“Enough about that.” He gestured to the window, where my work setup was clearly visible. “Still going at it?”
“I just packed it in, actually,” I said. Staring at my laptop and scraps of paper, I felt all of my self-doubt bubble to the surface and added, “I’m in so far over my head.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I’ve seen your work.”
“How?” I asked. Weary all the way down to my bones, I sank onto one of the outside chairs. Nick moved his wheelchair beside me.
“Your replies to my rules always included a drawing,” he said. “You’re very talented. You shouldn’t doubt your abilities.”
Flattered, I shook my head. “Those were just doodles, but thank you. It’s not the art part. I’ve got that. It’s the managerial stuff.” Nick looked interested so I continued, “I have a coworker who, well, never mind. He’s not the problem. Well, actually he is, but the bigger issue is my own stupidity.”
“Not getting any clearer,” Nick said. He shook his head, looking bemused as if I were a hummingbird zipping around him. I took a long breath, tried to center myself, and exhaled slowly and mindfully.
“In a moment of panic, I, quite stupidly, said I was bringing a huge new client into the business to said coworker, Carson West, who has resented me since the day I arrived,” I explained.
Nick held up his hand. “Wild guess, he thinks you took his job?”
“Yes!” I cried. It felt so good to tell someone. “Which is ridiculous. I mean if it was his, it would have been his, you know what I mean?” I plowed on, not really needing a response because I was on a roll. “Needless to say, Carson’s been impossible to work with, trying to make me look bad at every turn, so in an act of sheer dumbness, I told him I was bringing in a huge client to get him to back off. I’m such an idiot! Naturally, he told Miguel and Soph, who are now expecting me to deliver, and I don’t know a soul in Phoenix. How the heck am I supposed to pull this off without looking horribly unprofessional, childish, and ridiculous?”
Nick pursed his lips. “You need to channel this”—he paused and waved his hands in the air at me—“insecurity—”
“I am not insecure!” I protested. I was totally insecure. “I’ve just been a freelancer for five or so years and I’m not used to working in an office environment with all the backstabbing and petty meanness.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “That, right there, use that insec—pardon me, that frustration to give yourself momentum. Push yourself. Prove yourself. Win the job you have, leaving no question who it belongs to.”
I stared at him. “So you’re a motivational speaker now?”
“That depends,” he said.
He glanced away, studying his house from this angle as if he’d never seen it before. From the aha expression on his face, it appeared he was having an epiphany of his own. I wanted desperately to ask what was happening in that big brain of his, but I didn’t want to scare him off. I went for just looking cool, and asked, “Depends upon what?”
He turned back and smiled at me, a real smile full of warmth and affection, and a deep dimple appeared in his right cheek. I was charmed all the way down to my socks.
“Is it working?” he asked.
“Huh,” I grunted. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that it was working and that I did feel motivated to kick some Carson tail. I didn’t want Nick to think he could roll me with a pretty speech and a dimple—a dimple, for Pete’s sake! “I feel like my situation is more complex than that.”
“Human behavior is complex,” he said. “That’s why you break it down to its simplest construct. What do you need? How do you get it? In your case, it seems pretty basic. You need to prove yourself, and you do that by bringing in a huge client.”
“Did you miss the part about how I don’t know anyone in Phoenix?” I asked. I flopped my head back, resting it on the top of my chair. “I’m doomed.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “Again, if you break it down, you really only need to know one person.”
I lifted my head and stared at him. “And who would that one person be?”
He tipped his head to the side, and the smile he sent me was one of pure undiluted hotness. “Me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Soph said Nick had retired from Daire Industries, the business that afforded him these luxury digs. Why the heck was he willing to help me?
“Are you offering to help me to make up for yelling at me?” I asked. I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, partly for warmth and partly to curb the intense longing I had to crawl right into his lap. His fault. Muscled arms like his were made for snuggling.
“Is it a problem if I am?”
“Not for me.”
“Good, but I’m not. As it turns out, I need your help, too,” he said.
I knew it! He was the quintessential businessman, and the only way Nick would be willing to assist me was if there was something in it for him. Okay, then.
I tipped my chin up and said, “I’m listening.”
Nick
16
To be on the receiving end of Annabelle Martin’s full attention, to have her big brown eyes focused on me, well, it made my head fuzzy and I had to glance away to try to reboot my brain, which had just stalled out like it had a dead battery.
I hadn’t been alone with an attractive woman in so long, I barely remembered how to behave. Of course, this was all new territory for me as a man who used a wheelchair as his safe space. I’d never had cause to doubt myself with the opposite sex before, not like I did now. I glanced back at her face to see what she made of all this.
In the yellow porch light, I could just see the pulse point at the base of her throat. Was it ticking as fast as mine, or was that just wishful thinking? I sat beside her in a wheelchair. How could she see me as anything other than a broken man? She couldn’t, and it was good for me to remember that.
“I need you to be me,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment and then asked, “Be you? As in, you as a woman? Like you had a gender reassignment?”
A laugh punched out of me. “Uh, no, more like my representative, the face of Daire Industries.”
“I’m a graphic designer,” she said. “I draw things, make them pretty or interesting. I have zero skills in the business world, obviously.”
“You don’t have to do anything other than go to a gala and schmooze with the press, local politicians, and businessmen, assuring them that I am one hundred percent invested in the housing development for which the gala is being held to solicit money from investors.”