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“Thank you again for selecting my proposal for the build,” he said smoothly.
“Okay. I need to discuss a few alterations to the original blueprint.”
I stood and unrolled the papers from the architect on the desk between us, ignoring the irritation on his face. How was he already aggravated? Not that it mattered. I had a vision for this project and when and how it would be opened when finished. He was going to have to work with that, because I hired him to do a job. I didn’t hire him to be pleasant, I reminded myself. I wanted a sturdy and safely built community center for this town, a versatile and useful space that would prove a hub for social activity. A haven of sorts. No grunting sexist with a bad attitude was going to get in the way of those plans.
5
Noah
Goddamn.
I tried to be nice to the woman and thank her.
Nope. On with the show. The Nicole Show, guest starring whoever she decided to boss around. Today I was in the hot seat, and she had no idea who she was messing with. She had written on the goddamn blueprints. Like they were high school biology notes and she could doodle in the margins for fuck’s sake. People spent days preparing those. I approved those. They answered precisely my idea of what this town most required from event rooms to outdoor space. And she was meddling with that to throw her weight around. I wanted to grind my teeth loudly, but I waited.
“We’re moving this wall in by three feet. I know it reduces the size of the studio but it’s not a load-bearing wall and it opens up the green space on the side so it can accommodate an expansion of the farmer’s market. We already hold one every week, but this is nicer than the parking lot they use now, and it’ll have a covered area as well so it won’t have to shut down in case of rain. We attract shoppers from Overton and other surrounding towns already. This kind of space will let us include vendors from outside Rockford Falls who want to rent a booth seasonally as well as have room for the scouts to set up a lemonade stand or cookie sales when they need to. Church bake sales, the food drive, this is a space worth creating on the property. It’s versatile. And if you’ll notice, I’ve marked in an area for another hydrant by the extension I drew onto the parking lot. The ball teams and cheerleaders and church groups can use that for car washes, preferably on market days so they benefit from that extra traffic,” she said.
Well, wasn’t she just full of big ideas? I wanted to knock the blueprints off the desk. She fucking drew on them. And wrote notes. Not on a separate piece of paper, but right on there. With a pen. Not even a pencil. I guess I was lucky it wasn’t a deck of Google slides.
“This is the sort of thing you should’ve discussed with me. Before you scribbled all over the plans.”
“I didn’t scribble. I annotated it. And what’s it to you? It’s not like I wrote Nicole Was Here on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Noah,” she huffed. I snorted.
They weren’t bad ideas. I just didn’t like how she steamrolled in and forced them down my throat and then had the nerve to be both funny and right.
“That’s not how things are done around here,” I pointed out.
“They will as long as I’m in charge. Mr. Jeffries,” she said coolly.
I bristled. I wanted to show her who was in charge all right, but I had to keep my head. I had to act like the businessman I was, not the caveman my body kept insisting on instead.
“I was under the impression we were working together to bring a community center to this town. If you want a lackey, I think Ray Forrester still has time in his schedule to squeeze you in.”
“I have no desire to be squeezed into anything of Ray Forrester’s,” she said hotly. “You bid on this job. You made it sound like you cared about the project. Now you’re acting as though I stabbed you in the heart by improving on the original blueprint. Which, may I add, was drawn up by an architecture firm. It wasn’t something you created, and if it were, I’d assume you understood that plans can be altered to suit the needs of the client. They’re not sacrosanct and untouchable.”
“No, that’s just you,” I shot back.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You don’t seem to understand that people around here—outside Atlanta where you’re used to—we care about things. Like our town and our plans and doing things the right way. It’s not all business and not all cold and cut and dried,” I said.
