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“Don’t panic!” Susan appeared in my doorway. She was the CFO of my start-up, the CEO and founder being me. She looked wild-eyed and a little haggard and her tone seemed to directly contradict what she was saying.
I spun around in my desk, a stress ball clenched in my fist and squinted at her. “I wasn’t going to before you said that.”
My company, the makers of a finance app called Koinage that allowed investors of all levels of wealth to more knowledgeably and easily invest, was falling on the stock exchange. My company had its fingers in a few industries. We were just most famous for the app. We’d gotten big fast and went public fast and we’d been doing quite well. But lately...
I watched Susan try to school her expression into something more calming. She was almost twice my age, which I’d always liked because she had wisdom I lacked. She was thin as a rail with a neat brown bun on her head. I was used to her being the level headed one. She didn’t look level headed now. She looked freaked out.
“Have you talked to Joanie?” Susan said darkly.
Joanie was my publicist. She had been giving me side-eyed looks lately. I knew very well that she had some kind of scheme to get my stock up that she hadn’t told me about yet. Susan thought any problem with my company must be somehow related to my image and how I was covered in the press. Given her job, I guess it was understandable. But sometimes I thought she was a little nuts. That was why I’d been dodging her calls lately.
“Not yet.”
“You should talk to Joanie,” Susan said firmly. “We just leaked on the ID app and it’s already got very hot buzz. Downloads of Koinage are increasing exponentially worldwide. Our media departments are growing... There is no reason for our stock to be sliding like this.”
“That’s a nice way of saying you think it’s about me?” I leaned on my wrist and watched emails with panicked subject lines appear a few at a time in my Outlook. Yikes.
Susan walked in and closed the door behind her and that made the hair on my arms stand up. I founded this company and it had made me richer than God. But the bigger it got, the more power was taken away from me. Now I had a board and a CFO and shareholders. I was a dragon shifter and accustomed to holding my riches in the palm of my hand with complete control over anything I considered mine. But business didn’t work like that. It had taken a while to understand that.
Still, the company was mine. But I had a sneaking suspicion somebody was going to try and take it away from me soon if my stock didn’t at least start to level out.
“Have you thought about cashing out?” Susan said quietly.
I narrowed my eyes. This was making me like Susan a bit less. “No,” I said firmly. “I haven’t. I built this thing and I made it what it is. Why would I cash out now? I’m not even thirty.”
Susan took a deep breath and turned my laptop around, typing something quickly and turning it to face me again. She’d brought up the most popular business news magazine site on the internet to show me my own cover story: Is Justin King Too Hot for The Market?
I hated the cover story. It had come out a day ago and I was too smart not to know it had at least something to do with my falling stock. The reporter had followed me around like a puppy, kissing my ass and assuring me they were just writing a puff piece since the buzz on Koinage Corp. was so hot. I should have known better. It was a rookie mistake and I’d been kicking myself since the moment it had gone to press. Instead of a puff piece, it was a huge take down. It made me look like not just a rank amateur but possibly a con artist too. In an era where news about some scandal about a corporation’s misdeeds or some money sucking scam was breaking all the time, BizTech had decided to make me look like not just the next big wannabe Zuckerberg but the next big con artist. The article had taken quotes and twisted them out of context and used bits and pieces of my past as proof that I must not be a serious businessman. It didn’t help, I guess, that I was also kind of a playboy and kind of a dare-devil. I mean you only live once, I’d always figured. Might as well take advantage of it. I think it was partly my dragon nature, but I was looking for the next big thrill and I had the GoPro skydiving selfies to back it up. BizTech decided that must mean I was an idiot.
“I think you should think about it,” Susan said. “Before the board thinks about it for you. If they turn against you, I can’t promise to back you up.”
“Well, that’s great news,” I said, but my dragon’s fire was burning within me.
“You have always said you appreciated my honestly,” Susan said, looking at me steadily. “I’m not even supposed to be telling you that this is a consideration.”
She was right but I was still pissed. I wasn’t panicked or anything. I don’t panic easily, and I didn’t know yet how I would fix this. But I hadn’t gotten this far without picking up a few tricks.
I just wasn’t sure what my best move would be yet.
Joanie would tell me I just needed to reinvent myself. That sounded way too easy to me. Although, I’ve never tried it before. Why would I have reinvented myself (whatever that means)? I’m awesome.
“Call Joanie,” Susan said again. “Start there. If you don’t keep me in the loop, well, frankly I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I wouldn’t blame me either,” I muttered as she made her way out.
I spun around in my chair to face the window again. I have a huge corner office on the twentieth floor of a tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I grabbed my phone and winced at the storm of texts, ignoring them in favor of turning on a live stream of the business news channel which was equal parts wanting a distraction and some kind of masochistic desire to hear bad news about myself.
It didn’t take long.
“Koinage CEO, Justin King, was the hotshot Silicon Valley transplant who took Wall Street by storm. But now investors are starting to wonder...if King is all he’s cracked up to be? With his cocky demeanor, playboy reputation, and impulsive decision making, stock in Koinage has been slipping and some are thinking it has to do with King’s fast, young lifestyle...”
“I’m twenty-nine!” I barked at my laptop, as if the reporter would hear me.
The annoying part was, my “fast, young” lifestyle had been what had initially attracted so many people to Koinage. I wasn’t irresponsible, I just made investing and finance more fun again. I talked about it like it was an adventure, but not just one for elites. I wanted to bring it down to the level of people...well, people like me. Investing should be for everyone, was my motto. A lot of the guard had hated me for my attitude. I was an elite who didn’t believe in elites. I had no doubt that some of them were behind a lot of this bad press.
