Asher looked nonplussed for a second, as though he’d been startled out of a pose. “You never do let up, do you?”
“It’s one of my most sterling qualities,” I snarked.
“It is,” he said. He caught my gaze and held it, and for a moment—
And then he pulled out his card and pressed it into my hand along with the money, and took the opportunity to slide close enough to me that we were breathing the same air, and I realized it was just another move in his playbook.
“If you ever want any…business advice…” he murmured, maintaining eye contact.
“Business advice?” I chirped. “Wow, thanks. You sure are sweet to offer that to little old me—”
He leaned even closer, encouraged. “We could meet up sometime and…talk. I know a nice little Italian place…elegant, intimate…”
“—who definitely didn’t found this whole business herself without no help from anyone or anything,” I finished. “What an altruist!”
And smiling as sweetly as apple pie, still keeping eye contact, I tossed his business card right out the window.
You could have framed the look on his face and sold it for a million dollars.
“Goodbye, Mr. Young.”
As he slunk away, I went back to my designs with a vengeance. So he liked them? Well, that meant they needed to be even better.
Ha, ‘business advice!’ Not if he were the last man on earth.
FIVE
“No freaking way!”
Lacey slammed her appletini on the table in disgust, and then shot the waiter an apologetic look as he rushed to mop up the results of her indignation. Then she got right back to being indignant.
“That’s just completely unnecessary!” Lacey said. “It’s a complete overreaction! I can’t believe they fired you, I’m calling HR right now—”
She actually managed to get her cell phone out of her purse and the number halfway dialed before I could grab her wrist. That girl is a like a do-gooder ninja.
“Whoa whoa whoa! I mean, I was looking at lingerie,” I said soothingly. Lacey’s intensity was starting to unnerve me a little bit. I love that girl, but sometimes she gets this noble crusader look in her eye and there are not enough chill pills in the entire universe to get her down off her high horse and back into the real world. I didn’t need a knight in shining armor; I could take care of myself.
But Lacey with a cause is like a dog with a bone—specifically a starving pitbull with a bone fresh off the butcher’s block. She sipped her appletini angrily, shaking her head with her brow creased. “It’s discrimination. Total double standard. Marvin in accounting was looking at porn constantly—real porn, you don’t even want to know some of the search terms he was using—and they had to go through this whole process with verbal and written warnings for months, and they still didn’t fire him! They probably never would have if he hadn’t accidentally clicked the wrong button during a meeting with a client!”
“Ha, I remember that!” I said. It was all people had been able to talk about at Devlin Media Corp. for weeks. Someone had even redownloaded the video and made an autotune parody. I hadn’t been able to eat yogurt for a month after watching that.
“But you come along, looking at just a few dozen barely suggestive pictures, for perfectly legitimate reasons even if it is on company time—”
“Yeah, but isn’t Marvin’s dad, like, some big hotshot on Wall Street?” I interrupted, trying to bring the good starship Lacey back down to Earth before she began roaming the universe in search of new life and new civilizations. “That probably had a lot to do with that.”
“Well, I’m technically just a wedding away from owning half the company,” Lacey shot back. Her face cleared. “That’s it! I’ll just get you rehired! With an even better contract.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I don’t want to take hand-outs or special treatment.”
“Or even promoted!” Lacey said, not hearing me through the haze of blissful charitable planning. “There’s that position in—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Hold those horses still! Do not let those horses leave the stable.” I set down my drink and made Lacey look me in the eye. “Don’t be all going mad with power now. I do not want to have to interrupt my job search to depose you from a benevolent dictatorship, and let’s be real, I am the superhero the people would call on in their time of need.”
Lacey pouted. “Okay, maybe I was jumping the gun a little with the promotion. But not much! You’ve been there for years! You have tons of experience, and if you just had some challenges to be passionate about—”
“But am I ever really going to be passionate about receptionist-ing?” I argued, and quickly went on before Lacey could point out that ‘receptionist-ing’ wasn’t a word: “I mean, is anyone? Does anyone wake up in the morning and go, ‘oh boy, another day of answering phones and scheduling appointments and being yelled at! Maybe there will be a really difficult appointment to schedule and I can challenge my mental abilities to the fullest! I can’t wait to see what gross old man uses the fact that I’m trapped behind a desk to tell me that I ‘sure do got a good breeding figure’ and offer to take me back to his place!’”
Lacey waved her hands in surrender, trying not to snort her appletini out her nose.
“You know, maybe this was a blessing in disguise,” I reflected.
“How do you figure that?” Lacey asked, getting the appletini situation back under control.
“Well…” I took a breath. “Maybe this my chance to really focus on something I can be passionate about. Maybe this is the chance to really launch my business.”