Chapter 2: June

-- FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 2007 --

8:47 AM

The San Francisco Jonathan Kwong Enterprises office wasn’t anything like the one in New York. There were no JKE logos on the entry doors or signs on the outside of the building. Instead of occupying the top three floors of a massive skyscraper with its own helipad, we had only the twelfth-floor in a smaller, nondescript building. All the big movers and shakers in the company were in Manhattan, and sometimes it felt like the only reason we even had a San Francisco office was so that those big movers and shakers would have someplace to store their briefcases while doing business on the West Coast.

My role wasn’t flashy: I was basically an analyst. I crunched numbers, filed reports, and created PowerPoint presentations. It was still interesting work for a young man fresh out of college, with my research covering a wide range of industries. JKE was willing to buy and sell pretty much any company in any field, from high-tech start-ups to mom-and-pop farms. The company didn’t manufacture a thing except money – buying low, selling high, and flourishing on the margins in-between. In a way it wasn’t so different from gambling, except that the research I conducted was the company’s way of rigging the game to make sure we always had the winning hand.

I’d learned a heck of a lot about business in the last year, and I’d been exposed to such a wide range of fields that I could comfortably talk about a dozen different industries, using the jargon and acronyms unique to that particular trade. I was new enough that I hadn’t yet figured out my own specialty, nor had the company pushed me toward one. I didn’t know if I’d remain at JKE forever or come across an opportunity to go someplace new. For the time being I simply planned to learn as much as I could, for as long as I could, about every subject I could wrap my head around. And in the meantime I was provided with a great salary, excellent benefits, and regular big bonuses every time one of those big movers and shakers closed a deal.

“You’re late,” June Song commented without looking up from her screen as I dropped into my chair and docked my laptop.

“I know, I know,” I sighed, waiting for my login screen to appear. “Girlfriend wouldn’t let me--”

“Doonnn’t want to hear it,” she interrupted. Again she didn’t look up from her screen, although she raised her right hand and waggled her fingers at me dismissively. “Just tell me when you’re ready to discuss Harmon.”

“Right, right. Good morning to you, too.” I chuckled and smiled ruefully, but focused on getting Outlook and my other necessary programs initiated. But of course, Windows was taking its sweet time loading, and I suddenly remembered something I was supposed to ask June, so I rotated my desk chair and looked back at her across the 42-inch high partition between us that served as a cubicle wall. Her back was to me as she stared at her monitor, but I spoke up and said, “Hey, Adrienne wanted to know if you’d--”

“Not now,” June cut me off, clearly engrossed in her work. Again waggling her fingers above her right shoulder without looking back at me, she waved me off and I shook my head while turning back to my own monitor.

Given my well-known, tabloid-fodder relationship with a certain world-famous supermodel, most everyone in this office would be more than happy to hear about every little detail of my personal life, especially any detail that included the words “girlfriend” and/or “Adrienne”. Even after a year with the company getting to know people and letting them get to know me, I was still best known in the office as “Adrienne Dennis’ boyfriend”. It was a label people were only too quick to put on me, and to be honest, I was used to it. It made it easy for me to separate those in the office who actually wanted to be a real friend from those who weren’t worth my time and effort.

Thankfully, June fell into the category of real friends. She didn’t give a rat’s ass that I had a famous girlfriend, for one thing. From the moment we’d met in that Manhattan waiting room where M. John Fitzherbert III got fired on our first day of Orientation, she’d judged me first and foremost on my capabilities as a co-worker, and let all the other stuff about me be background noise.

Our trainer, Max, had warned us back then that we rookies would always be connected to each other, and that teamwork could only benefit us. June and I had gotten onboard with that concept right away, and from the first Monday in the San Francisco office together we’d made a pact to help each other succeed. It helped that for the first couple of months, we’d been given assignments to work on together. It was only after we’d proven ourselves as capable analysts who would provide quality material that we even started to work on different projects. Even so, we were partnered up more often than not, and should either one of us be unavailable, we were each other’s designated backup.

