25. Saturday

25

Saturday

NICOLE LAMB

Nicole didn’t think she was falling in love because falling in love had to take months or years to happen. Love was the accumulation of shared experiences, common ground, and trust.

Kingston had been in her life for only a few days, so this was just twitterpation, or maybe that he was really good at batting for the home run, so to speak, or that he was drop-dead gorgeous with his highly symmetrical, testosterone-carved features and genetically recessive blue-eye trait.

That was just science.

This magnetic feeling of needing to be in the same room with him, craving to touch him, the urge to very precisely draw her eyeliner and lipstick so he would look at her, too, wanting to know more and more about who he was and what he thought, that wasn’t love.

That was just, like, hormones or something.

And then, there was the tall thing.

Tall was a thing. Everybody knew it. Tall was scientifically proven, as much as psychology and sociology are sciences, Nicole chuckled to herself.

Physics was science.

Even when the pop singer sang that the guy she liked was tall and handsome as hell, she’d said he was tall first.

And Kingston was tall. Six-five, he’d said. A mountain of a man.

And Nicole was definitely up for some mountain climbing.

But that wasn’t love.

The few times Nicole had caught feelings for a guy had been weeks or months into dating him. A lot of guys hadn’t made it that far. They were nice enough, fun to hang out with or sleep with, but they hadn’t lasted.

This thing with Kingston was new and exciting. It wasn’t love.

Nicole slipped on her yoga pants and hurried back to the kitchen to meet Kingston, dressed in gray sweatpants and a blue tee shirt, sipping coffee while he was talking on the phone.

He covered his cell phone with his hand and turned to her. “It’s a friend of mine, Morrissey Sand. He’s a lawyer, so he can’t say anything short. Grab a cup of coffee. We’ll order room service for breakfast, but this might take a few minutes.”

Nicole found sturdy ceramic mugs in an upper cabinet and poured herself a cup of coffee while Kingston talked on the phone.

Saying that he “talked” was an overstatement. His answers to his Morrissey friend were monosyllabic, some more grunts than language. Some of the few more elaborate sentences he said were:

“Yeah, okay.”

“I didn’t know. How could anyone know?”

“There’s no way those numbers make sense. I went through the spreadsheets with Jericho.” Pause. “Yeah, the guy could be sued for hiding it during the deal, but it’s too damn late now.”

“Yeah, it’s dire. What did you expect me to say?”

“Yeah, I know you can’t say more, but I get it, dammit. How’s your wager going?”

She didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but he knew she was sitting right there on the bar stool, spooning too much sugar into her coffee. She wasn’t lurking. He could’ve told her to wait in the bedroom or gone in there himself and shut the door.

When Kingston hung up and strolled over to where Nicole was ruminating over what she was overhearing and sipping coffee, his mouth was set in a firm line.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Kingston sighed and scratched the back of his head, one eye squinting. “It’s fine. Nothing that can’t be worked around.”

Nicole clinked her spoon as she stirred her coffee again. “It sounded serious.”

Kingston turned to the coffeemaker. “Yeah, it was serious.”

“It didn’t sound like you were talking about golf club sales.”

“It was about some finance deal.”

“You said last night that you had been in finance but weren’t anymore.”

“Once you’re in tight with some of those guys, they don’t let you go,” he said. “They’re gregarious. Everything has to be discussed in a meeting, even when it shouldn’t be.”

“You said you’re from Connecticut, right?” she asked him.

Kingston freshened up his coffee and stirred more sugar in. “I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“But you’re living in Connecticut.”

He ran his hand through his dark hair. “Western Connecticut. Practically New York.”

“Is your finance friend in Connecticut?”

Kingston stared at his coffee. “Yeah.”

His tone hadn’t sounded like he was talking to a friend. He sounded sort of like when he’d been talking business with the other people on the sales team, but even more serious.

Nicole was an engineer, so she was good at math. Tricky math problems were just puzzles that, once you saw the connections, were easy to line up and figure out.

She was good at making those connections.

And she saw the path linking Kingston to Last Chance, Inc., the Connecticut-based venture capital firm strangling Sidewinder and endangering her friends’ jobs.

Asking Kingston about his connection to Last Chance would be like pricking the iridescent soap bubble around the previous night and that morning, allowing the grime into this private space they’d created.

She— might —never see him again, or at least never see him in the same light.

Working at Sidewinder these last few years and forming genuine friendships there had been her whole life. They were her friends. They trusted her.

The slithering around their feet might be fog, or it might be a snake.

Nicole said, “You know, the venture capital company that bought Sidewinder is based in Connecticut.”

This time, Kingston shrugged. “They’re incorporated in Vermont and have an office in Connecticut.”

“Connecticut’s a small state.”

He nodded. “Compared to California.”

“Do you know the people at Last Chance?” she asked him.

Kingston finished taking a long sip of his coffee and lowered the mug. “I know guys who work for them. That’s how I got this job. Connections.”

