His body entered the water slowly and was
soon covered in foam that smelled of vanilla. He sat down on the edge of the
enormous Jacuzzi and just closed his eyes and pulled his head back. Adam was
trying to relax after the party he had thrown, a luncheon in honor of all the
donors that had decided to give money to the hospital his foundation ran. They
were all nice people, always smiling and nodding and shaking hands with one
another. Adam knew most of them really well, from other events and from social
encounters, and he knew most of them wee awful people.
He took advantage of their guilt to fuel his
philanthropic endeavors with all the money they had to give which was a lot.
They were owners of huge companies and brands and taking a thousand dollars out
of their bank account was almost unnoticeable. Their guilt came from the fact
that most of them were always doing something behind close doors, whether it
was having an affair, or having links with organized crime or having some sort
of sickness or condition that they didn’t want anyone to find out about, among
other reasons.
It’s not like they knew Adam knew but rather
than they used any social service available to atone for their sins and guilt.
For Adam, who was a young businessman and also the owner of several companies,
that had to be taken advantage of, instead of potentially loosing that money to
other “causes” like prostitutes or alcohol. He didn’t have to threaten or to
convince anyone, they just did what he expected them to do and that had always
been the case even when his father was alive.
It had been five years ago that his father had
died and had left him in charge of every single one of the companies he owned
and also in possession of most of his estates. Of course, his siblings had
attempted to fight this will but he soon clarified no one would be kicked out
of nowhere and there would be no fighting among family members. He distributed
the estate and was sure everyone was represented in the various businesses they
had. That way he earned his family’s trust and also the respect of their
community of wealth.
In time, with his keen eye for business, he
managed to win the respect of every single company owner in the country and was
able to prove to them that his young age was not a downside of who he was but
rather and interesting and potentially key characteristic. After all, his
father had died when he was just twenty-seven years old and many in the
companies and among his family thought he wasn’t mature enough. He had an older
sister and his dad had partners who were more experienced. But the will of his
father was respected and he ended up being what they all needed in order not to
let everything be lost.
However, he wasn’t perfect himself. It was not
that Adam had any obvious flaw but rather that he had too much interest in his
rivals and friends. He had many of them watched by private investigators,
forming kind of a team that revealed to him every little dirty secret they all
had behind close doors. This gave him the advantage in every business
negotiation because, although he would never blackmail anyone, he knew how to
use those secrets in his own advantage. He was truly obsessed with getting to
know everything about a person and wouldn’t let his investigators rest if they
hadn’t found anything meaty.
In that luxurious bathtub, he would often have
a bath, as he would check all the files on his investigations. He was very
adamant that if there wasn’t any interesting discovery in the first month, he
normally left the person alone unless it was a current rival of sorts. He
didn’t want to be using all of that to be a rat. Business was business and
that’s what it was all about but personal things, very personal ones were just
out of bounds. He had discovered, for example, how some people he investigated
were HIV positive or had cancer. This for example was never used against them
and the files he had were destroyed because that was personal.
What he liked to find was something like a
love affair, like some weird transaction with the mob or something like that.
Both those things made people feel very guilty and guilty people are not good
for business. It was very easy beating them in that arena where he had learned
to excel from a young age, thanks to the tutoring of his father. He used those
really silly secrets to make them tremble in their pants and from there his
victory was already settled.
The fun thing about it all was that Adam tried
to be the contrary of all those rivals. First of all, he wasn’t stupid enough
to do something crooked. He had all kinds of advisors and people working for
him that would tell him if he was making a mistake or how to achieve something
without the need of dirty money or cheating. If he didn’t saw an honest way to
do something, he simply didn’t do it. He was rich enough so it wasn’t that bad
not to win more money. He wasn’t driven by money because he had learned to
control his thirst for power.
Besides, he was very open about his life, both
personal and in business and was always very clear that he didn’t answer to any
one in his personal decisions and that only his family mattered in his business
ones. That was it so he wasn’t the best media character, even if some news
outlets loved to show some pictures of him hugging beautiful models, kissing
men and women or having luxurious holidays in some faraway hotspot.
Adam was not about settling, that was true. He
wouldn’t marry any women because he thought that kids would come soon and he
didn’t wanted children not to have a father. Because he was always away for
business, was always focused on that and had only a few very well defined
moments during the week when he could just relax. He didn’t think a wife and
kids deserved that, even if it came with all the money and privilege he had to
offer. His mother insisted that he got married to continue the line and have
someone inherit all of it when he died. And she was right but he had no idea
how to accomplish that.
He had also thought of the option of marrying
a man but that had the same problems, minus the conceiving part that would be
replaced by the whole process of adoption or by them using a surrogate mother,
which was his favorite option of the two. Any way, he wouldn’t have time for
them and he wanted to be able to share everything.
The bottom thing was that he needed to love
someone and that didn’t happen. He had sex often enough and went into dates and
was charming as a man could be, but no one had really made him think about them
as a potential wife or husband. He was very nice and a complete gentleman with
them but he needed someone that gave him something he didn’t have, that made
him feel unbalanced but, at the same time, that made him feel like everyone
with that person was worth it.
Adam was not very big on the concept of love.
He thought it more like an alliance of sorts were two people realize they have
to be together because they work much better as a team. He knew many people
like that, friends and family, and he had the image of his parents, who had
always loved each other just like that, helping each other and being the best
partners one could ever see.
With the soothing sound of water around him,
Adam realized that some day he would want children, that one day he would want
to wake up and find someone he loved to smell next to him. He was only thirty
two years old and thought that maybe it could happen the next day or in a
couple of years but he was sure it would happen because, sometimes, he felt
that need but it wasn’t as strong as it could be. He knew it wasn’t strong
enough yet.
He then stood up and walked naked towards a
wall, where some wind blowers dried him up. He had to stand there like the
Vitruvius man, feeling the soft caress of all that wind. Then, his mouth began
to feel dry and the world around him started to get distorted. He felt dizzy
and tried to hold on to the well but he just fell to the ground, a marvelous
granite floor.
