Sweet Curse of Bali
Chapter One
Alonzo Ortega
Alonzo woke up with his usual slight hangover. He was groggy, and he rubbed his eyes with his thumbs. He then felt the sheets pulled off his body, and as he looked over, he saw two girls stirring in the mid-morning sun coming through the window. He had almost completely forgotten about them. He stared down at their tangled mess of blonde and brunette hair, not even remembering their names or where he’d picked them up.
They’re very beautiful and young, probably twenty-one or twenty-two years old, still naked and just barely starting to wake. He carefully slipped out of bed and went into his personal bathroom, phone in hand. He never went anywhere without it, not even to the restroom. He’d even taken phone calls in the shower before.
Alonzo Stood in front of the mirror, he washed his face and took a few pills from the medicine cabinet. They would help with his hangover. He wasn’t entirely sure what they were, but he got them from Mauricio, and they always did the trick. After he dabbed his face dry with a towel, he looked into his own eyes. They weren’t red or bloodshot, and the puffiness was already starting to go away. He blinked away the last of his sleepiness and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. The Ortegas had perfect hair. His father, billionaire Francisco Ortega, was in his fifties and was just starting to go grey. He looked at least ten years younger than his age, and Alonzo believed that he had all the time in the world before he needed to worry about losing his youthful and handsome looks.
He smiled at himself. It was that charming smile that ultimately got girls to go up to his penthouse with him. Those perfect white teeth, his dimples, and the twinkle in his brown eyes. His phone buzzed on the countertop, snapping him out of his thoughts.
“Hello? Yes.” It was Diego, his personal assistant. “Schedule an appointment with the buyers for next week. We have to update the mattresses at the hotels every few years. And figure out how to donate the old ones. I don’t know. Just make it happen.” He hung the phone up and set it back on the counter.
He hired Diego less than a year ago to keep his schedule in order – schedule he ignored a lot of the time anyway, and to take care of all the mundane business decisions that he didn’t want to deal with. Before Diego, he had always hired young, attractive women, but soon realized that nothing ever got done because they were busy hooking up instead of scheduling appointments and overseeing executive functions. Hiring a beautiful woman as a personal assistant was a great idea in theory, but in practice it did nothing for his business. So he hired Diego, a short and stout young man who did what he was told and held no tempting allure for Alonzo.
As soon as he finished brushing his teeth, his father rang. He looked at the screen but didn’t touch it. All his father wanted to talk about was money. Money and business and the future. He didn’t get that Alonzo had a life outside of work. Alonzo had a role to play in the family business, as he was the sole heir of the Ortega dynasty. He operated the hotels and a few high-end restaurants and was also overseeing some of the construction sites for new commercial properties. Well, he sorts of operated them. He hired other people to operate them while he reaped the financial rewards. He had more than enough on his plate. He let the phone ring until it finally stopped, knowing that it would be picked up by the voicemail anyway.
He felt clean and refreshed, but also wasn’t ready to start the day: it wasn’t even noon yet. He went back to bed, nestled between the bodies of the two European beauties. He would wait until later that afternoon to learn their names and then finally tell them to go home.
In the evening, Alonzo finished applying gel to his hair, the music blaring from the other room. Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee echoed, making the walls vibrate with the hits that everyone was listening to. He sang along as he looked at his body in the mirror. His abs, shoulders, and pecs were all in perfect shape thanks to his personal gym and vigorous exercise routine every afternoon.
The summer night was young, the sun just barely set, and he had time to kill before he met Mauricio. He set his comb down and rubbed his hands clean of the hair gel.
From the window of the penthouse, Alonzo could see the lights of Barcelona shining bright under the black curtain of the Spanish night. They would hit up Magic Club and maybe Razzmatazz or Red58, but they always ended up back in his hotel downtown, La Aguila de España, where they drank until breakfast time, keeping the bar staff up well past dawn, and then had mimosas before finally calling it quits.
He started going through his closet. He spotted a pair of women’s black lace underwear on the floor. The maid must have missed them. He swiped them up and put them in the drawer full of undergarments left by his lovers and one-night stands.
He quickly got dressed, choosing from hundreds of outfits in his walk-in closet, and messaged his driver to pick him up in five minutes. As he was messaging him, his phone rang again: once again, it was his father. He swiped the red button to reject the call. But his heart sank just a little bit. He went down the elevator and climbed into the limo that was waiting for him outside.
“Mauricio’s,” he said to the driver.
“Yes, sir.”
He took a small bottle of champagne from the mini fridge. His phone buzzed again in his pocket, but he didn’t even take it out. The limo pulled away from the high-rise building and turned into the streets. He took a drink and looked out the window at the passing world of Barcelona, the people on the street that he would never meet, who lived lives that were worlds away from his own. He caught glimpses of women in ragged clothes, with shopping bags hanging from their wrists and small children holding onto their skirts. An old man in a red sweatshirt pushed a cart down the sidewalk.