So that meant that for more the past year, June and I had worked side-by-side on the same or similar assignments, day in and day out. For the most part we stuck to discussing business, but even the most studious of hardcore nerds can’t talk about work ALL the time.

June was a sharp one, and she’d arrived for work that first Monday morning last year having researched on her own that Adrienne Dennis was not from San Bruno, despite my comment on the first Orientation day about my girlfriend being from that city. We were still near-strangers then, and I didn’t yet know whether or not I could really trust her, but rather than make up a lie on the spot, I simply explained that I’d been referring to a different girlfriend who really was from San Bruno. Getting straight to it, June asked me point blank if my relationship with Adrienne was real or just a sham for public consumption, and at first I started to give her the same bullshit lines I gave everyone else. But she was smarter than that, and I still wasn’t the best of liars, so June told me flat out that it would be easier if I just gave her the truth. She wasn’t a gossip, and she wasn’t going to blab; she simply wanted to know. And with my gut instinct telling me that I could trust her, I admitted that I was dating two girls at the same time, that the three of us lived together in that new SoMa apartment we’d just moved into, and while Sasha was also my girlfriend, it was just easier on everyone if the world believed that Adrienne and I were the romantic couple while Sasha was merely our roommate.

June’s reaction was pretty much “okay, whatever”, just another data point in her knowledge bank folder that summed up “co-worker Ben”. The information didn’t have any real bearing on my ability to do my job, so she filed it away as a simple explanation to resolve the apparent discrepancy in my previous “San Bruno” comment. And we both moved on.

Of course, while the San Francisco stalkerazzi weren’t anywhere near as intense as in the Big Apple, the media still eventually figured out that Adrienne and I had a roommate – and a beautiful, busty brunette at that. Given Adrienne’s well-known bisexual orientation – not to mention Sasha’s physical resemblance to the masked brunette in the online sex tape – the rumors of course started flying. At first, we’d planned to go ahead and admit that I was dating the two women at the same time, even if we didn’t go out of our way to advertise the fact. But after Sasha got a glimpse of life under the microscope, she lost her nerve a bit and decided she’d rather keep a low profile – an old habit from her stripper days.

So both Adrienne and I publicly stated that Sasha was merely our old college classmate and that we didn’t even become friends with her until my Junior year – long AFTER the date on the sex tape – so she couldn’t be the one from the video. So the rumors never became anything more than rumors, and when People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person in the World, Ashlyn Scott, turned up pregnant with Jonathan Kwong’s baby, let’s just say that the world at-large ceased to really care about determining Sasha’s actual relationship to us.

Kim proved to be a little simpler for the media to figure out, and also became the juicier story. Public record showed that I was BJ’s father, so there had been a minor scandal when he was born. For weeks, various tabloids published articles about how angry Adrienne was with me, how betrayed she felt, and claimed that I’d hidden my baby mama from her all this time, as Kim had remained living with her family in Sunnyvale right up until BJ’s birth. None of us paid those stories any mind, and both Kim and BJ moved into their bedroom next to mine. But when Adrienne continued to make public appearances with me as her boyfriend while Kim and BJ were living with us, and she stated on camera that the situation was no big deal, the furor died down pretty quickly.

Adrienne partied less(ish), stayed away from drugs, and generally became pretty boring as far as the tabloids were concerned. Sasha went to work, hung out with us as a group, and avoided any overt public displays of affection. And Kim squired BJ around town running errands and generally kept the lowest profile of any of us.

We were boring. We never did anything flashy. We never got into trouble. And we didn’t even try to hide. We just went about our daily lives as if the media didn’t exist, and after a while they really started to NOT exist, since their pursuits of some kind of story continually came up fruitless to the point where they simply stopped trying. As far as anyone was concerned, Adrienne was my girlfriend, Sasha was our roommate, and Kim was my baby mama. Nothing more than that; nothing else to report. There weren’t many paparazzi based in San Francisco to begin with, unlike New York or L.A., and the few that there were moved on to find more newsworthy fish to fry.