I stared out through my big glass walls that looked out on Central Park and sighed heavily. Everybody outside, way down on the ground, looked like they were having a lot more fun than I was in my office. The dragon in me felt restless. Sometimes when my human side gets stressed out, it feels better to let the dragon out for a little flight. The problem being that flying around in the middle of the day over Manhattan tends to attract a little attention. Although the extent to which our activity doesn’t get noticed is quite shocking. A friend of mine once sat on the tip of the Empire State Building for hours once in the full light of day and nobody noticed. It’s amazing how much humans don’t see what they don’t want to see. They convince themselves it’s a trick or they’re hallucinating or there “must be some explanation.” Although there are also groups of humans whose job it is to cover up these sort of sightings. It’s only helpful to us if it keeps the peace between dragon shifters and human.
My phone buzzed and I growled under my breath, grabbing it to see who was calling.
It was Joanie and I decided to bite the bullet and see what she had to say.
Joanie is a tiny woman who has enough energy to power several people and acts like it. She has a little red bob of hair and wears glasses and drinks espresso like water. Today, even the ringing of my phone seemed to sound more hyper than usual and I braced myself before I picked up.
“Hi, Joanie.”
“Justin! Don’t panic.”
I pursed my lips and rubbed my temples. “Joanie, have you ever once seen me panic about anything?”
“No!” Joanie said quickly. “But if you were ever going to, now would be the time!”
I could tell Joanie had more to say, but she sounded out of breath. I suspected she was at her treadmill desk. She’s forever running a five-minute mile while handling her clients.
“So how do we fix this BizTech bullshit?” I said, when she’d only panted for a few seconds. “And everything else. I mean don’t spread this around, but Susan just told me there’s scuttlebutt about voting me out.”
“Oh shit.”
“Exactly.
“Well, I have an idea that I truly think will work,” Joanie said. I could just imagine her wild blue eyes as she talked. She was probably all red-faced and sweaty too. I rubbed my temples and sighed heavily. Joanie sometimes got crazy ideas but all of them had worked for me so far. I had to give her a chance. She’d once had me stage a protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange to plug Koinage. I’d thought it was a little tacky but it had worked brilliantly.
“Hit me,” I said grimly.
“You need a girlfriend,” Joanie said flatly.
I raised an eyebrow. “I have plenty of girlfriends.” I had a woman in my bed as often as I wanted and all of them were happy to be there and most were just as happy to leave with no strings attached. Every once in a while, somebody was charmed by my model looks, not to mention my millions, and wanted more. I put a stop to that right away, but I always told them the score in the beginning. I had perhaps forgotten what the term “girlfriend” actually meant.
No,” Joanie said. “Girlfriend. Singular. Just one. A good one.”
“This is your plan?” I sat back in my giant desk chair, suddenly feeling tired. I’d always trusted my publicist but this didn’t sound like the usual kind of gangbusters but perhaps the offbeat kind of plan to put me back on top that Joanie usually came up with. “A girlfriend?”
“Not just anyone,” Joanie said. “Somebody solid, respectable. Somebody with a kid would be ideal. But an ordinary type of woman, not an elite. You need a girlfriend who could make you seem down to earth and settled. All just for show, of course, Justin. Bring her to events, make appearances here and there...”
“Ugh. A fake relationship?” I made a face. It’s not as if it was unheard of, but I’d never done one before. Fake relationships always looked so...fake. “I don’t know, Joanie.”
“Justin, who told you not to do the BizTech interview?” Joanie said darkly.
I heaved a sigh. We’d already had this conversation a couple of times in just the last couple of days since the article had dropped. “You did.”
“Who told you that your whole bad boy persona was going to make people uneasy just as quickly as it made them love you?”
“You did,” I murmured into the phone.
“Have I ever steered you wrong, Justin?”
“I’m sure I could think of something,” I said lightly.
“Look,” Joanie said, “think about it and get back to me. I’m already lining up some potential candidates. A lesser publicist would set you up with some pop star. But I know better.”
“Alright,” I said, tapping my desk impatiently. I was feeling edgy. I wanted a protein smoothie. Maybe an espresso. What I really wanted to do was go shift and be a dragon for a bit. But there was too much to do, most notably assuring shareholders that the company was just fine thanks. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Okay,” Joanie said, “but get back to me soon. We should jump on this fast.”
“Sure thing. Thanks, Joanie.”
I hung up and sighed, opening up the first of many emails. I cracked my knuckles. I was good at assuaging shareholders and investors one by one. It was how I’d gotten this far. It was retail politics. But I had the feeling that Joanie was right. This dip needed some finesse and maybe a special kind of move. But a fake relationship? If I was voted out, I could take my company back by scorching the earth and leave a trail of bodies in my path (metaphorically speaking). Of that, I had no doubt. But I didn’t particularly want to make a bunch of new enemies and I didn’t have any...less aggressive ideas. Maybe a fake relationship was my best option.
I didn’t really do relationships was the thing. I’d always sort of wanted a mate. I dreamed of somebody who I could share my dragon nature with; human or shifter. Sometimes I fantasized about somebody I would care about that much. But it hadn’t happened yet. It was hard to imagine it ever happening. I was just too busy and too used to keeping my dragon to myself. I couldn’t imagine falling in love like that. The kind of love that meant you shared everything was a love that seemed like the stuff of fantasies. It might sound weird for a dragon shifter to say, but I don’t live in fantasy. I live in reality. I’m a practical kind of guy and I live in a world of hard numbers and ruthless ambition, as much as I’m seen as an impulsive dare-devil.
True love just never seemed practical to me.
