“I appreciate it.” Weston continued to survey me, still trying to place me, but then I prodded Ashley to go, and he turned his attention to the women behind us.
“Well, that was embarrassing,” I whispered as soon as we were a handful of feet away.
“It was so worth it,” she said, fanning herself with her program. “I can’t believe you went to school with a wickedly handsome mega billionaire. He’s even hotter in person than he was on the cover of Money magazine last year. That dimple!”
“Right?” It was nice to have someone else witness the beauty that was Weston King. “You should see him without his shirt on. He was on the rowing—”
From behind me, I heard Weston say a word that caught my attention.
Heart beating, hands sweating, I turned around to see him staring after us. “What did you say?”
“You were in Donovan’s class,” he repeated, his eyes wide with recollection. Donovan. That was the word that I’d heard. “You stood me up.”
He did remember me.
“Told you so,” Ashley whispered at my side.
I pinched her arm and called back to Weston. “I had a really good reason. I promise.”
He put a finger up to signal for me to wait as he finished signing the program of the woman in front of him. When he was done, he sauntered toward us. “I’ll let you tell me all about it over drinks.”
Weston pinned his eyes on mine. “Okay, your father died, you went home and raised your sister, finished college, got your MBA. Then what?”
It had been almost an hour and a half since Ashley had so kindly feigned too tired to join us for a nightcap, and Weston had taken me to one of his favorite local nightclubs, The Sky Launch, for a drink, which had now turned into two. The circular booth we sat in overlooked the dance floor below, but because of the way it was set off with glass walls, the music wasn’t too loud to talk over. It provided a very unique vibe, one both intimate and alive.
“That’s about it, really.” I hadn’t bothered to tell him about my fight to get back to Harvard or how the MADAR foundation had refused to give me my scholarship back after I’d left without finishing the semester. Though it had happened ten years in the past, it was still a sore spot.
“That can’t be it. There’s always more,” he prodded. “How did you choose advertising?”
“Well. Advertising actually found me,” I said, kicking off my shoes and folding one foot underneath my thigh. “I’ve always been equally left- and right-brained, and I wanted to find a job that involved numbers and metrics but also involved creativity, so I got my emphasis in marketing. After I graduated, I had an interview with a headhunter, and one of the jobs she had available happened to be in a marketing department in an ad agency. Of all the positions she showed me, it was the one I was least interested in. But then when I got the offer and I flew out to Los Angeles to visit the office, I fell in love with the energy there. There was numbers and structure and ideas and art. Where else do you get all of that mixed together?”
Weston had taken off his jacket earlier. Now, he loosened his tie and stretched his arm out across the top of the bench. “Some people think that makes those of us who choose this field crazy.”
His choice of words stung at something that hadn’t bothered me in a long time. I’d wondered if I’d been crazy back then, when I’d been younger and the thoughts and feelings I’d had were strange and unusual and hard to grapple with. The people and fantasies that had turned me on had been frightening and dark.
But I’d grown up and realized that my time at Harvard had not been the norm. It had been a period of dalliance and in no way defined what I was to be for the rest of my life. My thoughts were normal. My fantasies weren’t strange. I wasn’t crazy.
Sometimes I worried I had to work a little too hard to convince myself of that.
But I was out with Weston King, and if that was crazy, that was exactly the kind of crazy I wanted to be. The kind of crazy I hoped I was. So I said, “Probably so. But what’s wrong with that?”
Our eyes met and held. As the night had passed, we’d moved closer and closer to each other. Now we were tilted in toward one another, our bodies only inches apart. Either this was going somewhere or…
“You’re still in the marketing department then?” Weston asked, picking up his manhattan and swirling it around before taking a swallow.
“Started in research, and now I’m the manager of strategy and marketing.” I sighed inwardly. Thinking about my job was depressing. While I loved the actual work, the president who’d come on in the last year had been a nightmare to work with.
Besides, what I was interested in was Weston’s firm—Reach, Inc. The business was only five years old and yet was already one of the leaders in the industry. It was the kind of career I’d hoped to have if I would’ve finished school at Harvard. “Your job, though…” I paused, hoping my jealousy sounded more like admiration. “What you’ve done is incredible.”
Weston shrugged dismissively but somehow beamed at the same time. “It’s been quite a ride. I can hardly believe it’s my life.”
This surprised me. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth—I’d thought he’d expect everything he touched to turn to gold. It was harder to resent his success when he was humble about it. “This is going to sound naïve, but what exactly do you do? How do you split everything up?”
“Not naïve at all.” He set his glass down, and now we were close enough that my knee touched his. Warmth spread throughout me, gathering in my belly. “I actually have no idea.”
I chuckled with unexplained nervousness. “Be serious.”
“Well. We’re set up in a traditional agency structure with a board of directors that consists of five people.” Five men, from what I’d read. Talk about a world of the patriarch. Donovan was the only other one I knew by name. “There’s two guys in Tokyo, a guy in London, and Nathan Sinclair and I run the New York office together. Nate oversees creative and account services, and I run everything else.”
“Which is a lot.”
“Which is a lot,” he repeated.
“So operations, marketing, research, finance…that’s all you?” I was surprised. Our office had three bosses overseeing all the areas and it was a smaller firm.
Weston shrugged. “Mostly I hide in my office and read Buzzfeed all day, but somehow the checks keep coming in.”
“You do more than that.”
“We’re growing. We’ll have to change the structure soon.” Abruptly, he altered his tone, dismissing the previous subject and growing serious. “This is boring, though. Let’s talk about you.”
I lowered my eyes, suddenly shy. “I’ve already told you everything about me.”
“Let’s talk about our brief encounter in college.”
“It was so brief, it could barely be called an encounter.” We’d had a class together, and once we’d shared a lunch. Then he’d asked me out, and I’d said yes, but I’d had to go home because my father died before the party had actually happened.