Not just connections. Too many connections.

Kingston living in Connecticut and having that conversation with a finance guy in Connecticut about a deal, a bad deal, were just too many coincidences. “Last Chance got you the job at Sidewinder.”

His voice was quieter. “Yes.”

“And that’s how you had Joe Flanagan on your contacts list, because our new owners gave you Joe’s number.”

“Yes.”

Nicole very gently and carefully set her mug on the coffee table and stared at the blue-painted swirls on the white ceramic. “You aren’t spying on us for them, are you? Listening to our meetings—like the sales meetings and our employee meetings about the change—and telling the new owners what’s going on?”

“I’m not a spy. I’m not some low-level grunt reporting what you say to a boss at Last Chance, Inc. Indeed, I’m not telling anyone at Last Chance anything about what’s happening at Sidewinder.”

That last part had an angry ring, a frustrated energy that said he was telling the truth but that more truth was hiding behind it.

But it was the truth.

Okay, Nicole was pretty sure Kingston wasn’t a spy.

But—

“So, you obviously aren’t just a sales guy. Everything about you says you’re not just cannon fodder to take to the summer golf trade shows. Why are you really at Sidewinder?”

Kingston sucked in his lower lip and bit it while regarding his coffee.

That much introspection before an answer might be due to deception or incoming bad news, and Nicole braced herself.

Maybe she shouldn’t have asked.

“Last Chance, Inc. gets its name from its mission,” Kingston said. “It’s the last stop for companies before bankruptcy. They buy companies for pennies on the dollar and turn them around, or they don’t.”

Her breath choked her. “How much of a chance do we have?”

“Not good,” he said. “Flanagan withheld information about an additional lien on Sidewinder’s business operations.”

“So there’s another outstanding loan? Can’t Last Chance just pay it off? That’s what venture capitalists do. They’re just a big pot of money that pays things off.”

It sounded stupid even when she said it. Vultures were not charitable.

“Last Chance overpaid for Sidewinder. Sidewinder is farther in the hole than it was purported to be, and they’ll have to work harder to get out of the hole and return it to profitability.” He looked up at her. “This is really bad, Nicole.”

“So, that’s your job, to evaluate Sidewinder, then? You’re like the trauma surgeon, seeing how bad the damage is?”

He shook his head. “It’s my job to turn Sidewinder around, to do anything necessary to get the ledgers in the black by the end of the year.”

“You can’t flip companies around to making a profit like that,” Nicole scoffed. “Businesses are like aircraft carriers. Changing the direction of that much mass takes a lot of energy. I don’t care about the operations side, and even I know that.”

“We have to,” he said. “It’s not an option or a hope. Sidewinder must make a profit by New Year’s Eve, or everything falls apart.”

“But venture capitalists invest money in companies,” she argued. “They don’t just close them.”

“If Sidewinder doesn’t turn around, Last Chance will try to sell the company for whatever they can get for it. They’ll likely just close the company and sell the equipment.”

“I knew it. When a VC bought us, I knew Sidewinder was going down. Maybe I should have taken that job at EB. Nuclear war is always a growing sector.”

“A large profit by December is the only way to save it.”

“It’s not possible,” she told him. “Not with our business model. We’re a luxury brand, selling a few units for high markup. I mean, you’d have to double our sales and price sets of clubs for a hundred thousand dollars each. No one’s that dumb, even golfers.”

Kingston huffed a sarcastic chuckle. “Yeah, a few billionaires would be dumb enough and have the poor taste to buy gold-plated golf clubs, but most billionaires aren’t stupid. The materials cost would eat into the profit, anyway.”

“But you have a plan to save Sidewinder Golf, don’t you?” Nicole asked. “That’s why they sent you. Right?”

He frowned. “I’m in sales. I wasn’t lying about being the new sales guy. I am an employee of Sidewinder Golf, on the HR org chart, and drawing a salary, but there will have to be changes.”

“You mean cuts,” she said. “People are going to lose their jobs.

“Not necessarily.” Kingston frowned at his coffee. “I need to see all of your prototypes and the designs. Basically, I need your computer.”

Panic grabbed her throat, and her ribs and stomach caved in, whooshing all the air out of her lungs. “But they’re not ready yet.”

“I need your plans, Nicole.”

The command in his voice was unmistakable.

“But they’re not ready. There are mistakes that I haven’t figured out yet. The steel might not be the right composition. They might shatter into shrapnel the first time you hit a ball with them. The ball might just flop off the tee and go nowhere. They aren’t ready.”

“I need a mirror of your hard drive on the company’s servers in an hour.”

The soap bubble had well and truly popped, and Nicole had to fight to preserve Sidewinder Golf. “I can’t do that, Kingston. As far as I can see on the company org chart—and I looked—you’re the new sales guy, not my boss. I’m not turning over my designs and prototypes.”