Never Say Forever

I drop them on the desk with a heavy thunk.

“Bunch of comedians,” I mutter, snatching up my phone, scrolling to the names of the usual suspects and coming across Tucker’s name first. I punch the icon next to his name, and as the line connects and begins to ring, I mentally tally the number of sex toys the assholes—sometimes referred to as my friends—have mailed my way.

The first to arrive a year or so ago was purported to be an oral sex night light. It looked like a cross between a spelunker’s headlamp and a telephony headset and, according to the packaging, was called the Going Down Right Night Light. As ingenious as the creators may think themselves, I can’t honestly review the product as it has languished in a chest at the bottom of my bed. Seriously, if you can’t feel your way around a woman’s pussy, you don’t deserve to be between her legs.

As the chest began to fill, these “gifts” overflowed to a drawer in my closet. If they keep this up, by the end of the year, I’ll have enough product to open the kind of store that would make a sexual deviant blush. There are at least a dozen flavoured condoms, including a particularly rancid-sounding bacon flavour pack with the unique tagline of bacon flavour for both your lover and your pork sword’s pleasure. Other highlights include a pink pigtail attached to a tiny butt plug and another, not so petite, attached to a foot-long rainbow-coloured unicorn’s tail. Not long after this turned up, a leather riding crop arrived in a package originally addressed to me, but with my name crossed out and replaced with the moniker For the My Little Pony Lover. I can only imagine what the guy from the post room thinks of me.

The call connects a split second later, and Tucker’s voicemail greeting resounds.

This is Tucker. You know what to do.

“Tucker, Tucker. You nasty fucker. You shouldn’t have. And I mean that. You really shouldn’t have.” I cut the call, knowing he won’t be able to resist returning it.

“Mr Hayes?” I look up as the feminine voice continues. “I think there must be a mistake with this invoice.”

“Come in or get out. Don’t hover at the doorway, Emmie.”

“It’s Aimee,” she replies, not at all hesitantly but with a hard roll of her eyes. She knows I know her name but indulges my ridiculousness, though neither of us will admit to it. I’d have to be some kind of idiot not to remember after she’s been working for me for almost five years, even if I have spent less than six months based out of this office. She sends me enough signed emails for her name to have stuck.

Emails. So many emails.

Sometimes I even answer them.

Well, I guess I answer enough to keep my grandfather’s legacy afloat. The truth is, I don’t give a fuck about his company, and I was happy to begin running his “global brand” into the ground after his death. But that was before I’d considered his workforce.

I take a moment to look at Aimee. Really look. Shiny dark hair, big brown eyes, pale skin; she looks much younger than her years, which I guess to be somewhere in the region of twenty-six, twenty-seven. I also remember the day I found out my grandfather had a type beyond the long line of women he paraded at public events and family dinners. Women I’d thought were just arm candy because surely the old bastard was so old and so ill it defied all logic that he could get it up.

The women who clung to his arm in public were a fraction of his age and fawning. Always attractive and often blonde, he had a knack for finding the kind of woman who’d give her right breast implant to marry him. Or maybe they had the knack of finding him, who knows. None of them seemed smart enough to realise the most they could expect from him was for their bills to be paid, and only for as long as he had use of them. A fact he was surprisingly sanguine about. He used to laugh as he said it was hard to tell who was screwing who.

But that was the public face of Carson Hayes the elder, a man so blinded by his own sense of importance that he not only gave his son his name but also insisted his firstborn grandson carried it, too.

I remember how I used to look up to him. Now, there’s only revulsion. I hope he’s rolling over in his grave at what his name has become.

While the public face of the man was brash, it turned out his private life and his private indulgences were much, much worse. I might not have been privy to the full facts until the end, but the man was a predator, plain and simple. Yes, he liked his women young, but behind closed doors, he also liked them vulnerable.