Saving Her Billionaire

“But what?” asked Phoebe.

“I think, more than actually running the company, all my life I have loved the idea of running the company. Do you know what I mean? I liked the idea of being in charge, the idea of basically being my dad. I liked the idea of being the one calling the shots, the one that everyone listened to. I think I just liked the idea of becoming my dad because I idolized him so much. But as I grew up, I began to realize that it wasn’t as much fun as it sounded. It was a lot of work, work that I’m not sure I even like doing. It involved doing things that I might find unsavory. When I run this company, I am going to have to be utterly ruthless, I am going to have to be cruel and brutal. I am going to have to do things in a way that might end up hurting people.”

“When did you start feeling this way?” asked Phoebe.

“I guess I started feeling this way when I started working at the company,” said Nate. “Before I started I had this idealized vision of how my father worked. I had this fantasy of what working at the company would be like. Signing important papers, looking important as I wrote something down, having coffee with important people. It was all very fantastical and childish and I’m surprised at how long I harbored this fantasy. Even when I was twenty two years old and I started working at the company, I still, more or less, believed that the work I was going to be doing would fit into this idealistic vision of what the company was like.”

“That’s not all that childish,” said Phoebe. “Everybody has an idealistic vision of what work would be like. Everybody is made to feel like this fantasy was childish when they actually start work. It’s extremely common, because when you are exposed to work before actually working in a corporate setting it is through movies and other such things. You are made to feel like the things you are doing are going to conform to this highly stylized aesthetic, and when you actually start working and discover that this aesthetic was false you, naturally, feel like you have been cheated. You feel like you are not doing the thing that you wanted to be doing.”

“That’s exactly how I felt,” said Nate. “And just… after eight years of working at the company I was starting to feel like maybe I wasn’t living the life I wanted to lead. I was starting to feel like everything in my life was leading up to something that had been decided for me, that what I had wanted had simply not been taken into account. I don’t think I want to run the company, you see, but that’s very different from what I have been thinking all my life up until right now. I’ve always wanted to run the company but I don’t want to do that anymore. And a few weeks after I started to realize that maybe running the company was not what I wanted to do, well, my father died. The responsibility was thrust onto my shoulders. I think… I think it’s the fact that it happened at such an awkward time that made me feel this way. I was thinking of talking to my father, you see. I was thinking of telling him that I didn’t want to do this anymore. I was thinking of telling him that life was too short for me to have to do what he wanted me to do.”

“I understand,” said Phoebe. “It must have been difficult for you to have to reconcile the fact that the choice had been taken away from you only weeks after you had decided that you might not want to do what you were expected to do your entire life. You feel cheated once again, this must not have been easy. It puts your breakdown after your father’s death into perspective, to be sure.”

“Yeah,” said Nate. “I just… this company deals in so many things, it’s such a huge corporation. I’m starting to realize that such a profitable enterprise simple can’t exist without taking advantage of people. I’m starting to realize that you simply can’t exist in the world and own so much of its money without taking it out of the hands of people that need it more than you do. How can that be possible? How can one have so much while others have so little?”

“It’s actually very nice that you think that way,” said Phoebe.

She was looking at him rather oddly. Nate wondered what that look was. Did it mean anything? He tried to push the thought out of his mind but he simply could not. Did Phoebe still feel something for him? He had tried to ignore this possibility but he had found himself returning to it time and time again, he simply could not ignore the possibility that Phoebe might still feel some small part of the intimacy and attraction that they had felt that night two months ago.

“Do you really think so?” asked Nate, hoping that Phoebe would clarify. She thought positively of him, he needed to know more. He wanted to know that she did not think that he was a despicable person. He needed to feel better about himself at the very least in this aspect of his life because he was not getting any support in any other area of his life.

“I do,” said Phoebe. “I mean, you kind of have this way of seeing things from a bigger perspective. This is really impressive because few people actually think this way. Most people just think that everything will go their way, and that if things go their way they are meant to do so. I’m talking about rich people here, just so you know. Rich people in general don’t empathize with the people that allow them to be rich by being so poor, especially people whose net worth is in the billions like yourself.”

Nate was quiet for a time. Phoebe thought positively of him. She approved of how he thought.

He had honestly thought that he had been silly to feel this way, that he had been acting immature by wanting to feel like what he was doing benefited the world in some way. His father would have disapproved, he knew that for a fact. His father would have wanted him to simply move on with it, to simply do what he needed to do. His father would have wanted him to simply go about his business and earn money because in the earning of money one fulfills one’s true purpose. It was a rather horrid way to think, and Nate was starting to realize that his father was a rather horrid person for thinking this way. He had always been ruthless when it came to money. Nate was starting to realize just how wrong this was when so many people in the world died hungry and died poor.