Open Doors (Suncoast Society #27)(17)

“True.” Derrick turned his coffee cup around in circles in front of him. “I hate being a hard-ass.”

“You’re not being a hard-ass, you’re being a smart businessman. Kaden and I, we’re the ones being the hard-asses. Look, it’s going to be a lot easier to do this for the second party than go several parties, risking liability and arrest, and then drop the boom. Everyone knows that things will change as a result of what you learned from the first party.”

“Fine.”

“You know I’m right.”

“Yeah, but Marcia’s going to kill me when she sees the legal bill.”

“So I can go ahead and tell Kaden we can get started?”

Derrick took a sip of coffee. “Yes,” he mumbled into his cup.





Monday afternoon, Derrick was a little surprised to see Marcia’s car parked outside the club—and he was already thinking of it as the club—when he arrived. He thought she’d left the office nearly an hour earlier and had headed home. He’d stopped by to make sure they hadn’t forgotten to do any clean-up—yes, including the bathrooms—and to pick up their personal coolers so he could take them home and fill them with ice before the next party.

He added another item to his mental checklist.

Install icemaker kit on fridge.

He wondered how hard the shit would hit the fan if she knew he’d authorized Kaden and Ed to get started on incorporating “Sarasota Venture Venue, LLC” and getting it insured.

For those purposes, it would be listed as a private membership club for performance art, where they also conducted educational seminars and photo shoots.

Kaden theorized that in the future they could rent the space out to riggers and photographers. And they would be holding classes, eventually. Even allow local kinky community groups to meet there.

Inside, Derrick found Marcia on her hands and knees with a measuring tape, and drawing chalk lines on the floor around the front door area.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Planning the office.”

“I thought we were going to wait a couple of months before we build out the office?”

“We were.”

She sat back and examined her work. She also had an old rag next to her, and he realized there were a couple of faint chalk lines she’d obviously rubbed out with the rag. Along with this, a pad of graph paper, a mechanical pencil, and an eraser.

Apparently, that was all she was going to say.

“So why are you doing this now? What changed?”

“I’m trying to decide on the layout now that I know how the party went. Once I decide on the layout, I can plan it and see how it would function at the next party. Once I have it laid out the way I want, I can draw up the plans and we can buy the lumber, drywall, all of that.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “I’ll start mapping out the changing room alcoves and upstairs loft areas next.”

“You are really getting into this, aren’t you?”

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You don’t get it, do you? We need to plan in advance for expenses like this. I had a ton of people volunteer to get supplies or buy things or hell, even outright donate money and manpower to help build it right. But we can’t count on that. I’m still not sure how we should handle the income. I guess we can run it through the accounting firm as miscellaneous income, for now. Of course, dealing with cash, we can just pay for expenses in cash, and then it’s an even wash that doesn’t get us in trouble with the IRS. We can buy stuff with our business cards and deduct it as an expense and then pay ourselves back with cash.”

He didn’t mention what Ed had hammered home to him at breakfast. “We’ll figure it out. Right now, I want to go home, have dinner, and collapse.”

“Yeah, there’s plenty of leftovers from dinner last night,” she said, once again enthralled in her work. “You can nuke something.”

He briefly thought about playing the Master card.

Only briefly.

He suspected that would go over about as well as a pound of raw beef in a starving lion’s den.

And he’d end up ripped to shreds just the same. He was already walking on paper-thin ice in terms of concealing what was going on with the business back-end stuff from her.

“Can I help you do this?” he finally decided on as the smartest answer.

“No thanks, I’m good. I’ll be home soon. I’m going to finish this while I still have good light. But thanks for offering.”

“Okay.”

He walked to the back to grab the coolers.

“Derrick?”

He turned to find her sitting back on her heels again. “Yeah, sweetie?”

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

He headed over to her and sat down next to her. “What?”

“I mean, I know it’s anything goes at the house parties. Not much someone can really do about that, legally. You can’t arrest people for allowing other people to have sex in your house. But what if there’s a consent violation, real or alleged? Maybe we should specify what is and isn’t allowed when we send out the next round of invites.”

He felt a little relief creep in. “That’s one of the things Ed wanted to talk about at breakfast this morning. They’re going to work up a new liability waiver.”