Of course, some of my co-workers would never stop being curious about my complicated personal life, and they continued to make not-so-subtle inquiries into the subject even a year later. I didn’t hang out with those people that much. The media told them whatever it could figure out, and I didn’t talk about anything beyond that. So while the latest public adventures of my world-famous girlfriend still came up as topics of conversation at the many team dinners, All Hands meetings, and other company functions, folks were used to getting non-answers from me. I still wasn’t the best liar, but I’d gotten pretty good at “no comment”. And if that didn’t work, I’d start gushing about how adorable BJ was, how he was growing up so fast, and how foul smelling even the smallest nugget of poop in his diaper could be, and the career-driven single businessmen I worked with quickly found ways to exit the conversation.

But I couldn’t completely become a closed book. The world of business is a social place, so I made nice with other co-workers, went out to bars with them, and generally got along with everyone. The surface level stuff – like where I’d grown up, how many siblings I had, and where I’d gone to school – was freely shared. The deeply personal stuff, on the other hand, was just that: personal. Thankfully, most people respected that, some people became actual friends, and a select few even got to meet Adrienne, Sasha, Kim, and BJ at one time or another.

Still, only one had ever actually been inside my apartment: June.

She and I worked together. We worked together a LOT. JKE paid very well, but it demanded a great deal of time and energy, and nobody worked only forty hours a week. Those first few months were trial by fire, and I can’t say with any certainty that I would have gotten through them without her help. And since 20-year-old June still lived at home with her parents in San Bruno, at some point it just became easier to invite her over to my place instead of remaining at the office into the late hours of the night or meeting up at a coffee shop. Quieter, too.

That was back in July, well before BJ arrived and Kim moved in. My only roommates were Adrienne and Sasha, and I’d called ahead to warn them that June was coming over to do some work together after dinner. (I’d never forget what happened the last time I brought home a 20-year-old sheltered Asian co-worker without calling ahead first). June was polite, almost formally so, and accepted the brief tour of the apartment before filing it away as another data point in her knowledge bank. And within five minutes of her arrival, we got down to our work assignments.

It was no big deal. June didn’t tip off the media or snoop around. When we were done with work she’d pack up and leave. And our projects were demanding enough that she wound up coming by the apartment at least twice a week.

Brandi, Dayna, and Kevin would also visit several times a week. We lived so close and had the larger apartment, so it only made sense for them to come to us. Group dinners were regular affairs, and if June and I were going to do work in the evening, then she might as well join us for the meal as well instead of eating in a restaurant by herself. She became a frequent enough visitor that everyone got used to her presence. And since my relationships with both Adrienne and Sasha were an open secret, neither of my girlfriends had much reason to hide their displays of affection. We weren’t fucking on the dining table or anything, but comfortable caresses and tender kisses were commonplace.

Then Dayna’s and Kevin’s relationship fell apart. It had been fraying for a while, well before June started joining us, but she had a front row seat to some of their fights that took over our apartment at one group dinner or another. At first, the couple would realize they were making a scene and would excuse themselves to continue the fight in their apartment downstairs. But by early-August they sort of ceased to care about making a ruckus, and June and I would usually find some way to excuse ourselves into my bedroom to do our work.

Dayna became a near-constant presence in the apartment after the break-up. Here, she had close friends willing to listen, ready and willing shoulders to cry on, and even intimate companions for sexual relief, myself included. She and I never once had sex in the two months between the time I moved in and the time she and Kevin broke up, since she was trying very hard to become the committed, monogamous wife-type she thought he wanted her to be. But about a week after things ended, the self-proclaimed nymphomaniac asked me for a therapeutic pounding, and we’d been fucking ever since.

As I mentioned, neither Adrienne nor Sasha did anything to hide their displays of affection in front of June. Once she started fucking me, neither did Dayna. And the third time June visited after the first time I’d become Dayna’s booty call, she asked me point blank if I was also having sex with the busty blonde.

