Millennium - 3. Chapter 3

November 3, 1999

“Thanks for coming back last night,” I told him as I lay snuggled up on his chest.

“You mean everything to me,” Robbie said. “I couldn’t let you go away without knowing that.”

Yeah, everything except the other guys he wanted to fuck, I thought cynically. But I was enjoying the afterglow of amazing sex, and I was smart enough to realize that being bitchy wouldn’t make him want to spend more time with me. “I love you,” I told him sincerely.

“And I love you,” he replied, just as sincerely. And that would have to be enough, strong enough to keep us together with this new experiment. “But I have to get back to LA. I have a meeting at noon. Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Stef is being mysterious.”

“Probably some exotic island full of hot guys,” he joked.

“Probably,” I agreed. “Good timing on your part. Now I can fuck them all.” I saw him try not to let that bother him. Well, this was his big fucking idea, and he’d have to deal with the downside.

We got up and took a shower together and made love one last time before we both headed to the kitchen for breakfast. Stef and JP were both there, looking at us nervously. I warned them with my eyes not to talk about any of this stuff.

“So where are you going?” JP asked.

“It is a secret. I am not even telling you,” Stef said. I rolled my eyes. I doubted that our location was a major issue.

“Well, enjoy wherever it is,” Robbie said, and gave me a very affectionate kiss. Stef and I waited for Luke to arrive, and then Luke and I instinctively headed to the limo.

“We will drive ourselves,” Stef announced. “Perhaps you can chauffer us Bradley?”

“I’d be happy to, as long as you tell me where we’re going,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. We put our bags in Isidore’s new Mercedes S55 AMG. It was big, fast, and comfortable.

“Your mother let me borrow it for a few days,” Stef said laconically. “I hope I can get her to trade back with me after she gets used to the Porsche.”

“She hates stick shifts, so it won’t be a problem. Frank, on the other hand...” I joked. We hopped into the big platinum-gray Mercedes and put on our seat belts. “Where to?”

“Santa Cruz, to the beach house,” Stef announced proudly. It was a good choice. We could drive there ourselves and it was isolated. There were no servants there to even notice us.

“Well that’s a lot more boring than I envisioned,” I said anyway.

“Me too,” Luke said. We were in such good spirits, getting away from all of the daily bullshit.

“You picked a shitty time to get all practical,” I told Stef. “Just when Robbie decides we should sleep with other people, you take me off into this remote, isolated retreat.”

“You can sleep with other people now?” Luke asked.

“That’s the new rule,” I said sadly.

“If you get cold, I’ll warm you up,” Luke said seductively. Damn, he had a way about him. He must have been irresistible when he was in his early 20s.

“Here, let me turn on the AC,” I joked. We laughed most of the way there. “Hey Stef, won’t we need to stop for food?”

“Leave it to you to think with your stomach,” he said. But it was a good thing that I did. When we got to Santa Cruz, we stocked up on a bunch of stuff, probably way more than we needed, and then headed north on Highway 1 until we got to the beach house.

Luke had been here before, but I gave him a brief tour anyway. The location was spectacular. The house sat securely on several acres of beachfront property with a path down the cliffs to what was basically a private beach. The house itself had started out as a small ranch house, but it had been expanded and modified over the years so it was quite large now. Ace and I had each gotten our own suite of rooms after we graduated from college, and I’d enlarged mine. They’d turned out really well, with a big bedroom, a huge bathroom, and a nice deck overlooking the ocean. I led Luke into the suite across the hall, the one that belonged to Ace. It was nice, but he didn’t have my flair for decorating. I guess it was the gay gene. “So I’m staying in here?” he asked.

“Yeah, until later tonight when you sneak over to my room,” I teased.

“I’ll be there as soon as you are,” he said. Then he shocked the shit out of me by leaning in and giving me a really nice kiss. “That’s OK, isn’t it?” he asked shyly, only he wasn’t shy at all. It was a complete act, and incredibly cute.

