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Finger guns? The flirting police should show up and arrest me for that.
“So,” Jude said, leaning back against the bar so he could face the rooftop patio. “Your friends are making me a little uncomfortable.”
I glanced over to the rooftop, where my sister and Phil were openly staring. A look from me and they quickly turned to face each other and pretended to have a conversation, although they kept stealing glances in our direction.
“That’s not my friend. That’s my baby sister.”
“She doesn’t look like a baby.”
“Tell me about it,” I half-groaned. “She’s twenty-one now. But it still feels like she’s the idiot teenager who keeps getting into trouble. She’s grown so much in the five years since—”
I cut off abruptly. A few minutes of flirting and I was already spilling my life story to this guy. Maybe I should have stuck with the Roy Rogers.
Jude frowned with concern. “Five years since what?”
“Five years since she got her driver’s license,” I said, searching for a change of subject. “She’s grown up so fast. She’s at Stanford now, if you can believe it. So, what’s this big work meeting about, anyway? Something cool? Programming-related?”
Jude grimaced. “Nothing that exciting. It’s about the business side of things. Our company is meeting with a big-shot foreign investor who flew into town last minute. We want his money, so it’s all hands on deck to try to impress him.”
“Billionaires, am I right?” I said.
Jude smirked. “Tell me about it.”
“Iwilltell you about it,” I said, waving my drink like I was gesturing at a protest rally. “When I think of billionaires, I think of Smaug.”
“Like, from The Hobbit?”
“Damn right!” I said, pleased that he got the reference. “The big dragon sitting on an enormous pile of gold in a cave? That’s what I picture when I think about billionaires. Asshole hoarders who make everything shitty. The modern ones, at least. Old-school billionaires were shitty human beings in their own right, but at least they did something with their wealth. You know what Carnegie did? He built like three thousand libraries all around the country. Little farming town in Iowa? BOOM, library. Coal-mining city in Pennsylvania? Yep, library time. He was like Oprah handing out libraries. You get a library, andyouget a library! EVERYONE GETS A LIBRARY!”
Jude was laughing now, and the sound was so sweet and pure to my ears that I kept going.
“Rockefeller too. He had his problems, but he at leasttriedto do something good for the world. He spent huge fuckloads of his wealth on medical research. He single-handedly funded vaccines for meningitis and yellow fever. You ever hear about Spelman College? It was the first college for African-American women. Rockefeller funded it.In1884.Eighteen-fucking-eighty-four! Back when it was still super unpopular to do something like that.
“But modern billionaires?” I said. “Guys like Musk and Bezos? They don’t do that. They’re busy spending their piles of gold to race to Mars on dick-shaped rockets. Do you know how many food banks could be funded with just a single dick-shaped rocket, Jude? All of them, probably!”
Jude was laughing so hard that he had to put his drink down. “You’re passionate.”
“I just hate seeing the little guy get fucked over,” I said. “And in San Francisco, the wealth gap between the Starbucks baristas and the billionaire investors is higher than anywhere else on the planet. And it fucking sucks.”
Realizing I had said a lot more than I intended, I cleared my throat and said, “Don’t, uh, say any of this to the investor you’re meeting with.”
Jude pulled out his phone and began tapping on the screen. Then he turned it around to show me. TheNotesapp was open, and there was a single line:
-Don’t call Mr. Rossi a money-hoarding treasure goblin.
“Glad you’re taking notes,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m learning a lot tonight.” He put his phone away. “Got any other tips for me? I’ll take whatever advice I can get.”
“Don’t seem too eager,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Play hard-to-get,” I went on. “If he wants to invest in the company you work for, then make himearnit. You’re not desperate for his money.He’sdesperate for someone to invest in. Otherwise he wouldn’t be meeting with you, right?”
Jude ran his hands through his sandy-blond hair again. “Can I hire you to be my life coach? I need someone following me around and whispering advice in my ear all day.”
“I charge by the hour.”
