The Underwriting (13 page)

Charlie shut off the television. “Fuck,” he said out loud.

He reached for his bottle of Ambien and picked up one of the L.Cecil water bottles and went to the sink to fill it. But when he took off the lid he noticed a white film at the mouth. He licked his finger and touched it: it tasted sour, like a crushed-up pill. He went back to the other water bottle: it was clean. Was this . . . ? He tasted more of the white residue: it was Molly. It had to be. But how had it ended up in her water bottle?

TODD

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
26; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

“Boom!” Todd turned his laptop to Tara.

The note was from Hook's lawyer at Crowley Brown, announcing that the S-1 had been officially submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the culmination of three weeks of around-the-clock work. S-1 filings normally took twice that time to pull off. Take that, Harvey Tate: just try giving Todd Kent a challenge he can't overcome.

Tara smiled thinly. She looked exhausted, and that made her look pretty, in a vulnerable way that almost compensated for the glasses and pinned-back hair.

“Everything okay?” Todd asked.

“Yeah,” Tara said. “Just tired.”

He could tell something was wrong, and guessed it had to do with Callum Rees. Apparently he'd just wanted to get her advice about market conditions and how much of his position he should sell. Tara said they hadn't even had drinks, just soda water, and that he'd spent the whole time checking out other women. That had to have sucked for Tara—comparing herself to all those hot girls at the Crosby—and Todd felt a little bad for having been so hard on her.

He liked Tara. She worked hard and didn't get stressed out and occasionally said things that were funny. She didn't get upset when he and Beau talked about sex or sports, and she didn't inundate them with questions about men. She was still neurotic—she only ate salads without dressing—and overly serious—she never took part when they ordered beers into the office—but he liked working with her more than he had any other woman, and would still sleep with her if the opportunity arose.

“I'm going to go home before the honeybees land.” Tara stood up and straightened her dress, wrinkled from a day and a half of wear. Honeybees were the employees who filled their days doing internal networking, picking up gossip and pollinating it elsewhere in the office. They scoured firm-wide announcements for employees who looked like they were on the rise, then e-mailed congratulatory notes and scheduled coffee chats to “get in front of” them in hopes of being remembered someday, once the rising colleagues were in charge.

“Congratulations, guys.” Lou Reynolds popped his head into the room as Tara slipped her heels back on and smiled knowingly at Todd. “Heard the big news!”

“Thank you,” Tara said, reaching out to squeeze the honeybee's hand. Lou blushed at Tara's warmth; he was used to buttoned-up, professional Tara, not the exhausted, tender Tara whom Todd had gotten to know over the past three weeks.

“Will you be back later?” Todd asked her, ignoring Lou.

“No, I've got this event at the Frick,” she said, shaking her hair from the clip that secured it and refastening it more tightly as she spoke.

“Since when do you rub shoulders on the Upper East Side?”

“It's work,” she said. “L.Cecil's got a table and Catherine asked me to go.”

“Catherine Wiley?” Lou's jaw dropped.

Todd's throat constricted: why was Tara on a first-name basis with the president of the investment bank?

“I guess a couple of important clients are going to be there and Catherine wants me to get some exposure,” she said innocently, as if she weren't aware of what that meant.

“Why didn't you say anything?”

“I didn't think you'd care,” she lied.

“Of course I care,” Todd said, dumbfounded. Senior management wasn't teeing up introductions for him, and he'd brought in this deal. Tara was only on it because he'd chosen her.

“Good luck tonight,” Lou told her. “And let's grab a coffee later this week. Would be great to catch up.”

“Sure thing,” Tara said, winking at Todd. “See you guys later.”

“Dude, what are you going to do to celebrate?” Lou sat down where Tara had been, anxious for whatever manly adventures his hero was plotting for the evening.

Todd was in fact going to PH-D, the nightclub in the Meatpacking District, but no way he was telling Lou that. His face was still on the door. How the hell could the firm give Tara such a leg up like that? Because she was a girl? That wasn't gender equality, that was reverse discrimination.

He glanced at his watch. “Right now, I'm going to the gym,” Todd said to Lou, not lying. “It's been too long.”

Lou stood, embarrassed he'd just sat, as Todd picked up his gym bag. “Yeah, totally. I hate it when I've got a big deal and can't work out.”

Todd tried not to laugh. “Well, thanks for the congrats.”

—

H
E
FELT
HIS
ANNOYANCE
subside as he opened the doors to Equinox and breathed in the over-oxygenated, eucalyptus-infused air.

“Long time no see,” Morgan, his super-hot personal trainer, teased when he came out of the locker room. Her spandex capris made no attempt to hide her sculpted legs and ass. Todd's friends had all written off personal trainers, insisting P90X was the way forward, but Todd couldn't imagine giving up Morgan or sessions of her undivided attention focused on perfecting his body. “I hope you have a good excuse,” she said.

He swatted her ponytail playfully. “I do, in fact,” he said, leading her to the gym floor, where he reached up to turn one of the flat-screen TVs to CNBC. She pointed him to the bike below it and he climbed on, watching the screen.

“A group of Stanford students today announced their intention to create a nonprofit investment fund honoring Kelly Jacobson, the Stanford senior found dead of a drug overdose in her campus dorm room earlier this month,” the anchor said. “The students struck a deal with the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to use the site to raise the two-million-dollar fund, which will be managed by the university's Student Finance Club, and donate five percent of annual proceeds to programs supporting women's rights, a cause Jacobson was passionate about when she was alive.”

“We're creating the fund to continue the work Kelly wanted to do, both in her finance career and in her passion for helping women around the world,” a pretty brunette told the camera. “Kelly was an amazing girl, and we want to make sure the world remembers her that way.”

