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She makes a show of licking the tip of her pen and turning to a fresh page in her notebook. “Bring it, teach.”
I hand her a folder with printed sheets. “Lesson one: The Hamilton Group. Who and what it is.”
Sixteen
Kingsley
She’s smart.
She’s so smart she’d run circles around me if I hadn’t been doing this my whole life and been running my own regional division over an entire continent for more than ten years.
Over the course of only the first few days, she has gained such a rudimentary grasp of The Hamilton Group that I soon teach her things that are pertinent to Baxter Enterprises, a multinational conglomerate as well. The crossover of information helps put both my, her, and other businesses that I used as examples into perspective, and she can better learn the difference of how each type of business is positioning itself in the respective industries that they are present in.
One of the biggest projects Baxter Enterprises is working on is a bid for a five-year government tech contract. We have spent months putting together a submission and are against some of the other biggest tech companies in the UK and Europe. It will generate thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue for Baxter and will be the jewel in the crown of allof my work over the last twelve months. I use it to explain to her why such a project would and would not be beneficial for companies like Baxter, and why it would not be suitable for smaller companies like The Hamilton Group, which do not have large tech subsidiaries that could fulfill the contract.
Her questions are pertinent and sharp, based more on her sheer lack of knowledge rather than ignorance. But once I explain something, she never forgets it and is quick to apply it to a different scenario.
Teaching her is a pleasure. One I thought I would never share with my father. Turns out I just wanted to have a student who was motivated, intelligent, and didn’t ask questions that I secretly think fit the bill of stupid.
I set her small assignments for my assess only, so I can see how much she actually understands, what she info needs to fill out her knowledge, and also because I want to see what her potential is. She repeatedly insists that she “only finished high school” and that she would’ve done terribly in university, but everything I’ve seen suggests just the opposite. And I wonder if that’s a direction she might need encouragement to pursue.
Other than in “our classroom,” she soon has my entire floor, and probably far beyond that, eating out of her hand.
By the end of the first day, Marcus and she were already making jokes I have no way of understanding and making promises of “catching up during break time,” though I have no idea what they could have to catch up on, considering they only met six hours ago.
But every time I feel like interjecting, I remember the way she sat in my car, ruminating over her lack of friends, and I’m suddenly glad that my assistant knows when to shut up around me and turn chatty around her.
It also takes surprisingly no time at all for her and I to develop a routine.
Too fast.
Too comfortably.
And nothing I do stops it.
And not just because I don’t do anything to stop it.
At noon on that first morning, I got up after her first lesson and told her to take a lunch break while I made some calls.
She looked up, the question stark on her face. “What about you? You’re not going to eat with me?”
I usually allow myself fifteen minutes to take a quick break, to sit by myself in my office apartment and mentally prepare for the rest of the day, but she looked so genuinely hopeful that we were going to have lunch together that I heard myself saying, “If you want. Go grab the salads and I’ll get some drinks.”
And she beamed.
Literally beamed.
Like a ray of moonlight on a full moon.
And we’ve had lunch together every day since.
Like I said, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Seventeen
Luna
“Mine doesn’t look as good as yours,” I say, standing back from my baked sourdough loaf.
