“So, I want to sanitize this wheelbarrow so I can cook in it, but it’s a two-person job, one person to feed the fire and grabfirewood, and one person to hold the wheelbarrow up so that it doesn’t smother the fire. Would you mind helping me?”
Bartosz stared at me with his deep grey eyes before he nodded.
“I’ll grab some more wood if you start the fire.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed quickly, glad that he hadn’t scoffed at me for asking him after I had basically accosted him.
We got the fire roaring and found a large, thick stick to use to hold one side of the wheelbarrow up. At this point, it looked like a lopsided turtle. We had gathered enough wood so that one person didn’t have to fetch more every few minutes, and so now the silence hung loud between us.
I fiddled with a loose stone with the toe of my shoe, gathering my courage.
“Hey,” I saw Bartosz look up at me from the corner of my eye, “I won’t apologize for our first meeting cause you were an asshole, but sorry about today, I was being super weird and aggressive with you. I may have,” I gestured with my free hand at myself from head to toe, “stuff going on, but that still is not an excuse.”
He scoffed.
“Dude,” and scoffed again, shaking his head again, “forget about it.”
I ground my heel into the earth and shot Bartosz a look with a serious face.
“But I don’t want to forget about it, I want to make up for it!”
Bartosz ran a hand over his face roughly, groaning.
“You don’t get it, I’m uh,” he groaned again, interrupting his words, “I’m such a fucking stereotype,” he finished to himself.
“What do you mean?” I asked earnestly, “I don’t know that much about you. What is your life like when you’re notbeing press-ganged into helping a crazy woman to clean a wheelbarrow on a godforsaken island?
Bartosz sank into an incredibly low squat where his arms were resting on his knees, which were just a whisker beneath his chin. The position would have been incredibly uncomfortable for me, but he looked like he was chilling.
“It’s crazy how distant that life, real life, feels,” he wondered before looking at me.
“I run two businesses, one is a materials company, we specialize in incredibly durable and flexible metal, and an adaptable plastic which is ideal for high velocity travel. We make parts out of both materials and also sell the materials themselves.”
“So for like rockets and stuff?” I asked, impressed.
He shrugged like it was nothing, but I could tell that he was proud of himself underneath it all.
“And bullet trains, F1 cars, and some airplanes. And my other company sells highly efficient generalized business software.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, not believing that he was saying what I thought he was saying.
“You’re not talking about Nanov?” I said in disbelief. I had heard that phrasing before, that description of a company, but it couldn’t be what I thought! It was more likely that it was some small start-up that did something similar, but…
Of course, he lit up like fucking Christmas tree.
“Yes! You know it?”
Did I know of Nanov? The company that had 80% of U.S. corporations turning away from the Microsoft Office Suite? The reason why people in the office said, ‘I’ll just do it in a Nanov sheet’ instead of an Excel sheet? The company that had just gone public?
“You’re shitting me!” I half squealed. I had heard the CEO was super young, but this was shocking.
“Yeah,” Bartosz shrugged, but I could see the hint of a blush on his cheeks, “I don’t do much other than work. I don’t get out often, and I was super stressed about my companies when when we first met,” he finished, running a hand sheepishly through his hair. It seemed like this was an attempt at an apology. I would accept it because of the whole accosting him thing.
“I get it,” I replied, still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was talking to the CEO of the fastest-growing, most impressive company in the U.S.
I could feel my consultant side rising up like a wave of slime. My immediate reaction was to think of the firm. Old Mina would think, ‘what a great opportunity to get a new client!’ and twist herself into something pleasing and easy for him, something non-offensive and non-sexual, someone who he could trust with so so so much of his money. But that wasn't who I wanted to be; that wasn’t who I was, at least not here. So instead I separated him from Nanov in my mind, and focused on Bartosz: the handsome, asshole-ish man who had brought me a sheep when I had asked him for one.
“So where did you grow up?” I tried, in my best attempt, to pretend that my mind wasn’t blown.
