Yuppie and Bitchface

Just when it seemed blows were inevitable, room service interrupted them with dinner.

"Quick, Gorski or Valdez. Who's the better linebacker?"

"You're in Canada," said the young waiter, laying out the plates. "If it's not hockey, I don't know what it is."

* *

It was morning again, but Abby only knew that by her watch. The view outside the window continued to be a white haze.

"Morning, Theo," she said, walking out from the en suite bedroom. He remained wrapped under the covers.

"I was hoping to get down for breakfast before hitting the hotel Stairmaster. You want to join me?"

There was no reply.

"Theo, wake up. It's almost nine."

"Theo?"

With a dash of concern, she made her way to the bedside to see him lying on his side. He was curled in a fetal position and clutched his sheets around him.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

He looked up at her. His eyes did not focus exactly. His expression was despondent.

"Theo. Snap out of it. Get up," she insisted.

"It's no use," he croaked. His eyes briefly glanced towards the drawer. She opened it to see an empty plastic bottle labelled Prozac.

She looked at him. His blue eyes looked so utterly bereft of life. All at once, realization crashed down on her. Her brain struggled to process the new information.

"When did you run out?"

"Three days ago. My doctor told me never to miss a dose. Ever."

"I'll check the hotel pharmacy."

"Don't bother," he said. "I had one of my guys ask already. There isn't any and the blizzard's too bad to go out and get more right now."

"Can you sit up?"

He nodded and she wrapped his arm around her shoulder, helping him up and onto a padded couch. His hair looked a dishevelled mess and his face looked sallow and sunken. He had an expression of disenchanted melancholy across his face.

"Are you okay?" she asked softly, sitting beside him.

"Yes. It's all in my head. None of it is true. I'm okay."

He repeated it a few times under his breath.

"It comes and goes," he continued. "This is just one of the lowest points."

Abby looked at him with a wide-eyed expression. It felt surreal seeing her business rival, a man who was the poster boy of a Fortune 500 company reduced to this pathetic shell of his former self.

"How many people know?"

"My doctor. My close family. A couple of trusted executives in the company."

"I'm so sorry. Do you need any help?"

"I think this morning has robbed me of my dignity enough without you helping me to go the bathroom. I need a few minutes."

Abby looked at his forlorn form and felt a strange upwelling of sympathy.

"Yesterday, when I offered to move into your suite, you knew that sooner or later I would see you like this and you agreed anyway."

It brought a hint of a smirk to Theo on the couch.

"You said it was for a family. That matters more. Even if you nark me out once we get out of here, I'd still do the same."

She bit her lip and did something completely out of character. She interlocked her fingers with his and held it to her chest.

"Not bad for a self-serving yuppie. You have to admit."

* *

"Yes, put me through."

Abby clutched her phone hard enough to crack the glass.

"Is Dad okay?"

"He's fine, Abby. The surgery went without a hitch. The first thing he wanted after waking up was some chocolate babka from Lev's bakery."

"You know that too many of Mrs Lev's babkas landed him there in the first place."

"Try explaining that to him. You're the only daughter he listens to."

"Put him on."

"I wish I could, but he's asleep now. The doctors want to keep him under observation till tomorrow. After that we're bringing him home. I'll call you back then."

"Thanks, Sara," Abby said, smiling for the first time in a few days.

"How're you doing? That storm is all over the news."

"I'm better than most. Just waiting it out. Thank God cell phone networks started working. I don't think I could take any more isolation from the world."

"Hang in there, Abs. It'll be over soon."

"Shalom."

She locked her phone and collapsed onto one of the sofas in the lobby. An almost alien sense of relief washed over her.

If she was in a less public place, she might even have cried.

"Excuse me, but are you Abigail Shapiro? The one who was originally in the West Penthouse suite."

She jerked her head up awkwardly at the mention of her name. Two men stood over her. They looked tentatively at each other and then at her.

"Yes."

"We're the family in there now. I'm Chad and this is my husband, Dorian," said the slightly shorter of the two. "I want to thank you so much for what you did for us. It was really the most extraordinary thing we've ever seen."

"It was the right thing to do."

