our payout to Madeline cut our finances to the bone.

  “Ramen noodles, anyone?” Dillon held out a bag of groceries. The door hit him in the ass.

  “Not funny, hotshot.” I cracked a smile. Before he left for the store, I’d told myself we’d get out of this jam. We had each other. Plus, my health improved more and more each day. “You want to pop a tent and play camping in Maine?” Back in the day, weekend excursions we took at the beginning of our relationship had us screwing each other senseless.

  Dillon plopped the bag of sundries on the hall table and yanked me close. “Seriously?”

  We kissed. One thing led to another, and fifteen minutes later, spent from our sex, we fell back onto the bed with our arms down by our sides. It had been some time since we’d fooled around. The surgery I had last year left my privates acting like those of an eighty-year-old man. When the thing rose to attention, we had to act fast. Dillon, ever patient, deserved more. Aside from Mr. Willy’s retreat, my gone-to-fat body troubled me. Time after time, he told me he didn’t care. A lackluster penis, a wine-stain birthmark on my chest, and tiny boobies like a teenage girl’s waned my confidence in my attractiveness.

  In bed, Dillon embraced me just before his phone beeped. “Shit!”

  I draped an arm over his chest. “Let it go.”

  He tore off the sheets. “We’ve got a meeting at the Hawthorne Hotel in fifteen minutes.”

  I bolted upright. “What?”

  “Madeline usually reminds me.”

  “Shit.”

  We needed the work badly, and there we were, midafternoon, playing let’s-go-camping like two horny teenagers just discovering mutual masturbation.

  The Hawthorne Hotel touted itself as one of America’s finest. In a banquet hall, with ceilings so high, my neck crimped from looking up at the intricate frescoes, Dillon messed with the projector. “My secretary usually gets this up and running for me.” Dillon eyed me. The PowerPoint showed well on the laptop’s tiny screen but not on the fleur-de-lis wallpaper where the hotel’s manager—tapping her polished nails impatiently—suggested we display it.

  I realized I needed to pinch-hit for the team, but outside of advanced Excel formulas, I was at a loss. “What if we print it?” I whispered.

  Cross-legged, the manager raised an eyebrow. A black shoe snapped along the heel of her dangling foot. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. We need to turn this room over for a wedding rehearsal.”

  Dillon wiped his brow. “It’s just, I can’t get it to show on the projector.” He hit another button and, magically, the wall lit up. “There! Finally!”

  I beamed and refrained from clapping.

  “Evan, would you please get the lights?” he asked, and I promptly obeyed. I could at least handle that. Presenting, no way.

  The chandeliers dimmed under my illustrious aid.

  “Conant Marketing.” Dillon cleared his throat. “We might be a small firm, but as I mentioned earlier, we do big things. We’ve worked with many large companies.” Dillon held his arms out and walked center. I knew he was on. He had a professional showman’s gleam in his eyes. “Emerson, Yankee Neighborhood Beef, The Merchant, Tryst Canning, 3M, General Electric.” He gestured toward the wall displaying all our clients’ logos. “A few of our clients.”

  They’re no longer clients. The thought of all those companies lost to Rocket infuriated me. I fidgeted in my chair.

  A man wearing a black-and-white uniform leaned forward in his chair. “What did you do for The Merchant?” The newer hotel downtown competed for the Hawthorne’s customers, but we knew we could give them a leg up in Salem’s tourism industry.

  Dillon splayed his hands on his taut waist, pushing the edges of his teal suit coat behind him. “A website rewrite. After their building renovations, they wanted a new design.”

  “They’re one of our biggest competitors, you know,” the heel-snapping manager said.

  “They are.” Dillon nodded. “But you’ve been around longer, have more rooms and better facilities. We can leverage that.”

  “We have smaller guest rooms,” Black-and-White piped in. “The Merchant’s are—”

  “Whose side are you on?” The manager glared at her colleague, then waved at Dillon to continue.

  He stepped in front of the projector and clicked a remote I didn’t realize he held. The slide advanced.

  As he proceeded through the pitch, a wave of pride came over me. I’m married to this man. The way he walked. The way he enunciated. The way he looked. I remembered falling in love with him.

  He clicked his way through pages of the presentation while I let my mind wander. I’d seen the boilerplate material before. I helped write it. Eventually he cleared his throat and woke me from my trance. His thumb tapped the remote again. “Uh.”

  A blank slide—where the Hawthorne-specifics were to have been—lit the wall. I save
d the right file, didn’t I? Shit.

  “Well, looks like my assistant”—Dillon’s eyes widened as he looked my way—“may have given us the wrong presentation.” He improvised through our estimate for the project.

  I swallowed. I’d taken over Madeline’s duties and loaded the jump drive from a file on her computer. In our post-coitus haste, I must’ve grabbed the wrong one.

  A group of more black-and-white uniforms rolled tables into the hall. Others followed with a stack of chairs on dollies.

  “Well…thank you.” The hotel manager rose. “We’ll get back to you.”

  When we returned to the office/house, remnants from the bag of groceries Dillon had haphazardly set in the hall—the one we forgot to put away—were strewn all over the floor. Bits of brown paper bag, traces from a chewed-up milk carton—yet no milk—left telltale signs of the culprit. Paw prints stamped in egg slime led through the pet door.

  “Son of a…!” Dillon yelled.

  We ran out back to find shells of avocado, wrapping from a Hershey bar, and remnants of a butter package on the deck. Detritus was hunched in the yard squirting a landmine of traps for us to avoid.

  We rushed Deet to the emergency clinic. AmEx declined the vet bill. I wrote a check instead.

  With meds in hand and Detritus better, we returned to find the office voicemail flashing.

  “The Hawthorne!” Dillon recognized the number. When he called back, the despair on his face revealed their answer. “Rocket,” he said after hanging up. “They called when we were out.”

  “And in that short time, the competition snuck in?”

  “With ten thousand less than our bid.”

  “Ten thousand! How can they…?” I knew the answer. They lowballed to get the initial work. Plus, a team of offshore web designers covered the amount we’d shell out to a third party. “Call them back and tell them we’ll do it for the same or less.”

  “They already signed the contract.”

  “If Madeline were here, she would’ve—”