This is the finale of Best Served Cold, which was the continuation of two previous stories: Upwardly Mobile and Warning Signs. You should read those stories before Best Served Cold.
I apologize for the long delay in wrapping this up.
***
Fate can sometimes be a strange and fickle bitch. It turns out Rose didn't need to pretend to be pregnant. She was. The news came as a tremendous shock to us both. We had no idea who was the father. Was it Jerry? Was it Marcus? Was it mine? We had no clue, and the suspense was horrible. We had considered getting an abortion, but neither of us could bring ourselves to do that. We decided to bear with it and see where it would take us.
If nothing else, it gave us an excellent excuse to avoid Jerry's continued attempts to fuck my wife.
It was December. Other than the pregnancy, things at our house had almost returned to normal. Rose and I were playing the parts of loyal Adrenaline devotees and sucking up to Jerry and Gloria every chance we had. It meant we had to play along sexually here and there. Rose was great and pretending to be sick, but she'd not been able to get out completely unscathed.
She'd fucked Jerry twice since the lake, but both times I was there, and neither of them was all that exciting. She practically just laid there while he did her. He wasn't thrilled with her, but she used the pregnancy as an excuse. After the second time, he didn't try for a third.
Gloria did her best to keep me pre-occupied. I didn't mind fucking her so that I could deal with it. Rose was not exactly happy with it, but she knew I was only doing it because I had to keep up appearances. The hardest part was dealing with the company parties, or should I call them what they were, orgies. We couldn't avoid them altogether, so we attended.
On one occasion, Rose was fucking Marcus, when Mike Hernandez showed up. He stuck his cock in her face, and she had no choice but to suck it. She let Marcus finish his business, but when Mike tried to mount her, she feigned an attack of morning sickness and threw up all over his pecker. That had an amazing ability to end his erection.
Mike didn't fare better with Amanda. He tried unsuccessfully to get her in his bed, with no luck. By the end of summer, he gave up and moved on to more willing women. I doubted there was a shortage of pussy for the muscular asshole.
Things seemed to be going well with the company, too. In early December, Jerry scheduled an all-hands meeting to announce the year-end results, bonuses, and our Christmas party. We held the meeting in our brand new office's luxurious break room. Jerry had it catered by one of the local high-end Mexican restaurants.
Everyone from all our regions had flown in for the event, and the place was packed, wall-to-wall with expectant employees waiting to find out how large their annual bonuses would be. I didn't realize we had grown so much over the year. The meeting started out well, and people enjoyed the food and the margarita machine. After giving everyone time to eat, Jerry had our tech-guy Dave dim the lights and cue up Jerry's PowerPoint deck. All eyes turned to the self-proclaimed "Guru of eCommerce" as he basked in the joy of being the center of attention.
"Hello Adrenaline!" he started. There was a subdued response, so he stepped forward, tested his microphone and repeated louder, "Hello Adrenaline!"
This time everyone said hello back, and he smiled.
"That's better! Well! It has been an amazing year for the company. I am proud to announce that this has been our biggest grossing and most successful year to date." The audience was delighted and cheered happily. Thoughts of big Christmas bonuses were filling many heads.
He pushed a button on the remote control, and a graph appeared showing the revenue growth over the past four years.
"Seventy-three percent compounded annual growth! Do you know what that means?" he asked, looking around the room. There was silence for several seconds.
"That we're growing?" one of the developers spoke up.
"That's right! But, not only are we growing, we are the fastest growing eCommerce consulting firm in America!"
There was a loud burst of applause. Jerry waited for it to die down.
"This year was a record year for us in so many ways. Record sales! We sold a total of fifty-two million in projects!"
More applause. Those employees who had been with us the prior year realized that was a massive increase over the preceding year. They were practically drooling about the size of their forthcoming bonuses.
"Our revenue was up one-hundred and thirty percent from last year! That means we more than doubled last years' revenue!"
There was a much more significant bit of applause and several whoops and whistles.
"Yeah! You all made this happen! It was your hard work and dedication that made this all possible! Give yourselves a big hand for that!"
The applause grew to an uncomfortably loud level. Someone started a chant of "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" that went on for over a minute before he raised his hands to quiet the room.
"And to celebrate, we're going to have the biggest and coolest Christmas party," he stopped himself and pretended to act like he was being scolded by the head of Human Resources, "sorry, sorry, the end-of-the-year party we've ever had!"