"Dorian owns a Michelin starred restaurant in Seattle. Fleur-de-lys. Best French food on the West Coast."

"If you're ever in town," said the other man. "Please come over. Bring your whole family. It's on me. It's the least we can do."

"Thanks. I'll keep it in mind."

"We told our daughter about you as well. She wants to thank you too."

Abby looked to her right to see the most adorable little girl with sideswept blonde hair and a shy smile underneath. She put her palm flat against her lips and pushed it outwards.

"You're welcome," Abby replied and Chad helpfully signed it out for her benefit. "You're the prettiest girl in this place."

The girl blushed her already pink cheeks when she saw Chad sign out the compliment. She reached out and held Abby's hand and pulled herself closer on the couch.

"Chad. There is one way you can help me out right now."

They sat down and listened.

A few minutes later, Abby opened the door to the East Penthouse and led her guest in. She picked her up and carried her to the bed. Theo was sitting at the edge of it, staring out of the window.

"Theo," she whispered. He turned around to see his new visitor.

"This is Allie. We gave her family my penthouse and moved in here. She wants to thank you."

Allie repeated her thanks from before which brought a hint of a smile to Theo's face. Before he could say anything, little Allie ran across the bed and wrapped her tiny arms around his neck. He looked up from her embrace to see Abby clasping a hand over her mouth and brimming with emotion.

In that moment, she had never felt closer to anyone than she felt to the entitled rich WASP one-percenter known as Theodore Astor-Dewhurst (the second, no less).

* *

"The bad news is the weather is still nowhere near good enough to fly anything in or out of Toronto. But at least now we can step outside the hotel."

"Did you get the...?" Theo asked hopefully. Abby nodded and procured a bottle of pills from her purse. He carefully studied the dosage and other information on the label before partaking. She looked at his downcast expression intently.

"Well?" she asked half expecting for a response.

"Abby, it's medicine, not magic. I won't get better instantly."

She swatted him on the arm and he chuckled.

"It's not as bad as it was," he said. "Honestly, it was that I wasn't used to it for so long that really scared me. When your tolerance has been dulled by medication for two decades, even a small glimpse into what life was like before gets to you."

"How bad was it before?"

He didn't say anything but held his arms out. She looked puzzled before he took her finger and traced it across his wrist. She felt a slight ridge where surgical intervention had been needed. The scar was no more, but its ghost remained. She looked at his face with an dumbstruck expression.

"A week after my fifteenth birthday. I didn't want to feel like this any more. The nurse at the boarding school found me."

"I'm so sorry."

"Dad did a good job of hiding it from the papers. Since then, I've been on some cocktail of drugs or the other and been a patient of an impressive number of doctors all of whom have signed NDA's."

"Do I need to sign one now that I know?"

"I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt for now," replied Theo. "You won't tell anyone about this, right?"

"Never. Not even under torture. Unless the torture gets too painful," she said without missing a beat. "The second they fire up the drill, I'm totally going to nark you out."

"I can live with that."

* *

Theo went over the figures one more time before closing his tablet. Notwithstanding the slump in construction activity, the profit margin for the quarter was still impressive. A lot depended on his tender for the Trans Canadian Rail project if he wanted to keep his job as CEO.

"How's your quarter been?" he asked to the form curled up in the sheets.

"Not bad. Profit's up fifty percent and shares seem to be following," Abby replied from memory.

"What the hell?" he shot back, flabbergasted. "How did you manage that?"

"It's a smaller company than Dewhurst Construction so it grows faster. No offence, but you're at the head of a century old dinosaur. The way you do business now is not that different from how your grandfather did. If only you'd use the cutting edge technologies and processes available now... but sadly the closest you've come to change is getting the previous owners of the property evicted by courts rather than by force. Perhaps your company can focus on more than corporate asshattery."

He looked at her disbelievingly. "You really hate what we are that much?"

"Do you know about Crown Towers?"

"Vaguely," replied Theo. "A condo high rise from the nineties my Dad built."

"Right, but do you remember the five or so buildings you had tenants evicted from so you could tear them down?"

"Look, it's unfortunate but..."

