Free Cash Burn by Michael Berrier

was next to the signature line. His signature would authorize a three-thousand-dollar contribution from BTB’s foundation to a charity caring for indigent families.
    But he let his eyes drift again to the skin of her neck where it descended to the collar of her blouse and linger there for a moment, drinking in its texture.
    He put the tip of his pen to the paper and scratched his signature above the line.
    Brenda flipped the next page and pointed out the dollar amount on the invoice.
    “What is that perfume?”
    She turned her eyes to him, and he felt the pull of their green, seeing now very closely for the first time their jeweled glistening, and she said a couple of words in French, her breath passing over his cheek a warm caress.
    He held her eyes for a moment before nodding. He looked to the file, flipped the next page himself, and signed. “That it?”
    She closed the file and stood away from him. He gulped a breath and tapped the pen on the desktop.
    She kept her eyes on his. “You have a meeting at CCI with Billy at two, and I confirmed your reservations at Drago for your dinner with Northfield. Seven o’clock, six people.”
    “Good. Thanks.”
    “There was some filing that backed up. And some reporting was overdue from a couple of your customers, so I called them. Anything else I can take off your plate right now?”
    “No. Thanks.”
    She turned, and he allowed his eyes to wander over her movement to the door. Finally she passed out of his view.
    He brought his hands to his lips and clasped them with his elbows propped on the desk. For a moment he sat silently, the buzz of chatter in the suite outside his office suddenly alien to his ears. He ignored the draw of the credits he needed to review for his team, the e-mails piling up, the pressure of preparation for upcoming meetings and the competition with Vince—all of it now somehow remote.
    He forced his eyes to the picture of Serena. On a sloop in the Caribbean five years ago, Serena sat on the deck next to him, her tanned legs stretched out toward the camera, one arm around his back, another hand on his chest. They were on their honeymoon, drunk with the freshness of their love, their smiles reflecting its intensity, its singularity. He remembered that day on the boat, the feel of her next to him in the Caribbean sun, the press of her against him as the boat lifted and swayed in the waves with the shove of the wind behind. At the resort that night over dinner, conversation lagging from fatigue after their day in the sun, he had looked into her and she into him, the dining room crowded but the two of them isolated and removed in their love, untouchable.
    But only a few months later, their marriage began to feel like a corporate merger. They would pass in the hallway in the mornings, off for meetings or to their offices on opposite ends of the Santa Monica Freeway to slug through ten- to twelve-hour days. And in the few evenings when they were both home, they were so tired from putting out fires all day that they had nothing left for one another. After the first year, they stopped even talking about going away together; their trips never panned out. They took their meals with clients or separately. Even on weekends the intensity of their schedules pulled them apart.
    They joked about it at first. When they resorted to punching appointments into their calendars to confirm their good intentions, Jason felt a sense of desperation over where they were headed. He had to break their dates nearly as often as Serena, but that didn’t stop his rising resentment over her work’s demands. He refused to allow himself to reveal that he was jealous of her job, but his jealousy turned uglier when he began to suspect that there was more to her trips than the business she claimed. The few calls she made from the road before the end were interrupted by background noise that sounded nothing like a business meeting. The last phone message, with the muffled voice of her boss