depressing thought. I don’t like many people. I can count them on the fingers of one hand, and Cassie is one of them. If only my past sex life hadn’t caught up with me, I might have been able to find out if I still like Cassie as much as I did before.
“There you go, Konstantin.” The barista hands me a steaming hot coffee and a plate with a huge slab of chocolate cake on it.
I take it to my table and sit eating it as I watch the world go by.
When I’m done, I finish my coffee and walk out the door, sick and tired of myself, my life, and the choices I face.
Do I keep Liza with me? Living with me while we try to raise our child together? Do I set her up in a place close by, and we co-parent that way? I think that might be for the best. I can’t promise I won’t end up murdering the mother of my child if I live with her, and that’s not what I’m aiming for here. I’m trying not to be a useless fuck like my father, not emulate him.
I think back to some of the shit she pulled when we were together, shit I only put up with because it amused me to keep her around at the time. Like, the occasion she drank a three-thousand-dollar bottle of cognac I’d had flown in for a meeting the next day. She finished it off with her stupid girlfriends. What had really fucked me off is the fact I’d bought them two bottles of Crystal and told her to leave the cognac, but she had it anyway.
Or the time she upset Michael’s female friends with her nastiness, and they stopped coming to the house when she was around.
Or the time she ruined the seats of my car by spilling nail varnish on them. Fuck me, but my dick has made some poor decisions.
My phone goes, and I take it out of my pocket. It’s Margaret.
“Yes,” I say.
“I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow is Claudette’s seventieth birthday.”
Claudette is the tea lady at my main building. An old-fashioned job, but one she does brilliantly. She works in the canteen, and every afternoon she takes a tea trolley around the two top floors of the building, which are where my staff are housed; the bottom four floors, I rent out to various organizations. She also serves cakes and tiny sandwiches to anyone who has missed lunch.
She’s a treasure, as the Brits say. I love the saying, but it doesn’t apply to many people in this world; Claudette is one of them. She’s worth her salary and more because she helps give my staff an afternoon lift. Their productivity has shot up since Claudette started her afternoon rounds. I don’t do these things out of the goodness of my heart; I do them because they pay off.
“Do we know what Claudette likes?” I ask.
“I did some digging,” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice.
“And?”
“Well, she’s always wanted something from a certain jewelers, comes in a duck-egg blue box. But she also loves my Louis Vuitton bag. She’s commented on it many times.”
“You like shopping, don’t you?” I ask.
Margaret laughs. “K, you know I love it. It’s better than sex.”
“You’ve not been fucked right, if you can say that, Margaret.”
She sighs. “You’re probably correct, but so far, my life experience has shown me sex is often disappointing whereas shopping never is.”
“Definitely haven’t been fucked right.” I chuckle, and she laughs.
“You want me to go to Tiffany’s or Vuitton?”
“Fuck it, go to both. She’s worth it, get her a bag and something shiny as well.”
“Oooh, really?” She breathes and it’s all excited, as if I’m going down on her.
Jesus, Margaret really needs to get laid good and proper. For her birthday I might buy her a gigolo for the night.
“Yes, really. Go spend big. Use the company credit card.”
“Limit?”
“Try to keep it to a grand in Tiffany’s, and up to two in Vuitton. Will two-grand buy her a decent bag?”
Last time I bought anything from there was a year ago for an actress I was dating, and that was a scarf.
“Yes, of course. Do you want anything while I’m there?”
“What, like a new purse?”
She laughs. “They sell some great men’s stuff.”
“I don’t like logos,” I say pointedly.
She bought me a Montblanc organizer, like she does every year, for Christmas, but unlike the previous ones, which were