"But," she interjected. "But my family was one of them. While the rest of the city celebrated the gentrification of the Jewish quarter of Brooklyn, we had to go my Uncle Ron's already crowded house in the suburbs. Imagine that, one day having a home and the next, being on the street with whatever tiny amount the lawyers negotiated the rest of your lease for."

Theo didn't really have an answer.

"That wasn't me. I would have ensured the previous tenants got a fair settlement."

"No that wasn't you. That was Theodore Astor-Dewhurst the original. I made a promise to myself that I would beat him at his own game. Twenty years later, I did. Brightstar Heights, right across the street. Twenty three floors of world class condominiums. Even before the elevator worked, I ran to the roof just so I could look down on what your father had built. It felt intoxicating."

She had a look of vindication as she said this.

"It didn't last though," she added quietly. "The next year over in Jersey I was days away from unveiling a new thirty floor highrise when Dewhurst Construction announced they would be building a fifty floor mega residential complex and mall hardly three blocks away. All of a sudden, it reminded me that I had won only a battle in this war."

"You think we're at war."

"No, Theo. I'm at war. I've been at war ever since Mr Kemper showed up at our doorstep and gave my father a check and week's time to empty the apartment."

He regarded her with a wry smile.

"It all makes so much sense now."

"I left it out of my book, but you deserve to know why I hate you and everything you stand for. You and I have achieved many of the same things. We have both been honoured by the city. We have both been named in the forty under forty. Even now, we're competing for the same construction deal. We're neck and neck in this race, but never forget how much ground I had to make up to catch you."

"You think the world's been that kind to me?"

"Father as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and mother from old money. I'd say the world has done everything short of tucking you in at night. While you spent your teen years picking a different European city for a party each weekend, I had to skip school and look after my youngest sister because we couldn't afford daycare."

Theo looked out the window, able to see a slightly clear sky for the first time in days. There was a brief lull in the weakening storm. He slid open the door to the balcony and stepped outside.

"Care to join me?" he asked, holding his arm out. Abby followed. He opened a pack of Chancellors and held it out for her.

"You have good taste," she commented, taking one. He held out the light for her. They leaned forward on the rail. A white blanket covered everything to the horizon. Flakes fell softly now, like they were trapped inside a snowglobe. The wind whispered around them.

"You ruined it," she said suddenly. He looked at her blankly for a few seconds while she took a long drag off her cigarette.

"All my life, I fantasized about the moment I would finally meet you. I rehearsed it countless times in my head," she continued. "It would be at a big corporate event and you'd be strutting around like you owned the place and acting like a generally self absorbed prick and I would cut you down to size. I would put you in your place and wipe that self important smirk off your face publicly."

"Sounds promising," Theo said.

"But I didn't expect to see you like this. The first night I get drunk and make a scene at the bar when all you were trying to do was be nice. After that, you give up half your penthouse for a family of strangers. And then..."

There was an uncomfortable pause at the end of the sentence.

"Don't be afraid of being indelicate," he smiled. "You can say the D word. Not saying it won't make it any less true."

"I'm sorry," she said, blowing a stream of smoke. "I built up this image of a stereotypically privileged yuppie."

"To be fair," he said, stubbing out the orange end of his butt. "I am a few of those things. I don't deny it. However, not all the rich are Bond villains. Most of us want what everyone else does -- to be loved, cared for and not alone."

Abby looked at him while she finished off the last bit of her cigarette. The reality and fantasy of Theodore Astor-Dewhurst the Second seemed completely incongruous.

* *

"Here's the photo from our last fund raiser. The Astor Foundation got hundreds of thousands in donations on that night alone."

Abby regarded the picture on the tablet. She swiped to the next few. They all involved Theo in a tuxedo shaking hands with increasingly older and whiter people.

"Where did that money go?"

"We gave it to several non profits working to rehabilitate child soldiers in Africa. We have tie ups with most of them."

"What other causes do your foundation support?" she asked, checking out pictures from a different album.

"Rebuilding war torn villages in Somalia. Restoration of UNESCO world heritage sites around the world. Making better irrigation channels in South America. I'm sure I could find a few more if you give me time."

He sat on the couch with a smug, contented smile on his face. She went through a few more pictures before handing the tablet back.

