“Do you actually know him or is he like a friend of a friend of a friend?”
“The second one.”
“And my date?”
She laughed. “Yeah, the second one. The girl I wanted to set you up with last time is dating someone else now, so I’ll have to dig deeper.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Connor added from the background. Melissa laughed and said goodbye before hanging up on me.
I guess it was a good thing I didn’t care who my date was.
Once I was home, I turned on my exercise app, which had been not so tactfully reminding me of the eight days since I last did their workout. At first, the little passive aggressive messages were funny.
Your abs will thank you….
You’re never too busy for your health…
It’s been six days since your last workout, but who’s counting? Oh, we are...
Giving up already?
And there was no way to turn off the notifications. I knew because countless others had already Googled the same question.
Deleting the app would be admitting defeat, and I wasn’t ready to do that. The app would know. The creators would be laughing. They were totally in my head. Jerks.
I did my three rounds of sit ups, pushups, lunges, squats, and high knees until the app gods were appeased.
After a shower, I checked my phone. Lauren still hadn’t answered me, so I texted her one last time before going to bed.
Clay: Cookies…
18
___________
Lauren
Another Tuesday morning meeting had me squeezed in between Herbert and Evan at the conference table. After yesterday’s first ownership meeting, I had a better idea of what my dad meant by ownership. He basically wanted to make sure that if he died, the company would continue on without him. Until then, Parker and I were regular employees who happened to own shares.
I was secretly relieved. Parker was livid. But then, when wasn’t he?
John looked around the table at all of us. “I’ll be at the trade show in Las Vegas this weekend, and I plan to come home with at least two new mini excavators and possibly a new skid steer. But that means we need some equipment sold this week to offset costs. I asked Lauren to look over what’s not renting. Give us your past sixty-day, six-month, and year-long losers in the different categories.”
With all eyes on me, I pulled up my spreadsheets and went over what I thought needed to go and why. It was important to keep our fleet up to date, especially when we could use the new purchases to offset our tax liability at the end of the fiscal year.
What I didn’t include in my presentation was the other numbers I’d run. I tracked who bought what and when. Five of the six sell-off suggestions had been purchased by Parker. In my opinion, he needed to be pulled from acquisitions and put solely on fleet management. Which probably meant swapping roles with Clay.
I was not looking forward to picking that fight. To Parker, spending company money was prestigious, a status symbol of his importance. Clay just wanted to fix stuff and stay out of the way. Which was exactly why they needed to switch. Clay was living below his abilities, and Parker wasn’t focusing on his strengths.
How I wished the company was just a chessboard and I could move pieces around at will. Guys could say whatever they wanted about being the tougher sex. They were way more touchy feely when it came to their egos.
That was why I planned to start with the guy with the smallest ego, which funny enough, was Clay. He was all bark and no bite. Plus, I’d be armed with cookies. Or, at least, I would after I made them. I texted him after the meeting, watching from my desk while he pulled his phone out and looked at it.
Lauren: Fine. Tonight. Seven-ish p.m. Chocolate chip cookies. Provide ingredients and the recipe, or else.
Clay: Or else what?
Lauren: Or else you don’t get cookies.
