Comari Dawn

Part One: A Fresh Start - Chapter Two

           

The following day, when I woke up in the morning I was pleased to note I'd managed to get back into my normal habit of waking up early since I'd been a man of the morning for as long as I could recall. I took a moment to relax in the bed before I roused myself to take care of essential needs, my bladder and my breasts both required emptying and it also gave me a chance to look myself over in privacy without interruptions.

Once I'd taken care of both, and learned more about my dual-gender nature, I returned to the bed and picked up my tablet, which had been in my messenger bag beside the bed. I'd had to plug it in before going to bed, since it was flat dead. However now, with the entire night on the charger, it was ready and after a quick software update to the device I fetched my emails and began to wade through the rather huge backlog of mail which had gathered while I'd been changing.

I prioritized messages from the company where I worked and as I began to go through them I realized the first dozen or so were fairly formulaic, being in essence, digital get-well cards from my co-workers. Once I managed to get through those messages I got down to the messages which I really needed to pay attention to since they came from David, and other managers with the company.

The messages I read which had come from David were very concerning, though they were pretty much par for the course for him. While most of the time we tried to affect the appearance of congenial co-workers the reality was rather different. The two of us had never really ever seen eye to eye on... well... anything. For him the main impediment to working well with me was the fact the I was a member of the Hawke family. He was very much aware I was the nephew of Walter Hawke, one of the founding partners of the company which we both worked for. His distaste for me was further exacerbated by my being the son of the first CEO of the company, Charles Hawke. My father had been the leading partner in the company and he'd set the standard of the company's work prior to his death ten years ago.

As far as David was concerned I relied far too much on blind chance, and on my name, to make my way forwards in the company. He was determined, sooner or later, to expose what he saw as my lack of actual skills and drive, to his father Simon Stearn, who was also on the board with my Uncle.

For my part I didn't really do much to engender myself to him as I found his general attitude grating and his mannerisms to be somehow less than admirable. He often could talk himself out of a problem and lay whatever he was talking himself out of at the feet of some poor unfortunate soul on our team. He had tried twice when I'd only just started the job two years ago, but his father and my Uncle had both checked with me before interrogating him about the problem. The result hadn't been pretty for him, but he had learned not to try and pull something like that on me. Sooner or later I knew the whole situation would come to a head and one of us would be out on their ass while the other would move up in the company with the possibility of becoming a partner in the firm.

For the time being the only reason, I was stuck as David's junior was simply because I was almost ten years younger than he was and I'd only joined the company two years ago after getting my MBA. David on the other hand had been with the company for a little more than a decade since he was nine years my senior. However; I didn't think my Uncle, or his father really considered his time at the company as the only factor. I was gaining the loyalty and respect of those who worked for the company while David wasn't doing much to engender himself to our co-workers.

From the emails which filled my work file it appeared David was trying to take some kind of advantage of my illness to shuffle me out of the company. It was a cheap move which I should have come to expect of David, but never the less it still made my blood boil at his conceited moves. I was almost to the point of writing up a sternly worded email to both his father, Simon Stearn, and my Uncle, Walter Hawke, but I took a moment to cool off. Once I was calmed down I went back to reading through David's increasingly overbearing and critical emails as he tried to lay everything wrong which was happening at my feet.