There was more shouting. I was happy to see that our employees were finally going to get bonuses and be rewarded for their hard work. Employee compensation was tied directly to the results of the company. Each year, the profit of the company was split among the owners first, with fifty percent going to them, with the remaining fifty percent being paid out to the employees. It was a great bonus plan. The only problem with it was, in the prior three years it had never paid out a dime because, in each of those years, the company hadn't turned a profit.
Now, however, it sure sounded like a big bonus was in the making. I could see the excited looks of anticipation on faces around the room. I was even starting to get excited. I was also looking to get a sizable chunk myself.
The slideshow changed to show the venue for the Christmas, err, End-of-the-Year, Party. We were renting out a casino! That was impressive.
Jerry went on at length about how great the party would be. He then pushed a button, and a slide appeared with the heading of "Bonus Results." You could cut the anticipation with a knife; it was so thick.
"And, to go over this year's bonus payout, I'll turn things over to our CFO."
Jerry sat down, and the CFO stood up and walked to the center of the room.
"Thanks, Jerry. Well, that was certainly exciting. How's everybody feeling?"
Nobody responded. All they wanted to know was how much money they would get.
He then spent the next twenty minutes going through slide after slide of financial information, competitive analysis, all kinds of mind-numbing crap. The audience seemed more than bored and was growing antsy.
"And, now for the bit, you're all waiting for. The bonus payout for this year."
Now everyone perked up.
He displayed a very complicated looking chart.
"As you can clearly see here, while we have had an epic year, a phenomenal year, our biggest year ever, the reality is that we ended the year with no profit. So, unfortunately, we have no money in the bonus pool to pay bonuses this year."
All hell broke loose.
"Fuck the Christmas Party," came a shouted voice from the back of the room, "use that money to pay us bonuses!"
The CFO smiles, "Well, that isn't enough to pay much. I mean, it would change the whole tax structure, and we wouldn't realize all of that savings as profit. So at most, you'd get maybe ten dollars each. We figure it's better to have the party."
"How the fuck do we sell over fifty million and not make any profit?" came another angry voice.
"Well," he pointed to the complicated graph, "as you can see, our costs of doing business is just too high. After we paid our debt to the bank, withheld money for anticipated grown for next year and paid the operating expenses, there isn't anything left."
This went on for about twenty minutes. I tuned out somewhere in the middle. Finally, the meeting ended, and everyone drifted away in shock. The leadership team went into Jerry's fancy executive office and closed the doors.
"Well, that didn't go so bad," Jerry stated, sitting down and putting his feet up on his desk.
"What the fuck do you mean it didn't go bad," Marcus asked, glaring at Jerry.
"Nobody got shot," he answered laughing.
"How is it possible we don't have any profit?" I asked, much louder than I had intended. "We reviewed this last month, and you said we would have about four million profit! Where the fuck did it go?"
The CFO shrugged his shoulders. "We had higher than anticipated miscellaneous non-billable expenses."
"What the fuck are miscellaneous non-billable expenses?" shouted Dan Harris, our head of Digital Marketing.
"You know, things we have to spend money on that we can't bill our customers for, like cell phones and computers."
"No, no," I cut in. "Those are already accounted for under computing expenses.
"Well, you know things like the cost of the new office build out."
"That's covered too! You showed us the line item for that."
He started getting red in the face.
"It's a bunch of stuff. It's too complicated to explain to you. You're not a CPA. It's the cost of doing business."
I stood my ground.
"I want to see the books."
"You can't see the books. You don't have a right to see the books. Only the owners can see them." He gave me a smug smirk.
"I am a fucking owner, you prick. I have a legal right to see the books," I stepped closer.
Jerry laughed from his desk.
"No, actually you don't The majority ownership of the company voted, and we downgraded all of your ownership stakes to B-level shares. B-level shares do not have any real ownership stake in the company, no voting rights and no rights to review the financials," Jerry laughed again. "You have only a right a share of the profit, but since we didn't make any, well, you're shit out of luck."
Dan jumped up. "You can't fucking do that! You issued us the ownership stakes as A-level shares, with full rights of ownership. You can't just decide to downgrade previously issued shares retroactively! That's illegal."
Jerry looked closely and Dan and then said, calmly. "We already did."
"I'll sue your ass!" Dan declared.
"Oh, and one more thing," Jerry stated while smiling at Dan. "Your B-level shares return to the company if you are no longer employed."