I’d trusted June thus far, and would continue to do so. I told her the truth, she filed away the data point, and that was that. We got back to work. No big deal. And then last month, when Dayna and I became “official”, I told June the truth again.

Of course, there were limits as to how much “truth” June wanted to deal with. There were very few people to whom I could talk about my personal life, and many of them were scattered all over the state. So once I started to get comfortable trusting June with the realities of my complicated relationships, I became more and more willing to say things I wouldn’t say to almost anyone else outside of the inner circle.

For example, there was a day when I barely managed to stay conscious on a Monday morning in the office, and when June asked why I was so tired I merely shrugged and admitted that my three girlfriends had teamed up on me and fucked me within an inch of my life. She made a face and didn’t want to hear any more about it. I quickly learned that any discussion of sex made her uncomfortable, the way a 12-year-old virgin might get squirmy about the topic, and I went back to not really saying much about it.

There were other times when she actually seemed curious to learn more “truth”. I would sometimes mention something about “my girlfriend” and June would find herself asking “Which one?” Those times, as long as the story didn’t involve something sexually explicit, she would listen to my story with interest and occasionally even comment about it.

And there was even one night in my bedroom, our work finished for the night, when I found myself rambling about my lost relationship with Dawn and how even though we’d gotten back on friendly terms, she mostly stayed in Berkeley being a student, and neither of us went out of our way to increase the number of times we saw each other. June listened to everything intently, absorbing the entire tale as if it were her favorite daytime soap opera.

I didn’t talk about everything, of course. Certain secrets remained just that: secret. The intimate nature of my relationship with Brandi, for example, went strictly unspoken; while my three girlfriends were open with their PDA, Brandi had much tighter control over her impulses whenever someone outside the family was around. The Master/sub relationship I had with Kim was another aspect of my life that was never shown to June. But in general, the mundane realities of my domestic life were fair game as topics of conversation with her, and in return, I started to get to know more about June, too.

She had a little sister, Eve, just a little older than my own baby twin sisters. June felt bad, because Eve had never been the superstar student that she was. Eve hadn’t skipped any grades and didn’t get a perfect score on the SAT. And most egregious of all, Eve hadn’t been accepted into Stanford, her father’s alma mater.

June had been an avid badminton player until her early teens, but the academic pressure her parents put on her had taken away all of her free time in favor of advanced after-school study programs. Her parents brought in a piano teacher to give both girls lessons at home, but the two sisters never did anything social or related to sports.

And on the ridiculously uncomfortable (for her) topic of sex, June eventually confessed to me that she’d never even kissed a boy, let alone engaged in any kind of sexual intercourse. When it came to the four bases, the girl was still in the batter’s box not even attempting to swing at a pitch. Hell, one could argue that she was still in the dugout.

But lest you think I began working my Big Ben magic on her with the goal of adding a new virgin notch to my ever-expanding belt, that sort of the thing was the very LAST thing on my mind. June was my friend, and my co-worker, and one of the very few women I’d ever met who knew of my reputation and didn’t let it affect her. Her friendship meant way more to me than any potential for conquest, and I went out of my way to treat her with kid gloves and make sure she understood I’d never do such a thing.

Plus, near as I could tell, June was the least sexual person I’d ever met. Seriously, I wondered if the girl even HAD hormones. I watched her from time to time, trying to figure her out. I never caught her checking out a hot guy, even the shirtless ones with great abs in front of the Abercrombie & Fitch store. For about a month I made up my mind that she was a closet lesbian, except that I never caught her checking out a hot girl either, and I pretty much had all types of hot girls hanging around my apartment.

June had no interest in guys. She had no interest in girls. She’d never been kissed and didn’t really want to be. And forget the concept of having sex. The whole thing seemed icky and gross to her and the one time I asked her about eventually getting married and procreating, she said she never wanted to marry and thought that maybe they’d find a solution for cloning if she ever thought about passing along her genes.