"Admit it," he said finally. "I give more to charity than you."

"Charity or photo-ops?" she asked pointedly. "Most of these look like they're tailor-made for press releases."

"What's wrong with a bit of publicity?"

"That's all it is. Publicity. Have you ever been to any of these places? Have you ever met the people you claim to help? You throw your money at them from the corner office of the top floor of your corporate headquarters and then make sure the press knows about your generosity."

"That's an incredibly reductive way of describing the genuine difference we make. I don't see you giving back to the world."

"Who says I don't?" she smirked. "The only difference is, I don't advertise it."

Theo looked like he had just found out the tooth fairy wasn't real.

"The winter my Dad got laid off. It was hard for all of us. The worst day was Hanukkah. He came home that night empty handed. No presents for any of us. I didn't care one bit, but it broke him. He sat in his armchair and the look of disappointment on his face was painful to look at. He did the best he could. He knew that, I knew that and he knew that I knew that. But even then, he felt he had let me down."

He put his gadget away and listened intently.

"It started as a fund fathers could use to buy Hanukkah presents if they were short on cash. Then, I realised that the occasion didn't matter. Be it Hanukkah, Christmas, birthdays or any other day your child deserves a present and you're short on cash, we help out. A gift, so that no parent has to return empty handed to their kids and feel like a failure."

"That's..." said Theo, unable to come up with words.

"It's not as much as you give obviously, but it's a personal project of mine. Thousands of families have used this fund. I don't know how you feel giving to your causes, but it helps me sleep better at night knowing no daughter will have to see their parent feel like they have let her down."

They looked at each other in silent appreciation and felt an entirely new emotion.

A mutual sense of respect.

* *

"The weather's finally clearing up," said Theo. "I'll be leaving my gilded cage tomorrow."

"Unfortunately, I don't have a private jet.... yet" Abby said. "My logistics people checked and there is a mile long backlog of passengers stranded in Toronto. The earliest business class tickets I got are four days from today."

"This could be our last night together."

They settled down on the balcony and clinked their glasses of single malt.

"What happens now?"

He looked over at her.

"Do we go back to the way it was? Do we go back to fighting each other in the press? I really don't want that," she said softly. "I've let my hatred of your company blind me to so much. All my achievements had to be measured by what you were doing and not on their own. I don't want that any more, Theo. I want this past week to have meant something."

"I'd like that too."

They sat up and toasted.

"To change."

Abby finished the rest of her drink in one gulp. Her hand reached out and rubbed gently against Theo's stubble. He smiled as the back of her fingers moved from his chin to his hairline.

"Don't go clean shaven when you get back. The ladies dig this."

Her thumb made slow circles until he grabbed her wrist.

"Ladies, or just you?"

They were close now. Close enough for Abby to see every contour on Theo's face. Close enough to see his high cheekbones in detail, his blue eyes and his smile.

Close enough to put down her glass and press her lips to his.

* *

A trail of hurriedly strewn clothes marked the path from the balcony to the master bedroom of the East Penthouse. Abby and Theo kissed frantically, exploring each other's bodies with their hands. She lowered her lips and kissed down his jaw, his neck before focusing her attention on his almost hairless chest.

Her lips and tongue peppered him with kisses across the length and breadth of his torso. Across his pecs, his stomach and finally a trail from the base of his neck downwards. She held his hardened member in her hand and looked up at him.

"Who are you and what have you done with the guy I hated all my life?"

She closed her lips around the head of his cock and wrapped her tongue around it. Never breaking eye contact, Abby let his cock slip out of her mouth and ran her lips from the base to the tip. Theo had to bite back on a groan. She repeated her slow circuit from the base to the tip of his cock over and over again until he could not hold back any longer.

"Stop."

She looked up quizzically before Theo pulled her up until their faces were level and kissed her. Their tongues played havoc with each other, fighting for space inside her mouth.

He rolled her onto her back and slid down until his face was right against her swollen sex. She held his head in place while he went about making her quake with pleasure. His tongue laved against her engorged lips. Her legs locked around his head, firmly holding it in place and he thrust his tongue into her as far as it would go.