“It’s very OK,” I said, kissing him back. “But right now we have to think about money.” He chuckled, and then followed me into the kitchen. We finished unloading all of our stuff and putting it away, which was a lot of work; suddenly all those groceries didn’t seem like such a good idea. It was almost noon by the time we were able to relax around the kitchen table, munching on some sandwiches, and talk about Amphion.

“I twisted a few arms yesterday,” Luke said. “I called a few of the companies we lost out to and asked them by how much we were outbid. They have confidentiality agreements, but I forced it out of them.”

“How did you do that?” Stef asked.

“I reminded them that Amphion only says they have deep pockets, while we actually do. I implied that they’d be burning a bridge if they needed more money.”

“That was effective?” I asked, smiling.

“Very. It seems that we were outbid by one-half to one percent on each of the deals,” Luke announced. “There’s only one way they could do that four out of four times.”

“Four times?” Stef asked.

“Yeah, I talked to three companies besides Centronics. There’s only one way they could do that. They had to know our bid.”

“That means that we have a leak in our organization,” Stef said sadly. Someone betraying him made him sad. It pissed Luke and me off.

“We won’t be able to bid credibly until we find out who it is,” I observed. “We have to flush out the rat.”

“I think we can do that, but before we do, I would like to revisit a topic that I have been talking about for some time now,” Stef said. We both looked at him expectantly. “For the past year I have been advocating that we lighten up our tech positions. I have not forced my views on you two, I have suggested it. Yet we keep funding these deals, one after another.”

“We’re making money hand over fist on them Stef,” Luke said. “Look at that Red Hat IPO. We made a killing.”

“You are correct,” Stef said. “Do you think it is reasonable for this to go on forever?”

“People keep questioning that, saying that the markets are overpriced, but it seems like there’s a new paradigm and that it’s working,” Luke argued. He was the most attached to the tech deals. They were easy, almost cookie-cutter, and they made shitloads of money for us, or at least they had.

“My primary goal for this outing is not to develop a strategy to outbid Amphion, my goal is to convince you two to pull your heads out of your asses and look at the facts that are all around you,” Stef said, and not in his nice voice. “If we cannot reach an agreement, we will have to work out a way for you two to stay in this market while I get out.”

“So you’re saying that we have to agree with you, or you’re taking your ball and going home?” Luke asked, almost belligerently.

“You make me sound like a bratty five-year-old,” Stef said, pouring on the charm. “I am not trying to browbeat you; I just want you to know how serious I am about this. I am confident that when you look at all the facts, you will see what I see. If you do not understand my convictions on this, we will be working at cross-purposes. Just like you two have disregarded my warnings for the past year.”

Luke and I looked at each other, both of us pissed off. We didn’t plan to come out here, to this meeting, to be bitched at, we came here to strategize. I was about to say something when Stef cut me off. “I would like to make a few points on this, then I would like to take a break for the afternoon to let you both have some time to consider my words and do any research you need to do.”

“You have the floor,” I observed coldly.

“I have reviewed Luke’s old models and used them to evaluate these new businesses we have been bidding on. None of them even comes close to our old parameters. Now I know you are saying that there is a new paradigm, new criteria, but if that is the case, would not those same models work on non-tech companies? I think if you do the research, you will find they do not.” Luke was furiously scribbling copious notes. “What worries me most of all, though, is the frenzy that this market has become. People, average people, are quitting their jobs to become day traders. They are borrowing heavily to invest in the market, in the NASDAQ. The patterns look remarkably like those of the stock market before the crash in ’29.”

“The Efficient Market Theory discounts the relevance of pricing information, and the investing trends of small investors,” I told Stef, just to piss him off.

“I know the men who created that theory. I went to the University of Chicago. There is a reason why it is called a theory,” he snapped. I grinned to show that I’d pissed him off on purpose, and he gave me a mock evil look for my efforts. “All I am asking is that you both take your considerable training and expertise and try to see what I am seeing. If you cannot, then perhaps I am wrong, but my instincts tell me I am not.”

