Page 33 of Due Diligence

Tattoo sleeves. An eyebrow piercing. A cigarette tucked behind his ear. Yes—he would do nicely. I leaned closer to him, stopping him mid-word as he talked about…I wanted to say, trains?

“So, do you ride them a lot?” I asked, letting my hand rest on his knee over the hole in his dark jeans.

He glanced down at my hand and then back up at me, licking his lips once before he said, “What do you mean?”

“Trains,” I said. “Do you ride them?”

Craig lifted his pierced eyebrow. “Oh, no nottrains. I’m sayingtrainers.Like, sneakers.”

I hesitated. Was this guy British?

“Oh, trainers,” I repeated, nodding. “Sorry, I totally misheard you.”

“No problem,” he assured me. “It’s loud. Should we get out of here?”

Now that I was listening for an accent, I was alarmed to find he really was British.Yikes. Somehow, I was so freaking horny and so ready to jump his bones, I didn’t even realize he was from a differentcontinent. That was a new low—probably much worse than me never knowing these guys’ names. I probably should have been more concerned. But then again…meh.

“Let’s stay a little longer,” I replied, taking a pull of my whiskey and coke through the flimsy red cocktail straws. “Tell me more about trainers.”

Smiling, Craig started telling me about how he would buy trainers and resell them at a higher price, in some sort of dull sneaker arbitrage. Shamelessly, I nodded and smiled at him, hoping I could appear interested while I waited for the liquor to really hit me. According to Craig, he could wait in line and buy a new pair of sneakers, and then sell them on eBay for a four hundred percent markup. And according to Craig, now that he had a reputation for this, it was really just a matter of time before he was bringing in millions every year.

I hated this part. Inevitably, when I met a guy at a bar, he would assume he needed to give me his net worth and earning potential to get me to sleep with him. I didn’t know why this happened—it was like the fuckboys of America got together and all concluded this was something women wanted. In reality: I didn’t care. At all. There was truly nothing less sexy to me than a guy who pretended to have more money than he actually did.

In Craig’s case, this little spiel might have worked on a lot of women. The sneaker game wasn’t exactly mainstream, so I imagined most women couldn’t call his bluff. I would have been the first to admit I didn’t know much about sneakers, but I could still work the logic out in my head based on my understanding of basic economics.

It went like this: Craig seemed to think he could buy any new pair of sneakers and flip it on a four hundred percent markup. For the sake of ease, I just pretended a pair of sneakers cost a thousand dollars—which I knew was way off, but I needed a baseline. At a thousand dollars a pop, a four hundred percent markup was five thousand dollars, or a net profit of four thousand dollars. However, online retailers like eBay always took a small cut, so I reasoned his profit was closer to three thousand five hundred. But when it came to making real money—‘fuck you,’ money—three thousand five hundred dollars per transaction wasn’t going to cut it. Craig was going to have to scale up his operation, which would require capital. The only access to capital he had was the profit from the previous sale. So at any given time, he was never really holding much liquid cash; most of his earnings were in inventory assets. And based on all this information, in order to turn a million a year, he was going to have to sell two hundred and eighty-six sneakers. That didn’t sound like much—but did in fact become impossible when he had to spend at least fifteen hours at a time justwaiting in linefor sneakers. Fifteen hours times two hundred and eight-six sneakers was over four thousand hours of waiting—or around one hundred and seventy-eight straight days of just standing there on a New York sidewalk.

I ran these numbers in about two minutes flat, all while Craig was telling me about a new pair of Jordans he was going to wait in line for next week. It was moments like these when I wished mental math weren’t so easy for me. Now I had nothing to dobut stare at him—throughhim, really—while he went on and on about these sneakers.

I was just about to stop him mid-sentence and take him up on his offer to get out of here, buzzed or not, when something—someone—caught my eye.

On the other side of the club, I saw a head above the crowd. He was elbowing through moving bodies, tall and controlled—almost graceful. He was wearing a black t-shirt that gently hugged his chest and accentuated the muscles in his arms. At first I did a double take because this guy was standout handsome: regal and clean-shaven with a jawline for days. He didn’t look like the other men who came to Shelf Atlas. No, this guy was pure composure—almost pretty. There wasn’t a tattoo in sight on his skin and all it would take was a little hair gel to make him look like a Wall Street trader. From a distance, I got a brief look at his eyes: pale green and bright. They caught the flashing club lights as he smiled. The room faded away; it was only him.

I marveled at him for at least thirty seconds before recognition took over. It dawned on me slowly, challenging the effects of the liquor I had consumed. His piercing eyes and shapely jaw began to register. Reality mingled with fantasy. This wasn’t just a remarkably handsome stranger, so clean and put together that he was almost out of place. No, I knew this man. I knew him well.

“Marcus?” I blurted out softly, unable to keep it in.

It took me another beat to accept this was really happening: I was at my favorite bar in the world and the vindictive tech founder who tried to get me fired had shown up out of the blue. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He had to be here for me. There was no reason why he would just magically appear here, of all nights, if not for me…right?

On the dancefloor, Marcus ran a hand through his thick brown hair. He pushed it away from his face where his forehead glimmered with a faint sheen of sweat. He was dancing;he was smiling—both things I never thought the Polo-shirt-wearing, patron of punctuality would ever do. Yet there he was: living in the moment—havingfun, for once. Another clubgoer accidentally collided with him, spilling beer on his t-shirt. Instead of grimacing, Marcus just laughed. The other guy tried to apologize, but I saw him shaking his head and gesturing at the spill, assuring him that it was fine.

After a few seconds, the other guy leaned towards Marcus and whispered something in his ear. I saw Marcus nodding, saying something back I couldn’t decipher. A moment later, the guy passed Marcus a joint—and to my surprise, he accepted it.

I watched as Marcus brought the joint to his lips and took a drag from it, the tip illuminating as he drew in the smoke. He took a decent—dare I saypracticedhit. When he was done, he handed the joint back to the other guy. Then he held his breath, letting the smoke sit in his lungs before he blew it out over the crowd.

“What the fuck is he doing here…” I murmured.

“Who?”

I had forgotten Craig was there, but I turned back to face him and found that he was staring at me with his brow furrowed. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I just saw someone I know.”

“A friend?”

“Not really,” I replied, although I didn’t clarify that Marcus was more of an enemy at this point. I nodded towards the dancefloor, where Marcus was still caught up in the thick of the crowd—with a new addition. There was a woman hanging off his neck, grinding on him now. He made no move to stop her. As the bodies around him shifted, I caught a sporadic glance at his hands. He gripped her ass over her short, tight skirt. She clearly loved that; she tossed her head back and beamed at him, grinning like she was about to win the one-night-stand lottery.

“Which one are we looking at? The tall guy who’s clearly about to get lucky?” Craig asked. “Cheers to him.”

“I guess,” I murmured, eyes still on Marcus. I watched as he dragged his hands along the woman’s body, traveling the curve of her ass up to her small waist. He wasn’t shy about touching her—at all. On the contrary, he seemed to be enjoying the way her body responded to his touch. He rubbed her back and she pressed herself even closer to him, bringing her nose up so it nuzzled against Marcus’s.

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