“Yeah,” he said. “Aftercare is important. Aftercare is just—really important.”
“I’m okay. That was great.”
He didn’t let go. “No, stay. Aftercare is important.”
50
Tuesday
Tristan
After lunch, Tristan showed Anjali and Colleen his office with a computer rig that took up half the room, and they went to work.
At the opening of the stock exchange and thus trading in New York, which was two-thirty in the afternoon in Monaco, GameShack’s stock price was already sharply lower, well less than half of its closing price the day before, and drifting downward.
The internet was screaming with rumors of GameShack’s imminent demise.
Which GameShack denied.
Vehemently.
They blamed hackers for infiltrating and crashing their system, calling it “a cybersecurity incident.”
And the message boards bellowed, “Well, of course, they’d say that if they were going bankrupt.”
GameShack’s users wanted to know whether their identity and credit card information had been compromised and was for sale on the dark web.
And when GameShack said they’d “look into it” and wouldn’t be releasing any more information, that all communication would go through their lawyers, the real outrage started.
Which was Tristan’s cue.
Tristan began buying small lots of the stock at this lower price, the lowest price it had been in years, just enough to prop it up for a bit and establish that he certainly hadn’t known what was going to happen to the stock price in case he needed that as a defense in court later.
Yeah, their plan was far beyond insider trading, all the way to market manipulation.
Logan’s grandfather, the Malefactor, had taught Tristan everything he knew about business, and the Malefactor wouldn’t have let little niceties like FTC regulations or international law stand in his way.
For behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Plus, if they did it right, the little investors at the Sherwood Forest forum would come out as winners.
What else could be expected from a forum called Sherwood Forest?
After half an hour of plucking small lots of GameShack stock as the price fell, Tristan opened the floodgates and poured money into the stock market, scooping up all the GameShack stock he could find.
Predictably, because Tristan was creating greater demand, the stock’s price stabilized and began to rise.
Colleen strolled over to where he sat in the control room on his yacht, flipping his eyes around the bank of monitors that formed a semicircular wall on the desk. She set another cup of coffee beside him, espresso and cream, just how he liked it. “How’s it going?”
“We’re almost there. The price is rising to where I want it, so I’m just about to turn it off.”
Colleen wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her soft cheek against his. His growing beard held their skin apart, and he wasn’t sure he liked that.
“And, stop.” Tristan sent the stop order, and the fire hose of his money dried up.
On his computer screen, the graphs showing the stock price reversed course and plummeted.
Colleen kissed him on the cheek, and Tristan wrapped his arms over hers, holding her lower arms against his chest. The warmth from her arms seeped through his shirt and melded with his skin, a slow glow spreading through his body.
Tristan rested his head back against her shoulder and closed his eyes.
He could have stayed like that forever.
Tristan liked sex as much as the next guy. If he were being honest, Tristan probably liked sex a lot more than the next guy. He liked everything about it, from the pursuit and seduction, to the first kiss and unwrapping the woman to reveal her softness and curves, to the exploration and conquest of her body when he found her orgasm, to his own completion and, above everything, aftercare.
Aftercare, when he held the woman in his arms and murmured to and petted her, and this same soft glow spread through him.
The thought had occurred to him once or twice that the whole reason he was so addicted to the BDSM dynamic was because he needed the aftercare.
Sure, Tristan hugged his friends with great flapping back slaps. Growing up in Europe, a couple of absent-minded pecks on the cheek was how he was accustomed to greeting a woman friend.
But being held like this was different.
His mind wandered back through his life, but other than sleepy clasps at night and the occasional serpent-like twining of a woman marking Tristan as her territory when some other woman was looking at him, the last time anyone had wrapped their arms around him and held on was before he’d left the decrepit Iowa farmhouse when he was thirteen.
His little brothers and sisters had been clingy little things, draping themselves on him like cats.
Surely his mother had embraced him at some point, maybe when he was younger, but she’d never liked “Velcro toddlers” tripping her.
And then they’d all been gone.
Tristan’s hand stole up Colleen’s arm, his fingers slipping inside her tee-shirt sleeve to her satiny shoulder, and he breathed in the clean scents of soap and feminine skin.
His breath emerged as a sigh.
Colleen whispered near his ear, “Twisty, don’t you need to do something?”
“Oh. Uh, yeah. Thanks.”
Tristan reached for the keyboard and began typing a message on the Sherwood Forum boards.
Colleen withdrew her arms and walked away, leaving a chill on his shoulders where her skin had been.
Tristan pushed the sinking emotion away and typed:
Hello fellow Whales of the Pequod Room,
This isn’t for general dissemination, but I have it on good authority (wink wink) that the GameShack cyberattack was a one-time event, and their website is now secure.
The message saying that GameShack will be closing their streaming service was trolling by the hackers. It isn’t true. GameShack has no intention of closing its streaming service.
The double top is just an artifact.
Buy the dip.
Best,
TwistyTrader
That comforting little message was about to ignite a round of panic-selling by the Killer Whales like tourists running away from a suddenly erupting volcano.
It served those Killer Whales right.
51
A Bloodbath of Killer Whales
Colleen
Colleen trotted to the rear of the yacht, where Anjali was reclining next to Jian in deck chairs on the shaded top deck in the late afternoon sun, holding his hand. Her laptop rested on her knees.
Dang, those two were just so sweet.
Colleen asked her, “Has the brouhaha started yet?”
Anjali glanced up at her, her enormous dark eyes amused. Her head bobbled on her neck like she was dancing. “Of course. The Killer Whale who calls themself Triple-X-Lehman-Bros is hinting in the comments that the dip is a buying opportunity for the minnows. Those assholes. They’re probably selling every last scrap of GameShack stock they own and trying to prop up the price with disinformation so they can offload it. I hate how they take advantage of the little guys.”
Colleen nodded. “The stock market is nothing but a Ponzi scheme. Let’s protect those minnows and sea bass from buying too early.”