“Your instincts have made us all more money than anything else we’ve done,” Luke said graciously. “I’m going to see what I come up with.”

“I’m going to go clean up, and then I’ll help you,” I told Luke. I felt kind of grungy, plus I remembered what Stef had told me long ago. He’d said that sleeping with Luke was great, the first time, but boring after that. But he also said that Luke hated men with hairy asses. I went into the bathroom, pulled out my personal groomer, and trimmed off every hair I could find, save for a small patch over my dick. Not that I was planning to seduce him or anything.

I found Luke absorbed in gathering data. We both had our laptops, so we connected to the T-1 line and started researching. I was so absorbed, I didn’t even notice that it had gotten dark outside. It was the smell of food that finally pulled me out of my analytical coma.

“You two were so busy, I made dinner,” Stef said.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said.

“It really is not too hard when you buy microwave dinners,” he said, cracking us up. Luke and I followed him into the dining room, where our microwavable dinners had been put on the table with fine crystal and silver. The incongruence of the thing cracked me up. “If you do not appreciate my cooking, you are welcome to push the buttons yourself.”

That made me laugh harder. “You did great, Stef. I think this is the first time I’ve eaten TV dinners with sterling silver.”

“Is there a reason tacky food cannot be served with some style?” he asked. “So how is your project coming along?”

I looked to Luke to speak first, not because I was being subservient, but because I knew that come hell or high water, I’d follow Stef’s lead. If he said the market was overpriced and this was a bubble, I’d agree with him. It was Luke who would be more of a skeptic. He owned about a quarter of the venture capital firm, Carruthers and Schluter, while I personally owned fifteen percent. That meant that sixty percent of it belonged to Stef, and while that was only part of his fortune, it was a decent part, probably about a fourth of it. If Luke didn’t agree with Stef, the only real solution would be to liquidate the firm; even if Luke tried to buy Stef out, it would hamstring him from funding new deals, at least for a while. That would be disruptive to all of our lives and our assets. The whole organization, with almost 100 employees, would probably cease to exist. Those were the stakes we were playing for here.

“The more I dig into what you said, Stef, the more I agree with you,” Luke told him. Stef beamed at him with pleasure. I winked at Luke when he looked at me.

“And what about you Bradley?” Stef asked.

“I spent the afternoon lusting at Luke. I didn’t do any research,” I teased. Stef rolled his eyes and Luke actually blushed a little bit. “Seriously, I agree with you Stef. I think the problem is that the valuation ratios just got gradually higher and higher, and it’s only when we step back and observe them over a period of time that we see how inflated the NASDAQ has become.” We spent the next few hours going over our findings, comparing notes to see if we’d come to the same conclusions.

“Gentlemen, it is late,” Stef said. We looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was after midnight. “Go to bed, sleep in, and tomorrow we must figure out what to do now that we are all on the same page.”

“What are you microwaving for breakfast?” I asked him.

“We will see if you can provide that meal for us,” Stef said, and flounced off to his room.

I shook my head and wandered off to my room. I got myself cleaned up, stripped completely naked, and made sure there were condoms and lube next to my bed. I was laughing at myself, at my organization, and then thought cynically that Luke probably wouldn’t come over after all. He was probably just flirting, just being playful. Then I heard a soft knock on my door.

“Come in,” I said just as softly. The door opened and Luke walked in, wearing one of the bathrobes Isidore had put in all the bathrooms.

“You still want me to keep you warm?” he asked.

“Fuck yeah,” I said, pulling down the covers and inviting him in. He slipped the bathrobe off and stood there in front of me, an amazing male specimen, probably the hottest 50-year-old on the planet. Then he climbed into bed and lay partially on top of me. Our lips met gently, then more urgently, and I just surrendered to his moves.

His hands explored my body, but like Stef said, he explored my body as if I were a woman. He played with my nipples, and then sucked on them, and I felt his hands move lower until he got to my dick. “Damn you’re big!” he said.

