AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ll do it,” she said. “I could use a vacation anyway.”
“Great,” he said, smiling at her.
She felt a blush start on her face for some reason. It happened whenever he looked at her, and she couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t Fabio-level attractive. They only had a few conversations with each other, and those were anything except personal. And yet here she was, crushing on him like he was Justin Timberlake and she was fifteen.
Happily, he’d quickly moved on to the other things that Eco Energy was getting involved in: lobbying for waste-to-energy power, and fundraising at the Food-Truck Fair, which was a staple of the Los Angeles food scene. Fred asked some pointed questions, and Lindsay was put in charge of organizing a booth. “I don’t care what it is,” said Bill. “Just make sure people remember it.”
At the end of the meeting Jane gathered her things together and began to head back to her apartment. She was just out the door when Bill called her back in. “Jane, why don’t you join us for a beer?”
“I—I can’t,” she began.
“Oh come on,” said Lindsay. “You gotta have a little fun. We’re all friends, right? And they can’t expect you to be working all the time, right?”
Jane felt her cheeks go red again as she realized that she was out of excuses, unless she wanted to start lying—and she was a terrible liar. “I guess I can,” she said. “But I don’t hold my liquor very well—”
“It’s beer,” Bill said. “We’re not asking you to down a fifth or anything.”
Don’t look at him, she thought, as they briefly discussed which bar to go to. “Lando’s,” said Fred, and that was that.
“Lando?” Jane asked, wondering if the name really did refer to the character out of Star Wars. “Is that—”
“Of course,” said Janet. “But they make the best curly fries.”
“Amen to that,” said Lindsay.
“You want the address for your GPS, or do you just want to follow us?” asked Bill.
“I’ll be all right,” she said, taking out her phone. “There can’t be that many—”
Five-hundred places with “Lando” in the name popped up in her search.
“Seventeen and Ash,” said Bill, tossing a wink at her.
Meeting Malcolm
Her boss didn’t even think about her request to attend the seminar, just nodded when she put in the request and reminded her to tell HR so that her vacation days could be docked appropriately. Just remember, nobody has to know I didn’t go. Bill had been ecstatic when he found out that it’d worked. They’d had a celebratory drink, where they’d arranged to meet for coffee so that he could give her the lobbying information.
It was hard to sort out just how she felt about Bill. Objectively she knew that nothing he’d said or done suggested anything other than cooperation towards a common end. And yet part of her kept going over each and every “Hi,” and “So are you clear about this?” looking for something—anything—that could possible suggest something more. She didn’t know what to think anymore. Leaving Los Angeles felt like a relief.
The following Monday she was on a flight to Washington DC, full of nervy excitement. She’d flown a lot when she was an account manager, and each time it was the same. It didn’t matter that the plane was freezing cold, the food simultaneously bland and repulsive, the cabin crew grumpy, or that she was invariably seated next to someone who should have paid for two seats. For some reason air travel had never lost its glamor to her, and while it’d been six months since her last flight she still found an odd kind of satisfaction as the plane taxied out onto the runway, and the cabin crew gave their safety demonstrations.
She’d taken a room at the Sheraton—rooms were twenty-five percent off for people attending the seminar, and while the money saved wasn’t very much, it was what she’d do if she were attending. Plus, as Bill had said, she could add it to her expense account. She felt like some kind of covert agent as she put her clothes away.
Her first order of business was to make sure that she got her badge. At the very least it would cover drinks and hors d’oveurs every night, and that ought to be enough in terms of dinner for the week. And anyway, it couldn’t hurt to make contacts. She wasn’t planning to stay with Rigel forever, after all, and there was probably someone who knew someone who knew someone who was hiring.
The seminar was in a part of the convention center. It was the middle of the afternoon by the time she got there, but the woman at the check-in still had four rows of ID badges in front of her. “Make sure you wear this at all times,” she admonished, as she handed Jane her card: MY NAME IS JANE, with a picture on the front, and a square UPC symbol on the back. “It’ll get you into the venues, but you’ll have to pay for your own food—all at a 20% discount,” the woman reminded her. “Have a good meeting!”
Jane walked past the desk. It was a snack-and-coffee break, apparently, because everybody was mingling with the tentative uncertainty that people had when they were randomly thrown together. She stayed away from the other single men: experience had taught her that they were likely to be desperate and the conversations could get very, very weird. Better to stick with the people in clusters, chatting about last night’s game or someone’s Maker project, even if she had no idea what they were talking about.
She went up to a mixed group of people; there were introductions all around. “Hi, I just got in. When does the next seminar begin?” she asked.
“New to these sort of things, are ya?” asked a goofy-looking guy, hair unkempt. His name label told her that his name was Dan.
“Not really,” she said, smiling politely. “It’s my first writing seminar, though.”
“Are you a writer?” he asked.
Thankfully the next seminar began at that moment. She wouldn’t have known what to say. The people who were there all seemed very nice, but “off” in a way, as if they’d never actually worked for the companies they were writing for. Still, they were a nice enough bunch, and she actually found the seminar topic, usage, interesting. It was with a pang of guilt that she parted ways with them at five, saying that she’d be back tomorrow when she knew full well that she’d be lobbying members of Congress. She’d come back in the afternoon, she decided. She could say that she’d been taken with traveler’s diarrhea. It was strange, stretching the truth like so many fiddles. It didn’t feel wrong, just odd, as if she was discovering something about herself that she’d never known before.
