the last time I was here.
The receptionist stopped me by leaning across the desk and whispering, “Sally’s out sick today, sir.”
I frowned back at her. “I’m sorry?”
The receptionist checked the hall and then whispered with a pointed look, “Sally.”
I stared at her blankly.
“Sally,” she repeated, glancing at the supply closet down the hall. “The secretary you… know.”
A foggy recognition of red lipstick around my cock amongst falling staplers in a dark room came to my mind and I snapped my fingers.
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Sally. Of course.”
The receptionist smiled and sagged back into her chair as if relieved. My next words seemed to ruin all of that.
“I’m not here for Sally,” I said, pointing down the hall. “I’m here for the board meeting.”
“The board meeting?” the receptionist asked incredulously, tiptoeing hurriedly around the desk to come along beside me. “Sir, are you… sir, are you sure?”
The receptionist nearly went as far as to block my path before I stopped her with a withering gaze. She blushed and ducked her head slightly as I patted my chest with a quizzical look.
“Hmm…” I said. “Did I forget to put my name tag on, love? I guess I did.”
I squeezed the receptionist’s shoulder and she flinched.
“It says CEO.”
“Yes, sir, sorry, sir.”
I patted her cheek and smiled merrily.
“I’m going to go in, eh?”
“Yes, sir, of course, sir.”
I stuffed my hands into my pockets and waltzed to the board room whistling a little tune. But the moment I pulled open the door and stepped inside, my brazen, unearned confidence wilted like a spent dick. At a long table polished to a reflective sheen, twelve heads swivelled as one and assessed me with narrowed eyes behind small, framed glasses.
I no longer felt like a CEO. I felt like a child called to the principal’s office only to find there was not just one principal, but twelve.
Mr Killinger, the company’s CFO and my father’s former right-hand man, pushed himself from his tufted high-backed leather chair at the head of the table and came to me with a low, hushed voice.
“Ronan, son,” he whispered almost embarrassedly as he grabbed my elbow to guide me from the room, “we’re right in the middle of a board meeting and—”
“I know,” I told him, setting my feet as he reached for the door handle. “That’s why I’m here.”
Mr Killinger’s shrewd, pinched face turned to look up at me more closely. I realised that he thought I was high or drunk or both. He must have assumed that that was the only reason I ever would have stumbled unwittingly into a business meeting.
“Okay,” Mr Killinger said, obviously surprised to find me, at worst, a little hungover. “Come on then, lad.”
I moved forward apprehensively as Mr Killinger nodded curtly at the company’s lawyer to his right. An awkward silence fell over the room as one-by-one, the men stood and shifted one seat over to make room for me. Few did me the service of hiding their irritation at the interruption. Mr Killinger patted the back of the head chair, the chair he had been sitting in, and smiled slickly.
“See if this one here fits, son,” he said before turning to the board and adding, “I’m sure we can round up a booster seat if necessary.”
There was a round of hardly concealed sneers as I slipped into the chair. Mr Killinger’s hand on my shoulder made me expect my shoes to not reach the ground and when I adjusted my tie, I felt like I was playing dress-up in my father’s clothes.
“There you go,” Mr Killinger said, squeezing my shoulder almost painfully. He moved his face to mine, his smile now grotesque to me. “Having fun?”
I tried to straighten myself up, but his hand on me weighed me down like a collapsing ceiling.
“Please don’t let me interrupt,” I said, trying to not sound as intimidated as I felt.
Mr Killinger pushed off me like I was his walking cane and moved to his own chair. He patted my hand kindly, but all kindness had left his cunning grey eyes as he looked at me.
“Chime in whenever you want, son.”
I gave a nod of assent, but no one in the room, including myself, believed for a second that Mr Killinger needed it, regardless of our respective titles. Everyone saw it for what it was: I was a boy, a spoiled, stupid little boy, playing at a man’s game.
With Mr Killinger at the helm, the board dived into discussions I struggled to follow. My father’s hotel empire