Page 22 of Executives' Omega
I blinked several times. “What?”
His smile was soft. “Do you know how I got into all this money stuff?”
I shook my head.
He shifted to sit cross-legged in front of me, still holding my hands. His skin was warm and soothing against mine.
“You know my family owns a catering company, yes?”
I nodded. “Brendan told me before the party.”
“Well… in businesses like that, everybody in the family is expected to help out. But…” he paused and let out a laugh. “Let’s just say I was a menace in the kitchen.”
“How so?”
He smiled. “Some days I’d only mess up by prepping the wrong ingredients—chopping tomatoes instead of tomatillos, or counting out flour tortillas instead of corn. Things like that. But food service runs on fairly tight margins, so even little things can add up fast.
“Next they had me assembling things like tamales. Easy right? Spread some masa on a corn husk, add filling, roll, and tie.” Another laugh. “Those were some of the most pitiful tamales anybody had ever seen. Either too much masa or too much filling, sometimes both in the same one. Almost all filling at one end, and masa at the other. There was no way we could sell them, and even my family would joke about how bad they were when we had them at dinner.”
He paused and gave me a soft smile that I couldn’t help but return.
“So after that,” he continued, “they gave me a job I really couldn’t screw up. Mix the meat and the marinades. All I had to do was get my hands in there and make sure that all the meat was coated. I didn’t even have to add anything to the bowls, they did that. Simple. Except, no matter what we did, my gloves would fall off and into the mix. Which is a huge no-no in the food industry. The gloves seemed to fit… until I got going. They tied twine around my wrists to hold them on better. It didn’t work. That job lasted less than a day.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Really.” He squeezed my hands. “My last job in the kitchen was just to run food between stations. Carry trays from point A to point B. Everybody thought that it would be impossible for me to mess up doing that.”
“But…”
He laughed and shook his head. “They decided that was a bad plan when I dropped a full tray of pulled meat. Hours and hours of roasting, resting, and pulling, spread across the floor.”
“Oh no…”
“Oh, yes. After that, I was barred from the kitchen, but I still had to help—because you always help the family business. They saw that I had good grades in math, so I started helping Mama with the books. I entered invoices and reconciled bank statements at first. I loved it, and I was good at it. Soon I was doing more complex work and even took a basic accounting class at the community college before I’d graduated high school. By the time I left for university, I was doing almost all the accounting. I made profit-loss statements, filled out the tax information, ran payroll…”
He chuckled. “I always thought I’d go back home, and keep doing that. Maybe open a small accounting firm. Then I met Brendan, Zane, and Linden. Plans changed, and now we’re here.”
“Thank you,” I murmured. “For telling me that.”
He smiled. “Can I tell you something else?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m still clumsy. This isn’t the first time paperwork has been scattered across the floor, and it won’t be the last. The print shop always keeps files for my reports for at least a week, in case they need to reprint.”
“Really?” I asked, scared to believe him.
“Really,” he smiled. “Now, are you feeling better?”
I nodded. My heart had stopped racing, and the parts that slammed on the floor barely tingled.
“Good. How about you gather the pages, and I’ll start sorting them. We’ll either get it fixed together, or I’ll ask for reprints. Ok?”
“Ok.”
∞∞∞
“Come with me,” Zane commanded as he stormed past the desk, jaw set and shoulders squared. His footfalls were heavy, and his fingernails dug into his palms. He appeared as if he’d grown in the hour or so since I’d last seen him, his presence taking up more space.