I wondered if she’d ever even masturbated in her entire life. Probably not.

June was a practically a machine. She slept, ate, and felt emotions like frustration, anger, and satisfaction, but she pretty much lived to work and that was it. It made no sense to me. I’d met workaholics, and Sasha was a pretty driven person, but Sasha at least had a passionate side underneath that career-oriented exterior. June, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care about anything except her job. No real interest in music, movies, or the arts. She wasn’t a tech-geek or a video gamer. And she didn’t care about luxurious things or have much interest in exotic vacations.

I didn’t get her at all. I couldn’t understand how any human being could LIVE like that. I’d idly wondered if she was a high-functioning autistic, maybe Asperger’s. I once thought about “fixing” her via Big Ben Experience brain scrambling, although I’d dismissed that thought immediately. At the end of the day, June was June, and it wasn’t my place to try and change her. She was smart, hard-working, and willing to help me out. And when it came to dealing with the pressures of this job, I sometimes wished there were three more like her.

Of course, she expected ME to carry my own weight, too. I was sifting through my stack of emails, judging what I would need to address today and what could wait until after I came back from vacation when the sound of plastic wheels on hard-packed commercial carpet sounded behind me.

I turned around to see a still-seated June walking her desk chair around the 42-inch tall partition between us, an expectant look on her face.

“Stop daydreaming,” she grumbled. “I know you’ve mentally got one foot out the door already, but I’m going to have to deal with all your crap while you’re on vacation and we have work to do.”

11:48 AM

“Knock, knock.”

June and I had both been staring at my monitor, but we simultaneously looked back and found one of our co-workers standing at the entrance to my cube, his knuckles still on the plastic edge of the partition he’d just knocked on.

Rakesh smiled down at us. “Hey, you guys hungry yet?”

June blinked, glanced at my clock, and replied, “It’s not even noon. The market’s open for another hour.”

Standing up straight, Rakesh head-nodded down the aisle. “It’s Friday and Kamar wants to go to Tadich. The line probably is already out the door.”

I nodded, about to agree. As close as we worked together, it wasn’t uncommon for me to join my co-workers for lunch while June stayed behind. Oh, she came along occasionally, to maintain at least a minimal amount of socialization under the rationalization that doing so would improve cooperative efficiency. But she rarely did so before the market closed, and certainly not when we had the volume of work to go through today.

But June gave me a death stare as I started to get out of my chair. I shrugged and remarked, “What? It’s Friday. Nothing big happens in the last hour on a Friday.”

“We’ve got a mountain of work to get through before you leave me juggling all your crap,” she complained.

“But we’ve still gotta eat,” I argued. “And if you want to discuss work, then come along.”

June shook her head. “We’re staying here. You can run out to The Sentinel and bring back a couple of sandwiches. You like The Sentinel,” she reasoned and turned to face the monitor again, the discussion over as far as she was concerned.

I sighed and sank back into my seat. Did I mention June was bossy? Especially for someone two years younger than me, possibly the youngest person in the entire building. I was one of the very few in the office that wasn’t put off by her demeanor – probably one of the reasons she liked me so much. Some of the others bristled and barked back, but we’d long established that I wasn’t the Alpha type and didn’t get flustered just for not getting my way.

With a shrug for Rakesh, I waved him off and said, “Next time, man. Have a good lunch.”

He nodded. “Have a good vacation. Try not to think about work while you’re out.”

“I’ll try.” I chuckled and gestured at June. “But knowing her, she’s still gonna call my cell phone every three hours to talk about our projects.”

Rakesh’s eyebrows popped, and he warned, “More true than you want to think about.” He grinned, turned, and headed back toward the others.

I turned back to face the monitor, and without looking at me June commented dryly, “Two hours. I’ll be calling you every two hours.”

“You’re welcome to try,” I replied with a smirk, knowing full well they didn’t have cell reception where I was going. June knew it too, and for half a second she glanced at me and smiled as well. The girl wasn’t entirely without a sense of humor.

