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I was barely listening to her rattle on, because my mind was stuck on one thing that just didn’t make sense. “Wait a second, Martha. What’s with the ‘proving yourself’ thing? He’s Hunter Knox. What’s he got to prove?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Martha took a hand away from the wheel to gesture, and I struggled to focus on her words instead of on my imminent death as the car swerved slightly. “He spent a couple years after college trying to set up his own business, and it tanked, and Chuck and all the rest of those as**sholes on the board have never let him forget it. They treat him like a total loser, like everything he touches is going to blow up. Never mind that since then he’s actually brought profits up across the board for Knox and gotten up one of the highest employee satisfaction ratings in the country. Never mind how many times he gets on the cover of Forbes or is asked to advise on a government think tank. Nope, who cares about that stuff? For Chuck it’s just a broken record of that one failure, over and over and over again!”
She was practically shouting as she got to the end of the sentence, and she struck the horn angrily as she finished, confusing the hell out of the guy in the pick-up in front of us.
I regarded her thoughtfully. “You’re really loyal to him, huh?”
Martha’s face was serious as she nodded. She took a deep breath, and went on more calmly. “He took a chance on me. My last job before this…I messed up. I messed up bad. My no-good drunk of a dad had cleaned out my savings, and I was barely scraping by, and my boss…he left a bunch of jewelry in his desk, in an open drawer. I saw it, and I thought about all the times he groped my as**s or yelled at me for dumb mistakes, and I thought…well, I thought, this is compensation, you know?”
She shook her head, as if trying to shake the memory from it.
“I’m not judging,” I told her.
Martha went on. “After I got fired, Hunter looked me up. Said he’d always thought I seemed like a good employee and he wanted to hear my side of the story, and after he did, he gave me a job. Good pay, good benefits, he doesn’t get handsy, and he trusts me. Lets me handle things. And I do.”
“I’m sorry it’s been rough,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My job experience didn’t look half so bad compared to hers.
Martha shook her head, rejecting my pity. “It’s in the past. And I’ve always been a present girl, myself.” We peeled into the parking lot of an outlet mall. Martha grinned wide. “And speaking of presents, let’s get you looking like something these boys can’t wait to unwrap…”
#
“Yo, babe, can I top you up?” A young man with more muscles than hand-eye coordination waved a bottle of vodka at me. I was honestly impressed that he was still on his feet.
“I’ll stick to punch, thanks,” I said, taking a sip from my half-full cup. Tonight’s research only involved alcohol at a remove, which was a good thing—I was not looking forward to repeating my last drunken experience with any of these immature dudebros. Or any of my drunken college experiences, come to that.
I winced at the blurry memory of several different parties; there was that time when I vomited green puke all over my closet on St. Patrick’s Day and woke up in the bathtub, that time I confessed my love to a stoner guitar player who stopped me in the middle to tell me he didn’t even know my name, that time I accidentally made out with a former professor and then started crying when he said he was married—
Yeah, no alcohol was definitely the way to go tonight.
I looked around, trying to observe drinkers in their natural habitat. What do twentysomething dudes want? Let’s see, there was a dreadlocked guy leaning into a blonde’s personal space, a clean-shaven polo player topping up a redhead’s drink, a sloppy drunk bearded hi**pster trying to hug a brunette and toppling onto the couch instead—
Okay, let me rephrase that: what do twentysomething dudes want besides sex?
I looked deeper. Dreadlocked guy had a shirt with Bob Marley and an inspiration quote on it. The polo player was plying the redhead not just with alcohol but with Maya Angelou quotes. And from the couch, the bearded hi**pster was protesting that he’d totally had the brunette’s back at that march last weekend when some scumball tried to make off with her purse.
Underneath the hormones and bravado, these were just kids. Kids who wanted to belong, and make a difference, but were afraid to go looking for something on their own.
But I could show them the way.
And just like that, I knew exactly what the new tagline for Knox needed to be.
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