C3 James

Being a billionaire had lots of perks. Two of them were that you never had to pack for yourself and you never had to shop for yourself. Nita, my personal assistant, had bought me a new tux and a bunch of new suits for the trip. My housekeeper had ironed all my clothes and packed them all perfectly.
These things did not suck.
What did suck, however, was that I had over one hundred emails that I had to answer on my flight to Boston. It also sucked that I wouldn’t be able to bark into my phone at the various directors who worked for me. I was flying commercial for the first time in years. I thought it would be good practice—to be around people that I didn’t particularly care for, and to try and maintain my manners.
Because that was the real suck of the moment. I was going home, and that meant I had to deal with all the people who drove me crazy. I was going to have to behave, because it was my family, because my stupid brother was getting married, and because that was the decent thing to do.
I hated decent.
At least the escort would be there, and that would be my private little joke. My fuck you to my oh-so-proper family. I really hoped that she was nice, and that she had a sense of humor. 
She was going to need it.
I finished making sure that my things were assembled and went to get some cash from my safe. As I grabbed the bills, I brushed the worn edge of something familiar, something I’d touched a thousand times. It was an old photograph.
I pulled it out, wishing that I could stop myself. It was of me and Danielle, from our senior year of high school. She was wearing a black dress, her dark-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was laughing. In the picture, I was looking at her and laughing, too.
It was the only picture I had of her. Of us. And for all the times I’d wanted to cut myself out of it, I couldn’t bear to. 
I put the picture back into the bottom of the safe. And then I cursed the day that I’d entered this world, along with the day that she’d left it.
* * *
My driver expertly maneuvered my BMW in and out of traffic on the way to LAX. Goddamn traffic, I thought, but I really didn’t mind. Los Angeles had been good to me, and I was used to the traffic just like everyone else. It was a part of the landscape, just like the smog, the rolling hills, and the built-out horizon. 
I hated to leave. I hated Boston—except for my sports teams. No matter how long I’d been in California, I would always be a Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins fan. I’d loved those teams since I was a kid. I didn’t miss the New England winters or my family, but I missed my teams.
I’d left Boston for grad school, and I went back as rarely as I could. But this time there was no way out. Todd was probably getting married just to spite me. In a classic dick move, he’d also asked me to be his best man. He had me then. My mother insisted that the best man had to attend every event, including the trip to Eleuthera, to fulfill his duties.
“Who takes their family on their honeymoon?” I spat out at her when she’d told me there was no getting out of it.
“Someone who loves their family,” she’d said icily. “But I guess you wouldn’t know too much about that.”
* * *
It was the flight from hell. I’d grabbed a window seat, ordered some coffee, and was reading the Wall Street Journal on my tablet. The other passengers were filing in, taking their seats. I took no notice of them until a frizzy-haired forty-something parked her kid next to me. “Be good,” she told the boy. “I’m in the row right behind you with the twins.”
She looked at me and pointed to the boy. I noticed that her mascara was smeared a little under one eye and that she had a little something that looked like jelly smeared on her cream-colored blouse. “This is Liam,” she said. 
I looked at her blankly. She sighed and turned back to her son. “Don’t ask the fancy handsome businessman for anything. He’s useless. Just like Daddy. But I’m right behind you. Just call me if you need me.” She kissed him on the nose and then gave me a fiercely dirty look.
“Can I pway with that?” Liam asked, pointing his grimy little hands at my tablet.
“No way, kid,” I said and put my earbuds in.
* * *
The twins screamed the whole flight. The earbuds did nothing to block out their wails.
“It’s their ears,” I heard their mother telling the flight attendant. 
Their fucking ears had been hurting for six straight hours. If I were her, I would have given them both sleeping pills to knock them out.
I wasn’t her, and I was thinking about trying it.
“Poor things,” the flight attendant said while everyone in first class glared.
Liam was looking up at my tablet again, longingly. 
“Oh, just take it,” I said. I opened up the Flappy Birds app and practically threw it at him. 
“Miss?” I called. “I’d like a double bourbon.”
I also sent the frizzy-haired mother a glass of Chardonnay. She clearly needed it, and despite what people say about me, I am not a complete prick. 
Not always.
* * *
A driver in a suit was waiting for me at Logan with a Preston sign. I raised my hand in greeting, and he gave me a pleasant smile and took my bag. 
“Mr. Preston, I’m Kai. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Get me the hell out of here. The flight was full of screaming kids.”
“Of course, sir. You can wait in the car while I get your luggage.”
A Mercedes SUV was parked at the curb, hazards flashing. Once inside the cool, dark interior, I leaned back and tried to relax. The memory of the screaming twins didn’t help. The fact that I had to go see my mother and then pick up my prostitute/wedding date didn’t either.
Kai came out shortly with my luggage, and we sped away from the airport. “Where can I take you, Mr. Preston?”
“I need to go to my parents’ house in Beacon Hill.” I gave him the address. “Then to the South End to pick up my…girlfriend.” The word felt foreign on my tongue. But I might as well start the facade now. “I have a dinner tonight, a brunch tomorrow…you’ll be driving me to all sorts of annoying shit all week.” 
I grabbed my phone and called my office assistant, Molly. She answered before the phone even rang. “Yes, Mr. Preston?” 
“Where is the Mueller report?” I asked. “It was supposed to be sent to me during the flight.”