But just as we started to get back into our work, my cell phone started buzzing in my pocket. Pulling it out, I checked the display, smiled, and answered. “Heyyy. It’s not even noon. What are you doing awake at this early morning hour?”

“Who, me? I’ve been up for hours,” Adrienne insisted before laughing. “Well, I’ve been up long enough to miss you. Come home for lunch?”

“You mean ‘breakfast’ for you.”

“Whatever. I have to see you. Can you come home or do I need to waltz into your office again?”

“Nooo,” I replied immediately, and she laughed on the other end of the line, knowing exactly what she’d threatened me with. The last time Adrienne had arrived unannounced, she’d literally stopped the whole company in its tracks. You’d think that people working at a company with Taylor Brynn married to the Owner/President would be a lot more blasé about a pretty girl walking into their midst. But like I said: all the movers and shakers were in New York, and Taylor and her model friends didn’t visit the San Francisco office very much. So of course all the co-workers with their not-so-subtle inquiries into my personal life had gotten stirred up again.

“Well either you’re coming to me or you’ll have to deal with the consequences of me coming to you,” she insisted.

By now I noticed that June was looking pretty annoyed with me. With a sigh, I replied, “It’s my last day in the office before our vacation and there’s a ton of stuff we’ve got to go over. Do you really want June calling me every two hours?”

“There’s no cell reception where we’re going, so she’s shit outta luck.”

“Exactly. I gotta take care of this today.”

“Your funeral. Looks like I’m coming to you.”

“No ... no ... don’t do that.” I pinched my forehead and rubbed with thumb and middle finger. “Let’s meet halfway. Any kind of food you’re in the mood for?”

“You can’t just come home?” Adrienne complained.

At the same time, June gave me a look and muttered, “We’ve got work.”

I stared back at my work partner and said, “We’ve still gotta eat, June. Look, we got a lot of stuff done this morning. Harmon’s pretty much put to bed.”

“We still need to get Cytherion sorted before you leave,” she grumbled.

“And we will. We have the whole afternoon and I’ll stay late if I have to. If it’ll make you feel better, come with me and we can start talking about Cytherion on the way.”

“Tiger...” Adrienne began in a warning tone over the phone.

“Fine,” June replied with a sigh. She could be bossy, but she knew better than to try and pull rank over one of my girlfriends. Standing up, she asked, “Where are we going?”

“Meet us halfway, Adrienne,” I said into the phone. “Café Soleil?”

My girlfriend sighed. “Just remember that this was your idea.”

I frowned. “You like Café Soleil.”

“I do, but food wasn’t what I wanted you to come home for. I miss you, Tiger. It’s been too long.”

I blinked, only now recognizing what Adrienne meant. She’d gone out to a party with friends for the evening last night after dinner and had taken Sasha with her, and I’d enjoyed a threesome with Brandi and Dayna. The girls wore me out and I’d fallen asleep before Adrienne came home, so it hadn’t been since Wednesday, nearly two days, since the last time My Tigress and I had made love. She wanted me to come home for a nooner.

My eyebrows rose, and I glanced across the low partition at June. The Chinese girl had already returned to her cube, locked her workstation, and retrieved her purse. I weighed the possibility of telling June that she couldn’t come anymore, that instead of going to lunch I was going home to fuck my supermodel girlfriend, but after a moment’s thought I decided against it. I really DID need to eat – that cold blueberry bagel hadn’t even replaced the calories I’d burnt during my ordinary morning – June and I WOULD be able to talk about work, and Adrienne and I were about to go on a two-week vacation together. There would be plenty of opportunities for sex at a time that didn’t interfere with my last day of work. Going two days without dick wasn’t the end of the world, and if she’d already waited this long, a few extra hours wouldn’t kill her.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized into the phone. “I’ll make it up to you when I get home, but I’ve really got to get work done today. Do you even want to meet us for lunch or just cancel?”