“It makes me popular,” I joked. My dick was big, really big dick, bigger than anyone else I know. But he wasn’t really interested in my dick. I felt his fingers graze down my crack.

“You’re so smooth,” he said. “I love that.”

I almost said “I know,” but didn’t. He played with me, getting me loose, just like he would if my ass were a pussy, slipped on a condom, and entered me. It was really nice, he had a smooth, steady stroke that let me stay right with him as he built us both up toward an orgasm. As he got closer, he reached down and began stroking my cock urgently, and I remembered what Stef told me about him. He always made his partner come first. I willed my body to respond quickly, and in what seemed like no time I came, a really explosive orgasm. As soon as I was done, he gave himself permission to cum. It was really cute, the way his whole face twisted up as he shot his load.

“I’ve wanted to do that for the longest time,” he said as he kissed me lovingly. “It was as good as I knew it would be.”

“Me too,” I said simply, and pulled him in for another kiss. He made as if he were going to get up, but I wrapped my body around him, telling him without words that I wanted him to stay. He just smiled and curled up behind me, his arms wrapped around my torso.

It was as good as he knew it would be. I don’t think he knew how important those words were to me. Having Robbie go off on this new tack, to want to fuck other men, had really damaged my sexual self-esteem. I knew that wasn’t fair, that I shouldn’t let it bother me. I mean, we’d had mind blowing sex last night and this morning, and I knew I could make him cum harder than anyone else on this planet. Only aliens could make him blow harder, I thought playfully. But it wasn’t enough, and that hurt. Yet here was Luke, who said he’d dreamed about fucking me for years, and now that he had, he said I was all he’d dreamed of. That was really flattering and not a little endearing.

 

November 4, 1999

I woke up in the same position I’d fallen asleep in, with Luke spooned up behind me. His dick was hard, and prodding my ass, so I relaxed and moved back into him, feeling him slide seamlessly inside me. “Mmm,” he said as he woke up. I pulled away, letting him slip out long enough to put on a condom, and then he slid back into me. It was interesting, because last night he’d been on top of me, just like he’d be for a woman, and his moves were just as Stef described them. This morning he was behind me, gently thrusting in and out of me while slowly stroking my cock and it was entirely different. I chuckled to myself at Stef’s perception. The love guru had been stymied by Luke’s inability to change patterns. All you had to do was force him into a new position. I put that out of my mind and enjoyed the ride, enjoying it so much, in fact, that I began to wonder if I was turning into a bottom. My orgasm ended that train of thought, it ended all my trains of thought, and then I had to try to maintain my enthusiasm while Luke built up to his own climax.

“I could do that all the time,” he said as he nuzzled into my neck. God, that was sexy.

“Good,” I told him. “But right now, we have to go plot to become masters of the universe.”

“I thought we already were?” he joked. He went back to his room to take a shower, giving me some space. I was smiling, thinking about how fun sex with him had been, until it dawned on me that Robbie was probably doing the exact same thing with someone else. I really hadn’t prepared myself for that, and it coursed through my body like an electric shock. I stood under the running water, pretending that I wasn’t crying, that it was just the shower, as I slowly shut off the parts of my brain that were thinking of that, that were willing me to visualize Robbie fucking the brains out of some twink. It took me a while to pull myself together, and that just pissed me off even more. I hated being this vulnerable. I hated being hurt. I’d let Robbie in, I’d let him into the deepest parts of my soul, and now when he hurt me, I was defenseless. Well that was going to have to change. No way was I going to let myself feel this bad, feel this miserable.

I finally made it to the kitchen to find Luke making breakfast. It smelled great, and looked even better. “I did not know you could cook,” Stef said.

“That’s because you never invited me to stay for breakfast,” he said.

“I did,” I said, and slipped my arm around him.

“So you are enjoying your freedom?” Stef teased. I almost stopped my real feelings from popping out, but they still did, even if only for a second. I should have been ready for something like that. Stef picked up on it right away and gave me a worried look.

“I am,” I said, and smiled up at Luke. Only I was lying, and Stef knew it.

