This would’ve been easier with sex, Walter reflected. But he was enjoying himself. The verbal interplay, the clash of wills. Drawing on financial acumen he hadn’t touched since business school. It was enormous fun.
“Ten million,” the old man said. “You are purchasing an entire enterprise in AgraRipe. A fully built house.”
They sat by a roaring fire, in a room that was nearly cold. The old man lived in a too-big mansion overbuilt before central heating, and the bonfire barely kept up. They sat in plush velvet antique chairs and swirled bourbon poured from some ancient bottle. Walter swirled his glass. It was all extremely enjoyable.
It would’ve been easy to do this with sex. Dose the old man until his testosterone screamed, with a cream or a gas or a vial of something poured in his drink. Have him raging out of his mind, and then bring in the girls. He’d sign everything away for a pittance amid grunts and screams.
But... this was nice. Not everything needed to be fluids and fucking. There was still a little room for quiet moments.
“Sir, $200,000 is my offer,” Walter said. He flashed his apologetic smile. It was his go-to when he was about to lower the boom. “That represents the value of the real estate.”
The old man snorted. “You’re saying the company is worthless,” he growled. “Come in to my home and say that. Well.”
Walter waited. The old man tried to lock eyes, dropped them. His frown deepened. He knows that I know, Walter thought. Just as well. He’d be gentle.
“Sir, we know that you lost the federal account. And the ConHerb account. You haven’t released a real upgrade since the mid-90s. Even the agricultural sector changes.”
The old man sank into his chair. He aged. He put everything he had into sipping from his glass without his hand trembling. “How’d you know that?” the old man said, hoarse from a too-big drink.
Walter shrugged. “Friends,” he said, eventually.
“I accept your offer,” the old man said, loudly and clearly. Walter wondered what he would’ve accepted. Probably anything. Probably a dollar. The old man thought he was selling a dead horse. He stood up. They shook hands. Walter had rubbed a little something on his palm. The meeting was becoming too sad.
“If I may, sir,” Walter said. He finished his glass and placed it on the mantle. “I took the liberty of having some of my associates spend some time with your wife while we were in here. I want you to enjoy your retirement, so...”
He trailed off. The door opened, exactly on cue. Walter’s staff was magic like that. A busty blonde with heavy tits walked in, smiling widely. Her eyes were set a bit too wide apart, giving her a particularly brainless look, but that was pre-existing. The big boobs and the smooth skin and the overcharged libido were new.
“Oh, honey,” the sex bomb whispered, the sound carrying in the gloom. She wore a thick fur coat, dropped it as she approached. Underneath she was dressed in red latex crop top and shorts. Marvelous work by the team, Walter thought. “You sold? That’s so amazing!”
“Sylvia?” the old man croaked. He didn’t resist when she gracefully dropped to her knees in front of him. Walter had seen to that. “You look.. you’re fifty-three.”
“Am I?” Sylvia said, absently. She unzipped his fly.
“Okay!” Walter said, eventually. “Lets bring the rest of the girls in. All of them. We need to celebrate! To AgraRipe!”
He meant that sincerely.
MONDAY
The office didn’t have to stink, Myra frequently thought.
First of all, there was no reason to have two office blocks in the middle of uninterrupted farmland far from any significant population center. Okay, they were in the business of agricultural management software. But did clients really care that they also looked at cows, knew about fertilizer cycles, drove past barbed wire fences?
The founder wasn’t even from cowtown or whatever. As far as Myra knew, he was born in Boston, and happened to develop HorsePower, their product, while an engineering student somewhere in the northeast. But he had insisted on erecting two office towers from uninterrupted pasture, and somehow, despite having endless acreage at his disposal, hadn’t built quite enough parking.
Then he had skimped on HVAC. Every summer the employees slogged in a country heat, nostrils singed by nearby agricultural processing. When the wind blew just right there was a tinge of slaughterhouse, coming from down the road.
“I can’t believe we have a security guard,” Myra said. She sat in the break room with Erin, her one and only work friend. The walls were decorated with aging notices. All the health notices or HR changes or notices of girl scout cookie sales got taken down maybe once a year.
“Well, he’s a nice guy,” said Erin. “I like him.”
Erin fiddled with her phone. It was rare of her to make eye contact when she talked.
“When have you ever talked to him?” Myra scoffed.
“I don’t. That’s what I like about him,” Erin said. She looked up. Erin worked in IT, with two men who were in an intense and deeply felt bro-ship. “I really like men who don’t talk. Cam and Paul. They spent the entire day talking about what they had done together. Last night. In a video game. An entire day.”
“Well...” Myra readied her one-up.
Erin put up a hand. “They argued over which of them had the better ass. One has a girl elf and the other is a human, and they argued... for... hours...”
Myra bit her tongue, reluctantly. She had an inexhaustible store of slights to discuss, all from her own boss. She waited a respectable interval. “Lydia called me into her office today, pointed to a document on her desk, raised her eyebrows, handed it to me, and then nodded me out. Didn’t say a single word to me.”
Erin slid back in her chair. They all squeaked. It was good employee practice to check the bolts in case they had rusted through. “I’d take that.”
“I’m getting the silent treatment,” Myra said. “From my boss. I barely remember what her voice sounds like. I’m assuming it’s like Devil Wears Prada. Assuming.”
“Silence. So good,” Erin said. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Maybe I should throw myself off the building.”
