AllFreeNovel
Share Us
An elegant shoulder shrugs. “Because I know what you don’t. I know that you are stronger for having failed. You see this as weakness, and I see a woman who got kicked hard and is doing the only thing life requires of us. We are not guaranteed success, Ivy. In fact we’re almost sure to find the opposite. You climbed the mountain at a very young age. Your failures were minor things that barely registered as anything beyond inconveniences. This gutted you.”
“Yes.” Even as I reply, I can feel the humiliation threaten to sweep me under again. I realize I’ve been holding it together all day. It took a lot to walk into this party, to let all these people see me again when I want to be hiding under a rock somewhere. “I’m still wounded, CeCe.”
“I know, but you’re not showing it on the outside. Feel all your young woman feelings and then get a bottle of wine and a reasonable amount of comfort food and in the morning, you get on the treadmill again. You start climbing again. You do it every single night until one morning you wake up and you don’t need it anymore because you’re climbing again and you know you can make it. That’s the difference between the people who achieve their goals and the people who don’t. The people who make it believe they can. It’s why there are so many successful men. Testosterone is a magnificent deceiver. It makes a man feel confident and so he does the thing and even when it’s half assed, he presents it as extraordinary. Not all of them, of course. But it certainly works for your Nick.”
I’m not sure a hormone is responsible for the success of most men, but I can buy it with Nick. I also can’t wait to see if that particular leopard eats his face. “I need fifty thousand seed money, and I’m going to be honest, that’s only going to hold me a month maybe two, but I should have enough for a proof of concept meeting then.”
“I’ll have a transfer for you in the morning, and I’ll see you back here in two months,” CeCe says and starts for the doors again. “Now run along, my darling. The party will get harder the more they drink. I’d like you out of the line of fire. Put on your blinders and run your race.”
She’d often called me a thoroughbred. I’d often laughed.
But I know she’s right about one thing. The race is on.
Chapter Nine
I’m still thinking about what CeCe said to me an hour later as I sit on the fire escape of my childhood home and look out at the people walking around. It’s closing in on midnight, but that means nothing in the city.
“You want another?” Heath sits next to me and offers me another tiny tart.
We’ve gotten to the dessert portion of the bag Benjamin had made for me. The man knew me well. He’d gathered up a feast because he’d known I wouldn’t be able to eat until I’d seen CeCe and once I’d seen her I would run back to my hidey-hole.
There is only so much a girl can do in one night.
I hadn’t planned on Heath coming up with me.
“You don’t know me so you can’t know how odd it is for me to say these words, but I’m full.” The moon hangs low in the sky, and I’m happy to have changed into yoga pants and a sweatshirt. It reminds me I’m not usually the woman who wears sexy dresses and gets kissed by guys. I shouldn’t have worn the sexy dress at all because it now has a red wine stain that means I own that sucker and I’ll be eating more cheap tacos. Maybe less of them since it was so expensive.
Anyway, I feel more like me now, but that also means I’m feeling the weight of what happened tonight.
Heath pops the tart in his mouth and leans back against the brick wall. He dumped his jacket the minute we walked in. “That was a lot.”
We’ve been talking about innocuous things up until now. I found out he went to Cornell. That had surprised me, but I was starting to get the feeling that there was some family money in his background. After that he’d worked for several big tech firms before going off on his own. We hadn’t talked much about me, but I liked it that way.
“CeCe is always over the top,” I say, my legs dangling over the edge. I like to sit out here and think. The building is quiet, filled with mostly older people like my mom. “It’s kind of her thing. I think in the beginning she used her outrageousness to help her climb the ladder. She needed something beyond money to get people to notice her. Our world likes a performer.”
