Page 5 of The Player Next Door
Sam
You do, tho
Not like, in a slut shamey way, just like, as a description of your habits in general.
When was the last time you had anything resembling a date that wasn’t just meeting for drinks before you had sex so she was sure you weren’t an axe murderer?
Logan
I resent that
No one has suspected me of being a serial killer in YEARS
Sam
Which means your last date was YEARS AGO bud, keep up
But to be serious: you have never bothered to update me on the end of a fuckbuddyship. Is everything okay?
Logan frowned. Everythingwasokay, but Sam was right. He rarely bothered to tell her about who he was seeing, since there wasn’t much to tell. But for some reason, he had felt like talking about Amber today.
Logan
I guess I thought you cared about me?
Sam
That was your first mistake.
He snorted again and pocketed his phone. It was time for his meeting with Peggy Roth, which did have him a little on edge. Maybe that was why he’d somewhat idiotically reached out to Sam for reassurance. It wasn’t 4 p.m. on a Friday so he wasn’t getting fired—he didn’t think—but there was no way to fight the drop in his stomach the second he saw a request for a one-on-one with the VP.
Because in addition to being unceremoniously dumped by Amber, Logan had been unceremoniously dumped by several clients in the last month. He had managed to find a few new ones already, but that amount of churn was usually a bad sign for a financial advisor.
Logan was fairly good at the winning clients part of his job as it exploited his two main talents: flirting, and reading the room. A lot of people assumed investment was a math and economics game, and it was, to a certain extent. But a lot more of it was gut feeling; reading the writing on the wall and convincing people he was the right person to trust, and then making the right choices with their money. It wasn’t all that different from picking women up in bars, quite frankly.
But much like his hookups, clients tended to leave him just as easily. It wasn’t that he was making crappy choices with their money, as his metrics were more or less the same as the rest of his colleagues, but rather that there was something about Logan that made people want to move on. He had managed to keep enough clients to stay off Peggy’s radar for a while, but the massive departure in the last month was enough to warrant this meeting.
He should be safe so long as he kept the Schneider account, though. John Schneider had made his money in off-brand cereal, which was boring but highly lucrative, and was one of Loyalty Investment’s oldest clients. Logan had inherited him when a senior advisor retired last year, and it was both a major coup for Logan and an easy way of keeping his metrics solid. He just had to keep things steady and not make any risky moves; Schneider was a very conservative, risk-averse client.
Logan stood, pushing his chair in. The Aidens were both in their cubicles one row over. The Aidens had been college roommates and were basically interchangeable, down to getting the exact same job right out of college. Even they admitted it; they were both tall and blond with light hazel eyes and a sort of Instagram-ready handsomeness that drew women to them without much effort. By virtue of having a slightly longer last name, Aiden Gerrick got to go by his first name while Aiden Brooks was resigned to using his last. They weren’t the worst—Logan hadsomestandards—but they were, in Sam’s eloquent phrasing, “slightly sketch.” Brooks was on the phone with someone, his voice in the rare “I’m doing actual work” register while he threw a baseball up in the air repeatedly, catching it with a loudsmackin his palm each time. Logan couldn’t hear Aiden, but he was probably one of the many people clicking away at his keyboard.
Logan made his way through the maze of identical grey cubicles to the hallway that held the actual offices. He knocked and waited for her response before entering. Peggy Roth did not look like one would expect the Vice President of a wealth management firm to look, because she dressed like a wacky English professor, complete with curly salt and pepper hair and turquoise glasses—but she had put in her dues and despite the staid dress code at Loyalty Investments, no one was about to tell Peggy Roth she had to retire the bangles.
But even though her clothes saidI’m a quirky aunt, her demeanor when Logan walked through the door reminded him strongly of his middle-school science teacher. He had a bad feeling he was about to be told off for doodling when he should’ve been paying attention in class.
Unfortunately for Logan, he was right. Peggy fixed him with a look and gestured for him to sit down. “Mr. Walsh, thank you for stopping by,” she said sternly. She peered down her nose at her computer, her glasses pushed to the top of her head. Her fingers clicked across the keyboard and she turned to face him. “I’m guessing you know why you’re here today.”
“I know I lost the Miller and Yang accounts, but—”
“And the Chaudhary account,” Peggy interjected.
Okay, maybe this was going worse than he expected. “And the Chaudharys, yes. But I have brought in two new clients in the last three weeks, which brings my metrics back up to where they should be.” He was fudging it a little, since he was technically down about a hundred grand in total client investments, but it was at leastcloseto where he should be.
“It seems you’re close to meeting this month’s metrics, yes, but you aren’t yet. Your client portfolio is about $100,000 short.”
Logan hid his wince. “I’ve got a few leads, and—”
“It’s more than that,” Peggy interrupted. “It’s the Schneider account as well.”