They had the entire break room to themselves, which was rare. There were three refrigerators and two microwaves, one of each worked. Erin wore light blue jeans and bright plastic bracelets on each arm, and a college t-shirt with a stained collar. Myra quietly resented it. She wore pantsuit or dark skirt every day. Lydia had made it clear in a hundred passive-aggressive ways that a company attorney must be constantly ready for a funeral.
Kay stuck her head in. She was just 18, some uncertain relation of Lydia’s, and a hopeless legal secretary. She, like Myra, was dressed for a sudden black tie dinner in a dark navy skirt. “Hey, aren’t you guys coming?” she squeaked.
It was, Myra reflected, mildly funny to have a gawky teen forced to dress for a wake. “coming to what?” she asked.
“The big company meeting!” Kay said, eyebrows well up. Erin and Myra exchanged glances.
“I didn’t...”
“They just called it! There was an e-mail!”
There was no wifi in the break room, owing to the interference of so many busted appliances along each wall, and the asbestos-and-lead construction. Myra occasionally wondered what Erin was staring at, on that phone.
“Meeting about what?” she asked. Erin finally looked up.
“They’re selling the company!” Kay said.
Tits met them on arrival.
“Oh,” Myra said, inadvertently, on being confronted with tits. A blonde stood just inside the door to the auditorium, her jugs squashed under a pink and blue baby-t that read “AgraRipe!” The girl handed out water bottles and gave Myra a wide, brainless smile. Myra took a water bottle. It was massive.
“Uh, thanks,” Myra said. She shook her head, and risked a look back. The blonde was in chinos, but practically painted on. Cam and Paul, Erin’s IT colleagues, stood not far down the aisle, sipping water and placidly watching her ass cheeks move.
“Why do we even have an auditorium?” Myra muttered, finding a backrow seat. It was purpose-built, too, sitting unused in between the two office blocks.
The building had been plonked down between the two office towers, mediating between them, and making it inconvenient to walk from legal/sales/IT [Building One] and product development [Building Two]. It had been done up vaguely like a high school gym, which was all the local architects presumably knew, with a too-high stage and rows of chairs. Scavenging parties occasionally raided it for relatively new chairs or for other parts.
The lights went down.
“HELLO AGRARIPE!” the PA blared. The voice was so bubbly and bright that Myra craned her neck to see if the blonde was responsible. No, that bimbo was still at the entrance. So another girl.
“That’s weird,” Erin said. “There wasn’t a sound system even in here as of yesterday.”
“PLEASE GIVE A ROUND OF APPLAUSE TO YOUR NEW CEO, WALTER RAPAPORT!” the voice blared.
There was a very brief, very confused round of applause. A short man strode up from off-stage. Two spotlights, apparently new ones, focused right around him. The man wore a thick shirt and wide tie, his pants too long, cheap wool bunched up around his ankles. His shoes shone painfully plastic in the light. He looked to Myra’s eye like a man working a rental agency desk.
“———” he said, and only then seemed to realize he didn’t have a mic.
From off-stage, on both sides, flooded a pack of bimbos, similar in measurements, top-heavy and all running in heels. A bunch of blondes and brunettes and redheads and others in an array of AGRARIPE t-shirts form-fitted to their generous figures. They seemed to be all in support of a lead bimbo, who held a microphone, just in case she happened to slip.
And then they were gone, back to the backstage. Walter held the microphone.
“Ah, yes, thank you to the AgraRipe… transition team,” Walter said, his voice finally audible. This, at least, was deep and reassuring.
“Well,” Walter said, looking over at the cohort. It was a ragtag bunch. The sales team in the first few rows were, at least, well-dressed and keen. But the rows behind that were taken up by product development, a thirty-year clique of aging engineers mixed with castoffs from STEM majors. And then somewhere in there were accounting, legal, IT, support staff, and the lone security guard. His acquisition. “I cannot tell you how excited I am. My name is Walter Rapaport, and I have taken over this company.”
He grinned with slightly yellow teeth.
“I’ve already packed your old boss off to the Bahamas for his well-deserved first vacation in thirty years,” Walter said. It was true, although there was a good chance he’d perish of sexual exhaustion on the way. The new wife was voracious. “He looked exhausted. To be honest, everyone here looks a little tired. A little low-energy. And that’s what I want to bring back to this company. A little energy, a little youth, a little playfulness. I want people to want to come to work here.”
He paused for effect.
“And that starts with a round of bonuses!” he said, and got his first real round of applause. That was that for whatever residual affection the workforce had for the previous boss. Walter built on the positivity, rode it. This, this was just as good as sex. “We’re repainting, refurbishing everything. We are throwing away everything decrepit and bringing in everything modern.” The older employees shifted at this. “You want to know why I bought this company? Because I believe there is value here—value in the people that made it. And that’s what is what is going to bring all this back.”
“And one more thing!” he added. “Everyone. Everyone! Keeps. Their. Job.”
This time the applause was long, wild, and sustained. Backstage, some of the girls got a bit excited and started making out with each other.
Myra bit her lip. She clapped mechanically. Erin stared at her phone. Her colleagues watched happily as chinos-girl applauded wildly, making her tits bounce.
Lydia sat a row in front of them. Tight-lipped. Unapplauding. “She didn’t know about this,” Myra thought.
What kind of acquisition had a bunch of sluts in tight clothes know about the deal before the company attorney?
And then the clutch of bimbos ran up and down the aisles, handing out pink and blue shirts, hats, jackets, and sweaters. “AGRARIPE!” they periodically cheered, trying to start a chant that never quite got going.
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