“There are a few problems with it,” she said. She was using the tone I mentally referred to as the Don’t Make Mr. Preston Scream at Me tone. “The inspections didn’t come back the way we hoped. The EPA’s going to have to be involved.”
“Are you kidding me?” I yelled into the phone, because (a) this was bad news and (b) I was trying to toughen Molly up. She’d been working for me for ten months, and she’d already cried twice. But this was real estate. If she kept crying, I was going to have to replace her. I didn’t have time to emotionally babysit anybody—especially not the hired help.
She took a deep breath. “No, Mr. Preston, I’m not kidding you. They found traces of contaminants in the soil. Not exactly ideal for a retirement community.”
“I disagree,” I snapped. “It’s not like it’s a school. These retirement people are on their way out, anyway.”
Molly paused for a beat. “Mr. Preston, what would you like me to do?”
“Deal with it and buy me some time. Hire some independent analysts and get them out there. Today.”
I hung up as we pulled up to my parents’ townhouse. I found myself in serious need of another drink. I needed to be home, managing this land deal that was derailing. Business deals gone wrong were easy for me. 
Families gone wrong were an entirely different matter.
“Wait for me here,” I told Kai. My father would be at work, so it would just be me and Mom. Even though I hadn’t seen her in over six months, I hoped I could make a hasty exit.
I braced myself and hit the buzzer.
“James,” my mother said to me, warmly, as I went into their stuffy townhouse. There was floral wallpaper covering the entire entryway, a white background with dark-green jungle-like vines. Looking at it made me feel short of breath, as if the vines were wrapping around my neck. 
But then, I always felt like that when I saw my mom.
“Mom, the eighties called—they want their wallpaper back,” I said, hugging her stiffly.
“Wallpaper happens to be very stylish right now,” she said with a sniff, and pulled back to take a look at me. At least I knew I looked good. I had on an expertly tailored Armani suit, Hermes tie, and my plain-old ruggedly handsome James Preston face. 
“You look good,” she said. She sounded slightly surprised. She probably thought I’d be drunk already, like at Thanksgiving.
“I always look good, Mother. Just like you.” 
My mother did always look good. She’d been a knockout when we were younger—naturally blond, thin, smiling a large, fake smile. She currently maintained a regimen of just the right amount of plastic surgery, Botox, and tennis to keep her looking refreshed. 
“Honestly, Mom. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Yes, you do,” she said tightly. “It’s all the boards I chair. Keeps me on my feet and dressing up.”
I snorted. “You know that’s not it,” I said.
“It is if I say so,” she said. That was a classic Celia Preston statement if I’d ever heard one.
I decided to pace myself and not give my mother and all her charitable activities a hard time right away. She’d run around for decades for her boards, pretending to be a saint, while one Guatemalan nanny after another had raised us.
Oh, the irony of my mother’s charities. The Boston Public Library Children’s Room. All that crap she’d done for the importance of healthy meals and fresh vegetables for kids. The woman had never even cooked me a processed chicken nugget. The nanny was the one who taught me the words to Goodnight Moon.
“So,” said my mother, clapping her hands together and breaking my brief reverie. “I’d ask you how your flight was, but I couldn’t care less. Tell me about your new girlfriend!” She slipped her arm through mine and led me to the formal sitting room. In typical Preston fashion, she poured a before-lunch bourbon for me and a larger one for herself.
I gripped it as if it was one of the few life preservers left on the Titanic.
“Tell you what?” I asked.
“To start with, I’d like to at least know her name,” my mother said. “So that we can let Todd and Evie know.” 
I winced at the mention of Evie—she was Todd’s fiancée. She was just like my mother. Thin as a rail, all collarbones and wrists, with a perfect outfit for every occasion. I was not looking forward to seeing her.
I took a sip of my bourbon. Oh fuck, I realized, I don’t even have the escort’s name. “You get to meet my girlfriend tonight. All secrets will be revealed then,” I said.
“James, don’t be ridiculous. Tell me about her. We’re all going to be spending the next two weeks together. I’d at least like to be prepared. And since you neither call your family nor return your family’s phone calls,” she sniffed, “this is the one opportunity I’ve got. So stay right there. Don’t look like you’re going to feign an important phone call and run out of here.”
Shit, I thought, and took my hand off the phone in my pocket.
“She’s young, and very pretty,” I said, making an educated guess that both of these things were true. “She’s…in school, still,” I said, trying to remember the story that Elena had come up with. “Grad school.”
My mother raised her artfully waxed brows at me. Grad school was a pretty amorphous category.
“How long have you been seeing her?” she asked.
“A few months,” I said. I’m picking her up on the way home from here, I thought, and making a one hundred thousand-dollar deposit with her madam. And signing a waiver that says I won’t sue the service if I happen to contract chlamydia, genital warts, etcetera, even though they’ve signed a contract that states my escort’s vagina is pristine and sparkling.
Not that I was going to sleep with her.
“So, her name?” my mother asked, expectantly.
Just then, my phone buzzed. I smiled at my mother in triumph. “I have to get this,” I said and picked up. “Molly. Wait one minute.” I knocked back the rest of my bourbon and leaned down to give my mother’s papery cheek a quick kiss. 
“See you tonight. I gotta take this.”
Then, happier than I’d ever been to get bad news from Molly, I hustled out of the house without a backward glance.