Then he saw groups of people who looked like him, in nice clothes, with clean hair and faces, who walked down the streets and headed into the bars that they actually could afford, because although they tried to make themselves look upper class, Alonzo could tell that they were not truly wealthy.
Sometimes he caught himself wondering about all those people. People who worried over money and other little things he would never understand. Then he snapped out of it. The limo pulled up to an apartment building and parked outside. The door opened.
“Mauricio!” he shouted, as his friend got into the back of the stretch limo.
“Alonzo!” He grabbed a little bottle of champagne from the fridge.
“To another night,” said Alonzo as they raised their drinks to toast.
“To another night.”
They started in Eixample with drinks, and when they left the first bar, they had three cute girls from France following them into the back of Alonzo’s limousine. They couldn’t remember their names, but they were the first of many followers that joined them for the night.
They all had short skirts and high heels and spoke Spanish with a thick French accent. One of them linked arms with Alonzo and said, “You are so cute!”, as she eyed him up and down. Her other hand rubbed his leg and then squeezed his knee.
He did not reply but ordered Mauricio to get them all a drink from the mini bar. Alonzo always started the evening by ignoring girls. He let them chase after him until the end of the night, when he brought one or two back to the penthouse for the night. He figured out in his early days of nightly partying and club hopping that women were both very attracted to him and they could sense that he had a lot of money. He didn’t know how they knew, but they figure it out immediately.
They went from club to club, picking up new followers along the way while others dropped off and scattered away. When Alonzo had first started hitting up the clubs as a young man, everything about that lifestyle excited him. But now he did it often enough that he needed more excitement each night in order to get that same high. He always needed more.
“Alonzo, look!” Mauricio shouted as they walked along the markets on their way to the next club. It was so close there was no point in getting in the limo. Mauricio was pointing to a pair of shoes in the window of a shop.
“Mauricio, you have seventeen pairs just like that.”
“I know, but I want another pair. They’re my favorite Testonis.”
“Mine too.” He eyed the dress shoes behind the glass. “We’ll come back tomorrow and get them.” He thought of his own shoe closet, which had over a thousand pairs of shoes in it and figured there was space for at least one more pair. The girl on his arm was kissing his neck. She was already drunk.
“I want to keep dancing,” she said as she grinded her hips against him. They left the window and went to the next club.
Sometime after two in the morning, as per usual, they ended up at Alonzo’s hotel, La Aguila de España, specifically at the bar in the lobby. Alonzo and Mauricio sat with three girls on each side of them. Some other men hung around them, people he remembered from the many clubs. He recognized their faces and ordered a round of drinks for everyone, on the house of course. They all knew who he was and would never say no to his demands.
The girl at his side was the same French girl that had been attached to him from the very beginning of the night. He learned that her name was Chloe, and she was on vacation with her two friends for the summer after finishing her junior year at University.
She went on to talk about what she was studying, but he had stopped listening. Other women were giving him flirtatious eyes, but he kept his arm around Chloe, his hand hovering over her chest. Pretty soon he would have that chest free of clothes, once he got her up to his penthouse and into the bedroom.
“Hey, more drinks over here, por favor,” said Mauricio with a loud clap of his hands.
“Hurry up,” Alonzo snapped at the waiter, who was starting to look tired. “Do your job.” Then he turned to the line of women beside him, who were telling the waiter which cocktail they wanted. “It’s on the house,” he said. He loved being able to tell people that.
“Do you tip the waiters at all?” asked one of Chloe’s friends. “This is such a nice place.”
“We already pay them with their wages. Why would I tip?”
She shrugged. “Usually in a place this upscale…”
“They are just workers. Hey,” he turned to one of the bartenders. “The glass you gave me has lipstick on it.” He slid the glass across the bar top.
“I apologize, sir. Let me get you a new one.”
“Alonzo is a little hot-headed” said Mauricio with a drunken slur. “He gets a little feisty after he’s had a lot to drink.” Alonzo looked at the French girl beside him, rail thin with bright lipstick and thick mascara. She was batting her eyelashes as she sipped her cocktail, her fingers resting on his hand affectionately.
“So, do you want to see my penthouse?”
“Of course,” she said with a smile.
He had been ignoring his phone all evening. He had a lot of missed calls and messages. Many of the calls were from his father, but some were also from Diego. If he kept answering all of Diego’s questions, then Diego would never figure the job out on his own. He had to learn to solve problems without consulting him every few hours. That was the reason Alonzo hired someone in the first place.
But he had a message from his father.
Family meeting tomorrow at lunch. Be there.
He put his phone back in his pocket. His father wasn’t normally that direct, but he decided he would worry about it when he woke up. He escorted the French girl out to the limo. The light of dawn nearly blinded them as he and Chloe headed straight back to his place for a morning full of fun.