Sadie nodded with a wink. “I got your back, girl.” She chuckled. “It’s weird, I guess I’ve been so caught up in being a mom and being a wife that I didn’t realize how long it had been since I just went out and hung out with a friend. I gotta do this more often. Tell you what? You can always use me as a connection as long as we continue getting coffee a couple of times a month.”
My jaw dropped. “Uh, deal. I don’t know, how often do you get to just go to the movies or hit up a shitty bar? The world is your oyster.”
“That used to be my bread and butter until I started dating the guys. They spoil me rotten. It sounds awesome though. Let’s just make a list and start ticking the boxes.”
I laughed. “Double deal.”
The rest of my coffee with Sadie was nothing but delightful. She told me all about her home life, how her husbands can be a bit intense, but deep down are just really good men, and how they’re wonderful parents to her daughter. I told her about my travels and how the whole Foxx offer came well timed because I was thinking about slowing down the traveling for a while. Sadie had been in a similar boat and was glad to start performing more domestically and living a more reliable lifestyle. It was nice. I spent most of my ‘free time’ alone, and on rare occasion with my brother. I did have a few friends from college that I would see from time to time, but every time I left the country and came back it felt like one more of them had gotten married, or had another kid, or had moved. Their lives were going on without me, so when I came back, it was awkward to try and force my way back in. It was easier to just be alone, but just like Sadie, I didn’t realize how long it’d been since I just went out and spent time with a girlfriend. It was wonderful.
We parted with hugs and promises to see each other again soon, and I made my way home. I was in the midst of packing and getting ready to move; the Foxxes were sending some men to move my apartment to my new condo uptown while I was training on my first day on Monday. I took a shower, ate a quick dinner, and then finished up packing while spending more time going over my job duties for my new, well four new jobs.
When it felt like I had a good enough handle on what was going to be asked of me, and having allotted enough of my sanity to the unexpected, I pivoted to googling the Foxxes online. There wasn’t a single article amongst what I read that matched Sadie and Garrett’s narrative about the Foxx siblings, and the articles weren’t just grasping at straws. There were pictures and videos and quotes. Things that the Foxxes actually said. That wasn’t just someone making something up for the sake of doing so, it was based on facts.
“Believe me, Miss Storm, there isn’t a thing that has hit the media that isn’t controlled by us.”
Maybe there was more to the Foxxes than meets the eye, then again…
…maybe there wasn’t.
10
Alexa
Screw what Sadie and Garrett had said, the Foxxes were brutes. I woke up for the day to a mudslide of phone calls and texts from Quentin, telling me that, despite the starting hours on my contract of 8:00AM, he was expecting me in his office to begin learning the Event Planning business at 6:30AM on the nose because he was an ‘early riser.’ Because I was asleep and my phone was in Do Not Disturb for the night, I didn’t get the original message, which meant each minute after 6:30 I got a new text or call berating me for being late.
Only after taking a rushed shower, grabbing a bagel and cream cheese to shove down my throat while I finished preparing my boxes and furniture to be moved to my new condo, and driving at a speed for which I definitely should have been arrested, was I walking into Quentin’s office. I was prepped to completely blow my stack upon entering, but when I walked into his office, I noticed that Sadie was inside.
She looked up with a smile. “Hey girl!”
“Hey, I didn’t think I’d see you,” I replied.
“You weren’t supposed to,” Quentin cut in. “You’re late.” We hadn’t even formally met yet, and he was hopping right into rude; very Foxx.
He also stayed true to the family name in terms of looks. He was wearing a long black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled all the way down and the wrists buttoned. He had light brown hair and green eyes, and was clearly fit with large muscles. Most notably about his appearance was a scar that bisected his left eyebrow and stopped just shy of his eye. I’d seen dozens of pictures of him just in the previous night alone, and not one of them had that scar. Either the scar was drawn on, and it didn’t appear to be, or he went out of his way to make sure that any pictures of him that were released had the scar photoshopped out. It bolstered Rogan’s notion that they controlled all the media coverage around him. For his scar to be missing, even in so-called ‘candid’ photos, he had to have control over them.