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“Then I’ll go to Melvin right now.” He started to stand.
“I want to hear what the proposition is,” Patrick whispered from the other booth.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, what’s the proposition? Just out of curiosity.”
He immediately sat back down. “I’m here on behalf of Artemis.”
I blinked. Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “What do you mean?”
“You know what they’re saying, right? That if this deal with S.J. Sporting goes south, our entire team will be cut.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times,” I said. “But things with Melvin and me are bad right now, and he’s going to fire me.”
“Probably, but not until the interface is done. Please”—he almost choked on the word—“stick around that long. We need you. We all talked it over. We all agreed that if we follow Melvin, we’ll crash and burn. So we want to follow you instead. Well, they do. I’d rather walk adjacent. I’m not a follower.”
What? Had I misheard? “So you’re not here because you found out I’m female?”
“Technically, that’s why I’m here, at least at the coffee shop. But I’m not stupid, and neither is the rest of the team. When he told us he was spending sleepless nights coming up with this great proposal, we all knew it was bullshit. So we assumed you were the one not sleeping. Were we right?”
I nodded, surprised. But then this group, or at least Evan, had known Melvin a lot longer than I had.
“We’re going to let Melvin think he’s getting away with it. We all need this to succeed, and the easiest way to deal with him is to keep him in the dark.”
“And the Artemis team doesn’t care that I’m not a rugged uber-masculine man?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t tell them.”
“What? Why not?”
“I thought there was the off chance you’d let me be Indiana.”
There was a gasp from the booth behind me, and then it moved a little with Patrick’s silent laughter.
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. I was for sure in the Upside Down. “You can’t be Indiana Aaron,” I said. “There is no vacancy here.I’mIndiana.” God, he reminded me of Heidi. “He’s not a separate person, despite how it seems. So no, you can’t be me.”
“But no one’s met you in person, except me. So in order to win the S.J. account, I could show up and be manly.” He averted his eyes, like he couldn’t believe what he was asking but was also stoked by the possibility I might agree. “I could give the pitch. Just so we don’t lose the account because you’re not masculine, and obviously, it’s a man’s world. At least in sports.”
I took a moment to digest the absurdity he was spewing. He didn’t know Melvin had moved the pitch up, and that I’d moved it up again and gotten the account. The booth had stopped quivering behind me, and I wondered if Patrick and Joseph were just as confused as I was.
“So you think if I gave the pitch, they wouldn’t want it?”
“Look at you,” he said as he leaned back, spreading his arms across the top of the booth.
“Look at you!” I cried. I fought the urge to reach across the table and smack him. “You may be a dude, but you and I would both scream at the same decibel if the Avs started taking shots at us on the ice.”
His face reddened, and he looked down at his arms, still spread across the table. “It was worth asking,” he muttered.
I silently counted to ten and held my tongue as best I could. “The answer is no. How do you think the team will react when they meet me?”
“I think keeping our jobs outweighs any weirdness they might have about the fact you have boobs.” I opened my mouth and then closed it again, but Evan plunged on. “We have a Zoom meeting coming up this afternoon, but all invites are going to personal email addresses. Can you give me yours?”
I wrote it on a napkin and handed it to him.
He put it in his pocket. “We’re keeping the Hammer out of this. You can tell the team everything at the meeting.”
He got up and swaggered to the door of the shop. Before he opened it, he turned around and gave me a kind of finger-guns salute.
Patrick turned around in the booth immediately. “‘Evan and the Audacity of This Bitch!’ That should be the title of today. I don’t know how you didn’t roundhouse kick him in the neck, Ana. You’ve really grown as a person.”