We ate Luke’s breakfast, and then started strategizing. “It seems to me that we have three major things to deal with,” I said, taking charge. For some reason, I needed to feel dominant. This thing with Robbie was fucking with me again. “We have to come up with a plan to reduce tech in our portfolio, we have to ferret out the leak in our company, and we have to drive Amphion under.”

“That is an excellent summary,” Stef said. “Let us tackle reducing our portfolio first.” We got out a listing of all of the current holdings we had.

“When Xbotics goes public next week, that will reduce our illiquid holdings to 3.5% of our portfolio,” Luke said. There was a cycle to these deals. We would fund companies in venture capital mode, let them build up their business, and then the stock would go public and we’d hopefully make a fortune on the initial public offering (IPO). Once it was public, we could sell our stock, or at least some of it, because there were rules limiting how much we could sell over a period of time, the Rule 144 provisions.

“It seems that with Amphion outbidding us on those start-up projects, we ended up with a very liquid portfolio,” I observed. We hadn’t been adding new projects, so most of our deals were already public. Amphion would have a lot of deals still in incubation. They’d be lucky to have those deals listed on the NASDAQ by the end of the year 2000.

“Then we must go through each of these companies and decide which ones we will retain. I would like to see us limit our portfolio to no more than 10% in technology stocks,” Stef said.

Luke and I looked at each other dubiously. “That’s a huge shift in our portfolio,” he said.

“And we’ll have to do Rule 144 filings so everyone will know we’re selling,” I said.

“Then that will play into the second part of our plans,” Stef said with an evil grin.

“Ferreting out the rat or destroying Amphion?” I asked.

“Both,” he stated confidently. “Here is my plan. There is a tech conference in a few weeks, and we will attend. We will explain casually that we are liquidating some of our existing assets so we have ample cash to fund new projects. Behind the scenes, we will pretend to be alarmed by Amphion and the way they out-bid us, and it will seem as if we are raising money simply to compete with their generous offers.”

“By the way, the only deals they’ve closed are the ones they’ve beaten us out of,” Luke said. “I checked. It’s like they don’t do anything but find out what we’re doing, what we’re bidding on, and then go in a little higher and snake the deal away from us.” Even now that we’d decided we didn’t really want any more deals, I could see the anger on Luke’s face, anger at losing. I felt it too.

“So then we’ll bid on deals, knowing that Amphion will outbid us,” I said grumpily. “It will make us look like idiots, as if we can’t figure out how to beat them.” Luke nodded in agreement.

“You two are going to have to check your testosterone-laden pride at the door,” Stef said, almost rudely. “We will win in the end.”

“Alright, tell us how that’s going to happen. My testosterone is dying to know,” I said, being a smart ass. It got a laugh.

“We will do business as usual, only we will develop much higher bids,” Stef said.

“So we’ll actually bid high for the project?” Luke asked.

“We will,” Stef said. “From time to time, we may unfortunately win one, but I am counting on Amphion using the system that has worked so well for them. I am counting on the leak.”

“We still need to find out who it is,” I told him. It drove me nuts to think there was a traitor in our midst.

“We will, but it is not so important. It is more important that we use this leak to feed them bad information,” Stef said.

“You know, if we’re wrong, we could be leading Amphion into some serious money,” Luke said.

“Not if we bid so high on the deals that even if they are successful, the profits will be miniscule,” Stef said. “I do not think they are doing much of their own analysis. I think they are simply using our bid, assuming we are smart, and going slightly over it.”

“That’s hard to know, since we don’t know much about Amphion,” I said. “We still do not even know who is behind Amphion.”

“Well, I think that since it is someone you went to school with, you should make that your project,” Stef observed.

“Who did you piss off so bad in high school that they want to ruin us?” Luke asked, kind of joking, kind of not.

“It could be a number of people,” I said, thinking back to my time at Gunn. “I was outed in my senior year, so everyone knew I was gay. Whoever it is could be a homophobe.”

