“I know.”
“So, we go in, we do the presentation, you answer a few personal questions—”
“Personal questions?” She’s a master at sneaking in details when she thinks I won’t notice. And I’m a master at calling her out on them. If I’d known about all this a week ago when the client in question, Mrs. Francine Dunlow, asked for this meeting, I would’ve said no.
I don’t answer personal questions. Ever.
“She likes to know the people she’s working with.” Her lips twitch to one side. “She buys a lot of spa trips.”
Yeah, and that was probably how she managed to get Leila agree that I would be at the presentation. She plied her with cucumber masks and a Shiatsu massage. Goodness gracious, Leila can be so gullible sometimes.
“Oh come on, Corinne. You know you want a nice spa day.” She wrinkles her nose—Leila’s telltale giveaway—and I know. It’s coming now. Three, two, one … “You’ll need it after the wedding.”
Phew. That was tamer than I was bracing myself for. Normally, she can go on for hours about my fiancé, Alvin Ernest Dean.
Captain Anti-Fun.
The Great Bore-ini.
Super Snore.
The Human Ambien.
Just to name a few of Leila’s personal favorites. She has somewhat of a point—he isn’t known for his ability to stay up past nine or to have fun that doesn’t involve spreadsheets and fantasy football, but that’s why I like him. I don’t have to worry about him cheating, coming home drunk, staying out late.
Most of all, there’s no danger of unbridled passion leading me somewhere my heart isn’t ready to go.
I’ve been down that road before. I swore I wouldn’t ever do it again.
Leila’s right about something else, too—a facial and a massage doesn’t sound like the worst way to spend my time. But I have a wedding to finish planning, a honeymoon to shop for, and a presentation that’s single-handedly responsible for the bags under my eyes.
“Fine,” I mutter. She’s relentless, and we both know she’ll keep poking me until I give her some kind of verbal response.
Leila claps her hands together. “Alrighty! Let’s get down to business then. Tell me about the software.”
I launch into the spiel. “The firewall security system is rigorously reinforced with …”
I ramble like that for a while. As I drone on, it sounds practiced and stiff, even to me. I try adding a smile, but now it sounds like all I’m missing are pompoms and a short skirt before I break into cartwheels and rah-rah my way through the remainder of the presentation.
I grind to a stop. “Can’t you do this part?”
Leila shakes her head. “She wants to hear it from you because it’s your baby. You’re the one who created this magnificent, genius software, which is going to allow them to expand and protect their assets and maximize their blah blah blah. You get it.”
She nods like a bobblehead and rolls her hand in a spiral motion.
“Start again. Less teeth this time. You’re in a business meeting, not at a dentist appointment.”
I sigh and start from the top. I really do hate people sometimes.
Two hours of increasingly not-horrible tries later, I’ve finally found a workable balance between smileyness, confidence, and expertise. Leila nods, seemingly pleased, for which I thank all deities major and minor.
“Alright. Now, Francine is going to want to do a couple minutes of Q&A about the software, then she’s going to want to talk about you.”
“Just me?”
Leila shrugged. “She knows me already. It won’t be bad. Pinky promise.” She’s aiming for a reassuring tone, but my stomach rolls nonetheless.
I don’t like telling strangers, business contacts or not, about “me.” I keep the distinct parts of my life compartmentalized.
Work is work.
Alvin is Alvin.
Home is home.
But there isn’t much I won’t do to make sure Sentinel Security Corp succeeds, and there isn’t anything I won’t do to get Leila to stop harassing me into compliance with her latest devious plans.
So when I nod, Leila smiles like she’s won something substantial.
“Fine,” I grumble.
It’s not like I have a choice. We’ve got a lot riding on this, so we need to knock it out of the park. Francine’s mega-corporation, Dunlow International, is going to make us a force in the online security world. That means, if Francine says, “Jump,” all I should be saying is, “How high?”
Leila grins again, clearly over the moon with how compliant I’m being today. “Faaantastic. So let’s practice talking about you!” She pulls a stack of notecards from her pocket, pitches her voice in the best mock ‘concerned client’ tone she can muster, and says, “What do you do outside of work?”
I retort immediately, “Oh, nothing much. Crush coal into diamonds, scale tall buildings in a single bound. Sometimes I rescue kittens from trees.”
She scowls. She doesn’t need to say anything—I already know my sarcasm is extremely not appreciated.
I shake out my hands and sigh. “Okay. Why don’t we try this: ‘When I’m not at work, I spend time with family and friends.’”
Her nose wrinkles even further. She looks like one of those hairless cats that rich old widows always seem to love in the movies. “You sound like one of those vapid beauty contest contestants. Try to be more organic.”
Organic? “Like without pesticides. I got it.” I nod and bite my lip to stop from smiling because I know it’s going to drive her crazy.
She rolls her eyes. Any harder and she’d be looking directly into her frontal lobe. “Just be natural. Like you’re just having a conversation with a friend.” This is her area, her specialty, the reason she’s the one in charge of accounts. She has the business sense and the social skills to read people and know how to win them over.
I … uh, don’t.
“Okay. Just having a conversation. I can do that.” I deep breathe, and remind myself of the importance of this meeting. When a billionaire client asks to meet the software designer, that designer straps on her eBay-purchased Manolos and her borrowed Prada purse and she meets the client.
“Talk about your book club or how you love playing golf on Sundays. Don’t be so vague. She likes details.”
“But I shouldn’t mention my pole-dancing class, right? That’s a no-no?” I smile because she’s so serious right now and it’s making me nervous. Her cocked eyebrow and pursed lips make her look like tech-company Barbie in the pre-political correctness era: long blonde hair, implants in her boobs, lips, and cheeks, and an haute-couture wardrobe that the royal family or the Real Housewives would be jealous of.
“Ignoring that. Take number two,” she sighs. “Aaand … action.”
She repeats the question—“What do you do outside of work?” This time, when I answer—“I like to cook and read, and I just took up knitting”— she smiles. “Perfect. Moving on. How did you get into technology?”
I’m fairly sure Mrs. Dunlow doesn’t want to hear the actual truth: about my crippling shyness or the fact that my only friends for the first thirteen years of my life were a cat named Cougar and a dog named George, until my seventh-grade computer science teacher decided to make me her pet project. So I fudge the details a little bit.