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I didn’t like the stab of jealousy I felt. I was not a jealous guy. I took what I wanted and I moved on. This was an unexpected bump in the road. I intended gettingrid of it like I got rid of everything that got in my way.
Chapter 7
Evie
There was this huge bouquet of roses delivered to the office.
There was no name on it, just a message saying thank you for a beautiful night. I assumed they were from Jacqueline for Tate. Their date clearly had gone well. He was in a meeting with a developer and the shut door meant he was not to be disturbed. Then I got busy doing other things, he’d sent me out on errands to buy things, turned out Tate hated shopping. Something I really did not mind all that much.
By the time I got back, he had already left for the day.
On my desk were ten cardboard boxes.
I looked inside, and found they were protein-based shakes.
There was a post-it note, which said: Sample all and pick one.
I had to laugh.
This was typical Tate, making me choose something that was bound to be wrong. We had completely different taste buds and what tasted good to me would be awful for him. But he kept telling me he didn’t have time to waste. I was to be his taster, as if we were on an ancient court, like in Egypt or Mesopotamia or something. If I dropped dead, well, that was another PA gone but in the bigger picture, who would really care?
I took the shakes to the cafeteria and proceeded to mix them all up, tasting them and scoring them from one to ten.
“What are you doing?” a young woman asked, coming in to get yoghurt from the fridge.
I explained my assignment.
She shook her head. “This is your job? Tasting protein shakes?”
I nodded and laughed. “This one is quite good, what do you think?”
She smiled and sipped. “I like that one, yeah! What is it made of?”
“This one is pea protein, I think.”
The woman was called May, she said she was working in New Projects. She’d been there for six months but she was thinking of quitting. “I have no life,” she said mournfully. “I’m always working and never seem to make any headway.”
She was part of a team working on an app customizing dog voices. “It’s not really what I saw myself doing as a kid,” she said pulling a face.
“Do you think I thought I’d be doing this?!” I said pointing at the shakes.
We both laughed.
Despite how crazy it looked though, I liked what I did.
“There is method to his madness,” I told May. “Tate Sagarro looks insane but he isn’t. It took me a while to figure that out.”
She looked at me. “Yeah?”
I couldn’t tell her how we’d slept together and how awkward things had been for a while. But it seemed that he then hooked up with Jacqueline and even though it did bother me a bit, the thought that he had moved on so quickly. Somehow, I’d let myself think that what had happened between us had been special. How naïve could a girl be?! I shook myself out of that dream. A man like Tate deserved a woman who was experienced and knew something about the world. I’d looked Jacqueline up on the internet, saw that she had studied business in France and worked in Barcelona when she was young. Her profile said she was unmarried and I did a little digging, finding out she was divorced. Like Tate. They had a lot in common. More than we did, I had to admit.
I focused on work, and tried to make friends with my room-mate Luisa, who was studying at the nearby University of San Francisco. She had a lively group of friends who went out almost every evening and I joined them as often as I could, to take my mind off Tate. Luisa didn’t believe in having one boyfriend, going out with many male friends, flirting with all of them and leading them on. Some of them flirted with me to make her jealous and it was fun in a way. One of them, Xavier, had seemed to take an interest in me. I didn’t feel the same about him, but as Luisa, pointed out, he didn’t need to know that. I needed to get Tate out of my head. I seemed to be thinking about him. All the time. It was like when he’d touched me that night, he’d switched something on in me, awakened something. I couldn’t help it. I’d spend all night with Luisa and Xavier, dancing and drinking and having a good time, but when I went to bed, all I could think about was Tate, his hands on me, the way he'd pushed me against the wall, hard enough to knock out my breath.
But I only told May about Tate, the innovator. I couldn’t say anything about him, the man.
“The app you’re working on now? Imagine being a kid in hospital, sick with cancer or something, missing your family back home. If you had an app where the dog barked just like your Fluffy did at home, or it squeaked like your pet hamster did?”
“Huh,” May said, seemingly impressed. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