“That would explain why he would come after us,” Stef said. “It is rumored that I am gay as well.” That really made us laugh. No one was more out of the closet than Stef. He had such an awesome ability to keep tense situations from getting too tense.

“Could it be Lark?” Stef asked.

“Who’s Lark?” Luke asked.

“He was my best friend in high school. We had a falling out over this guy he dated. It was more of a conflict with Robbie and Marcel, not me,” I said. “We haven’t seen each other for a long time, but I didn’t think he was pissed at me.” I really hadn’t done anything to him. Well, I guess that was wrong, because I had cut off our friendship. He was being a real ass, always trying to piss Robbie off, flirting and hitting on me in front of him, until Robbie had finally had enough. Of course I’d chosen Robbie over Lark. Still, it wasn’t a major confrontation; it was more that I just stopped doing stuff with him. We gradually grew apart and he pretty much faded away.

“Does he have access to money like that?” Luke asked.

“I don’t think so. He was a stockbroker, so he could be involved in that side of the deal, but he didn’t have much money last time I talked to him.” I thought about that. “I think if he’d come into a fortune somehow, we’d have heard about it.”

“So we can rule Lark out because he does not have the money, at least temporarily. Who else could it be? Could this Cary Chase be the real deal?” Stef asked.

“Did you piss him off, Cary Chase, that is?” Luke asked.

“Yeah, I embarrassed the shit out of him when he was a freshman,” I told them. “He was messing with my brother and I jumped all over him. But after that, we were cool. I even invited him to our parties. And after I was outed, he was really cool about it.”

“Maybe it was one of the other guys you slept with?” Stef teased. “Perhaps you were not very good.”

“That can’t be it,” Luke said, and got a big smile for that comment. It was really sweet the way he was working to prop up my ego.

“No, it can’t be someone I slept with,” I joked. We speculated for a while, and then got back to more concrete topics. We spent the rest of our time working our plans out. When we drove back to Escorial on Friday afternoon, we had a detailed plan of action, designed to move the bulk of our assets out of the tech sector and to try and destroy Amphion while we were doing it.

We got back to Escorial and the first thing I did was escape back to my room to call Robbie. “Hey,” he said cheerfully when he picked up the phone.

“You sound like you’re in good spirits. You fuck your twink?” I asked him playfully.

I could tell he was nervous. “Yeah, I did. It was nice.”

“Cool,” I said, but he would have had to be a complete idiot not to know how much that bothered me. “You want to fly up here for the weekend?”

He got really nervous. “I have a lot of things planned today,” he said.

“You’ve got a date,” I said, trying to hide the bitterness. He didn’t answer me. “What about tomorrow?”

“Well, I thought you were going to be up there this weekend, so I planned to get out of town and go somewhere kind of warm,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“I’m flying down to Cancun for the weekend,” he said.

“With your friend,” I said bitterly. No way could I hide it now. He didn’t say anything. “Do you still want me to go with you to see David, or would you rather take your twink?”

“Brad, that’s not fair. Come on. I’m not trying to hurt you. I thought we were going to give this a chance.”

“A chance? Fucking a guy is one thing, taking him off to Cancun for a romantic weekend is a whole different thing. Don’t you think?”

“It’s just a little trip out of town,” he whined. God, I hated it when he whined.

“Don’t lie to me. You’re not going to fucking Barstow.” I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. “That’s fine Robbie. Go, you have fun. I’ve got Matt’s orgy to go to this weekend.”

“Braaad…” he whined.

“You created this nightmare, Robbie. Now you get to live through it. Only you’re taking me along for the ride. I’m not sure I’m willing to let you do that to me, ever again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Think about it in between orgasms. I have to go find Matt and Wade.”

“You’re not going to fuck them?” he asked, horrified.

“Why not? I’m a free man now.”

“That’s like incest!” he said.

I laughed, really laughed. “You sound just like your mother. You just enjoy your pretty boy, and don’t worry about who I’m with. It’s none of your fucking business anyway.” And then I hung up.