“That was Renee Schultz, a sorority sister of Kelly's. We contacted Sean Robinson, a vocal critic of the fanfare surrounding Jacobson's death, for his comment.”

“I'm not saying I don't commend the students' efforts,” Sean Robinson said, raising his hands to the camera. “All I'm pointing out is that a black kid ODs and no one pays attention, and a white girl ODs and she gets a televised funeral and a memorial fund.”

“You're working on Kelly Jacobson's memorial fund?” Morgan turned her attention from the screen, punching up the resistance on Todd's bike.

“Wait for it,” he said, feeling his heartbeat rise with the movement of his legs and anticipation of the moment to come.

“In business news,” the anchor continued, “the location-based dating app company, Hook, filed an S-1 with the SEC today, indicating its intention to offer its shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The deal, which is speculated to value the company around fourteen billion dollars, is being underwritten by L.Cecil. It's a piece of good news for the global investment bank that has, otherwise, only been making headlines for SEC investigations. The announcement comes as a surprise to many analysts, but is already generating speculation that it will be the hottest issue since Twitter went public last November.”

Todd grinned at Morgan. She looked back from the TV, pursing her lips in approval. “Not bad.”

Bam
, Todd thought.
That
was the moment that mattered: the moment when a hot girl was impressed by his power and authority and involvement in things that got reported on CNBC.

“Come on,” Morgan instructed him off the bike to the weights. “Let's see if you've got any muscle left in those manly, important arms of yours.” He let her flattery spread across him like a steroid.

“So, do you have a big celebration lined up?” Morgan asked as she adjusted the weights on the lateral pulldown. He could see a girl on the mat checking him out in the mirror.
This one's for you
, he silently told her, pulling down on the bar.

“Going to PH-D tonight. Come as my date?” He smiled slyly.

“Afraid I don't date clients.” She sighed but grinned in a way that made him know it wasn't off the table.

“I'll fire you, then,” he countered. The idea suddenly seemed very smart: Morgan must be incredible in bed, with all that core strength and endurance. “Come on, it'll be fun.”

She laughed. “I've got plans.”

“Who's the lucky guy?”

“Girl,” she corrected. “Her name's Rosie. And it's our anniversary.”

Todd let go of the metal bar and it clanked back up. “You're gay?” It came out with more disgust than he intended.

“You thought I was straight?” Morgan laughed, unbothered.

“How?” was all he could muster.

“Well, when a girl—”

“No, I—” He grabbed the bar again. “I just didn't realize.” She
hadn't
been wanting to sleep with him this whole time? “Is your girlfriend hot, too?” he finally asked, consoling his masculinity with the vision of Morgan having sex with an equally attractive girl.

“I think so.”

“Are you into threesomes?”

“Get on the bench.” She pushed him over to the chest press with a smile.

NICK

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
26; M
ENLO
P
ARK
, C
ALIFORNIA

The Rosewood Hotel, a subtly designed sprawl of five-hundred-dollar-a-night suites tucked at the top of Sand Hill Road, was
where it all happened
. The venture capitalists who ruled Silicon Valley, and by extension anything interesting happening in the world, came here for their power lunches and after-work drinks. It was the only place in Northern California where you could order a proper twenty-three-dollar martini and be surrounded by women who'd made an effort to look great.

Sure, there had been some scandal around a prostitution ring, and some older VCs claimed the excess was out of character for the Valley, but they were behind the times. Not like Nick. He was the new wave, a ruler of Silicon Valley
3.0
. His phone buzzed and he checked the text message.

To celebrate Hook's S-1 filing, Nick had scheduled this meeting at the Rosewood with Darrell Greene, the esteemed wealth manager, to discuss his finances, followed by dinner with his girlfriend, Grace. He hadn't told her, but he'd also reserved a suite at the Rosewood for after dinner. He had a feeling tonight was the night they were finally going to sleep together, and he didn't want to have to go back to San Francisco or, worse, her sorority house.

He checked his watch and dialed her number.

“Hey,” she answered. Grace's parents were Chinese immigrants, but you'd never know: she was pure American Sorority Girl, a hot Pi Phi who also happened to be smart, though not as smart as Nick, which was the way it should be.

They'd met last fall at an entrepreneurship conference where Grace had been helping with registration. He'd asked her to dinner at Evvia (girls never turned down dinner at Evvia), and it had been easy to win her over from there.

“What's up?” he asked the phone, scanning the lobby for important people. He rolled his eyes when he saw Ashton Kutcher on the sofa, talking to some guy who was probably a second-tier venture capitalist. He hated the celebrity infiltration of Silicon Valley and the implicit assumption that a decent Twitter following made a person capable of evaluating a start-up's potential. Had Ashton Kutcher even gone to college?

“I don't think I can make it tonight,” Grace said.

“What'd you say?” Nick turned his attention to the phone.

“I'm sorry, I'm just really upset about the news.”

“What news?” Nick tried to control his voice. The only news that had happened today was that his company had filed for an IPO, which was going to make her boyfriend famous, a fact she had yet to acknowledge.

“That congressman is protesting the fund we're raising for Kelly,” she said. “And now Kickstarter's saying they might cancel our partnership because they don't want to get involved.”

Kelly Jacobson, the girl who had died at Stanford, had been in Grace's sorority. But Nick had never heard Grace mention Kelly until the girl died. He didn't understand why she was so upset.

“What fund?” Nick didn't try to hide his irritation.

“The investment fund we're starting to raise money to help women's rights,” she said.

“How big is the fund?”

“We're aiming for two million dollars, with a five percent distribution to charities.”