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“Irving, you take yourself so bloody seriously!” she chuckles. “I am here to make sure you work at an optimal level. That’s it, okay? Isn’t that my job?”
“It is really not your job,” I answer rigidly.
She shakes her hair back over her shoulders, an affected gesture, but one that works so damn well. Her hair shimmers in the lights. It’s like a hologram. Like it isn’t even real. And yet I remember holding handfuls of it and…
“Irving, no expectations…”
She slides closer to me, arching her back so that her front planes curve toward mine, not touching, but ever so present. She knows what this does to me. What it has done, historically, at least.
“Please leave,” I manage to say.
Her eyes half close, and she shakes her head softly. “You don’t mean that.”
Her hands drift toward me. Her sweetened breath coats my lower lip so I can taste her. I can hear her toes sliding against the sole of her shoe.
In one more moment, she’s less than an inch away. A warning barks in my mind. By some miracle, I find the conscious will to take a simple step back.
See?I remind myself.It’s just one step back. It’s not that complicated.
“Veronica, it’s important that we keep his professional,” I remind her evenly. “If we are going to continue to work together, at this level of proximity, anyway…”
Her laugh is like wind chimes as she tosses her hair and rolls her eyes. “For heaven’s sake! You are so dramatic!” she exclaims. “I am completely over you, Irving Galloway. Don’t flatter yourself.”
She shakes her head judgmentally and tucks her iPad under her arm.
“You need to get your ego in check, don’t you think?” she scoffs. “You really let those magazine covers go to your head. Don’t forget, I know the truth about you…”
There. That makes it easier. She pivots so easily from seduction to toxic insults. That used to draw me in, keep me off-balance enough that I always seemed to be falling into her. Now, it’s just the energy I need to push myself away.
“That reminds me, I have a shoot withGQthis week,” I mutter aloud, just to annoy her.
I can hear her suck her teeth in disgust. “That magazine is garbage.”
She’s done. The smack of her palm against the privacy panel lifts the barriers and the light instantly changes. I can feel some of our team members’ eyes flicker in this direction as they can’t help but be curious. Our breakup wasn’t public in any way, but still everyone notices. Everybody knows. I don’t expect anyone to have the courage to ask me about it.
“All right. I’ll just get these action items in order,” she begins loudly, enough for people to overhear her.
“No, just let go,” I correct her. “The project isn’t going to do anything. Good exercise, nothing else. You should know that.”
Steaming, she stomps off. That might’ve been a cheap shot, but at least it’ll keep her out of my eyeline for a few hours.
Somewhere in the stack of reports is the thing that I am looking for. The needle in a haystack. I can almost envision it… Closing my eyes, I try to recreate the scene, a memory trick my mother taught me. I wrote something down? Scribbled a note? And then the meeting was over, I closed the pamphlet, it got filed away, and then…
Every time I almost imagine enough details to give myself a better clue where to find this damn thing, it slips away again. It’s like trying to catch a bird in midair with just my hands.
Each of the spiral-bound notebooks looks almost the same. Plastic cover, plastic or metal binding, about half an inch worth of paper, color printed with charts and a bunch of bullshit copywriting at the beginning, trying to paint a picture for investors. The good stuff is usually at the back, hidden deep within the spreadsheets. About 95 percent of the time, it’s the stuff they don’t want you to see but felt obligated to include.
My family has always made a practice of going to these meetings, even though our charitable giving is rigidly structured toward education and healthcare, and my business products tend toward the technical. While I am not a venture capitalist, sometimes it pays to buy other people’s ideas. And one of my father’s mottos was that “it doesn’t hurt to listen.” So, in his honor, I have a collection of starry-eyed reports from all over the globe, documenting ideas which almost always failed before they ever got a chance to try.
Not Argentina. Not Uruguay. Not Brazil. Somewhat north of there. In a slim volume on mining technology in Honduras, a barely bent page easily slides between my fingers. I see my note again and it comes back to me.
“Mining: Opal.”
Opals are mined in Australia, of course, but the author of this paper, Opal Curie, caught my attention. It was a few years ago, a pitch for a clever way to mine zinc out of the jungles without the usual hurdles of distribution. Though Honduras is rich in minerals including gold, silver, and zinc, transportation of the materials has always posed a problem for the country.
Ms. Curie’s contributions to the paper were unmistakable. Normally these things are written in a way that is both overly optimistic and tragically lacking in imagination. Opal’s descriptions of the technology were somehow brighter, more convincing. I could see through the corporate communications jargon into the mind of the writer.
That was just the kind of person that we needed on our team. After looking into her disposition a bit further, I discovered that she was a senior at Florida State, from a modest upbringing and probably not on a stellar trajectory toward success without some help. So I created a scholarship that came with a paid internship after graduation, and completely coincidentally, she won it.
