“I’m sorry I spoiled our date,” I say.
“What do you think this was?” He noses at my earlobe and drags his stubble along my neck.
I laugh. “Date part deux?”
He’s undoing the snaps on my shirt. “The very same. Now take this shirt off and come to bed.”
“I don’t know,” I say a bit breathlessly, already hardening in my jeans. “That was a lot of food. I might be too full to fuck.”
Reader, I was not.
* * *
Lena comes to the co-working space on Monday at ten, as we’d agreed. She’s got purple hair and an entire binder of references from past jobs and volunteer placements. She’s from Argentina and, when we spoke on the phone, she hesitantly admitted she didn’t have much Canadian work experience.
I don’t give a shit where her work experience is from, as long as she knows the difference between an IP address and an email address.
Which, fortunately, she does.
She tells me about the gaming computer she built from scratch using parts she bought on eBay. Before she came to Canada five years ago, she worked in Buenos Aires as the IT manager for a multinational shipping company. Since she arrived, she hasn’t been able to find another corporate job. Instead, she’s working at a Spanish-language community center helping seniors learn to use the internet.
“They’re so sweet,” she says. “You’ve got to take it step by step. Some of them don’t even know what I mean when I say double-click. But they’ve heard about this thing called Facebook and they want to see pictures of their grandson’s birthday, and the smile on their faces when I help them get there is totally worth it.”
I think she might have been built in a lab, designed exactly to my specifications for what I want an employee to be. And since all the other potential employers passed on her because of her lack of domestic experience, their loss is my gain.
She is also almost certainly overqualified.
“This job is mostly helping people troubleshoot their printers and set up laptops with things like Office and Dropbox.”
She shrugs. “I know. You told me that on the phone.”
“And it can involve a lot of after-hours work. We carry what I call the football phone. If it rings, you answer it.”
She gives me an arch smile. “Because we could be starting a nuclear war with Mississauga?”
I laugh. “You might be the first person to ever get that joke right away.”
Lena looks like she’s used to exceeding expectations. I’m a monogamous gay, and I’m in love with a forty-something silver fox, but I’m also a little bit in love with Lena.
“I assume I’d have to carry the phone most of the time? You’ve earned some time off, no?”
I am about to drop to my knees and worship at her altar. Ramona and I had never really discussed what was fair, and since I’d carried the phone by myself for ages, it seemed a lot to ask her to take it on.
But maybe if I set a different tone right off the bat...
“We can share,” I say. “We’ll work out a schedule that fits for both of us.”
I’m talking in definites, not hypotheticals, but what’s the point in pretending I’m not going to offer her the job? I will pay her almost anything if it means I only have to carry the phone four nights a week instead of seven. Nash said we’d spend more time together if we could find ways to get away from work. Without the football phone, I can spend every free night with him. We will eat at every restaurant in the city and make love on every surface in both our apartments.
Turns out, Nash’s bed is way comfier than mine.
I should probably tell Lena I’m sleeping with one of my—our—clients. She has this no-nonsense air about her that says she might not understand the subtleties of what Nash and I have going on. Or at least I should hand the Out & About account over to her. Ethically, that probably makes the most sense. I’d say I was sorry to give it up, but really, what I loved about working for the festival was the rush I felt every time Nash’s number came up on my phone, and now he does that even when his printer is working and his extender is sending a clear, uninterrupted signal to his office, so I’m not really giving anything up at all.
I shoot her my best smile. “When can you start?”
“Wednesday,” she says with a firm nod.
Seriously. Eternal worship at the Church of Lena.
