coffees and cakes, found a secluded table outside and sat down across from each other before we said anything more. “Sorry I let it go on so long. It took me a while to come up with a plan,” he chuckled. I could see him remembering. I hoped he’d had the face view.
“Well, it was perfect and I thank you.” It had come out like a coo. As though I was saying, “Oh, you’re so big and strong…and poor little me.” Except I’m not a very good cooer; I run out of pucker too fast. “You were there on the groom’s side?”
“Yeah, roommates at U.T. Used to play squash, have a beer together whenever I was in town. Good guy. Or he was,” he said wistfully.
“Married, remember?” I reminded him. “Not deceased.” “Well, I haven’t seen him once since she got her princess-cut boulder. Think she’ll let him out now?”
Good point. End of another conversation volley. Dylan: 0.
It was Brad’s serve. Silence sat down, hung around, watched the boats with us. And then finally, he said, “So, what do you do?”
“I’m a bridesmaid. Certified.”
He smiled his smile. Thank goodness. When you joke around as much as I do, you have a better-than-even chance of a flop. “Full-time?” he asked, eyebrows up.
“Nope. Believe it or not, it’s actually not much of a moneymaker. I have to sell stuff to support the habit.” I realized, all of a sudden, that I hate telling guys what I do. It was one of those midchat epiphanies I get sometimes. And midchat, I started to wonder why.
“Like what stuff?”
“Services.” It wasn’t the job I hated, so much. I was new at it but that wasn’t it. The real problem was trying to explain my industry to people who had no idea what the whole thing was about. It could get painful. They usually ended up saying something like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.”
“Are you makin’ me guess or somethin’? All right…I know. Wedding services? No, no. I got it. Dance lessons.”
At least he didn’t say peep show. “Professional.” Now comes the painful part.
“What kind?” he asked.
“Um…professional services.”
“Yes, Dylan, I got that part,” he laughed. “What…kind of…professional…services?” His slow Texas syllables got even slower. As though I was deaf. Or really stupid.
I didn’t want to get into all this. I wanted us to be on the same page. I can’t believe I said that. I hate that stupid expression. But I knew Manly Man wasn’t going to know about all this stuff and it was going to get embarrassing. For both of us. “How do you like Cupid’s Toes?” I asked.
One eyebrow shot up. I’d kill to be able to do that. Maybe I should start interpreting his eyebrows instead of his eyes.
“Your little cakes,” I answered the eyebrow.
“Dylan,” he said with a big, exasperated sigh. “This is real painful. Are you gonna tell me what you do or not?”
“I sell professional services. B-to-B. Um, that’s business-to-business—Internet logistics, human contact technologies. Stuff like collaborative browsing.” I waited for the zone-out.
“What? Like e-Boost?”
Okay, maybe someone else could have seen that coming. If I’d had any fillings, he’d have had a great view. It took me a while to get my jaw back in its socket. “That’s my company,” I said with a big, old, toothy grin. In the collaborative browsing world, happiness is being on the same page.
“Sales, huh? Seems like I’m remembering somebody told me you were a programmer or analyst. Designer or something like that. Something super…nerdy.” He gave me one of his scrumptious grins so I wouldn’t be offended. I pursed my lips and pretended to consider it. But I was really just thinking about his mouth.
And then I got the uneasy feeling that maybe he knew more about me than I knew about him. Like maybe that’s where he’d gotten the idea about thick glasses and stringy hair. Another midchat epiphany: Duh, Dylan. It’s the job, not the name. Damn. I’d rattled on about my name for no reason. Talk about paranoid. Get over the name thing, Dylan. Lots of people have weird names—Pawnee, Breeze Zed, not to mention Keanu and…Rats! What had my friends said about him? I couldn’t recall. Did he really bowl and skin opossums and pick his teeth with a knife? No clue.
He was waiting with Silence.
“Yeah, I was. All of the above. Except for the part about being nerdy.” I gave him a little stink eye for that. “In the business, we prefer to call it technical,” I informed him. He kept grinning at me, enjoying himself. “But I decided to get into sales instead. Something opened up and I went for it.”
“Why?” he asked.
I had to think a little about what to say in response. There was no way I was going to tell him the real reason.
“Money?” he guessed, while I was doing my pondering.
“No, not really.” I mumbled it.
“Did you like your job, like being…technical?” he asked. “Yeah. I did. It’s who I am.”
“Then why?” He really wanted to know. This was one of those first-date tests, I could tell. What if I did switch for the money, was he going to think less of me? Probably. And why did I care what he thought? Because I did. For some dumb reason, I cared a lot. And why do you suppose that is, Dylan? I asked myself. Because, I answered a bit testily, gravity is one hell of a force to resist, that’s why.
“If I tell you, could we talk about you for a while?” “Sure, if you want. Not much to tell.”
“Deal,” I said. “But you’re going to be sorry you asked, and, okay, here it is. I got out of development because I have a good friend, Rex, who’s one of the best technical guys I’ve ever seen and we were talking one day and he said if I wanted to be really good at it—I mean, really, really good—then I’d have to turn off certain areas of my brain so that more blood could flow to other parts, the analytical ones.”
His left eyebrow rose slowly toward his hairline.
I ignored it, took a breath and pushed on. “And the parts Rex was talking about shutting off were the social parts, the parts that care about other things besides geeky stuff, the parts that make normal people different from techies. I thought a lot about what Rex had said and I knew what he meant. And also knew he was right. But I couldn’t do it, didn’t want to do it—I like those social parts—so I got out.”
Both eyebrows were up. He just sat there looking pleased.
It was essentially the truth. My decision had been only a little bit about the money. Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But did I pass his test? I wanted to pass. I could tell he was getting ready to follow up with a whole barrage of other questions. I’d never been with a guy who wanted to talk about me so much. You think that’s what you want, what’ll make you really happy, but then it happens and it’s sort of weird. I cut him off before he could launch them. “Okay. It’s your turn. How did you know about e-Boost?”
I
