But Jedidiah Walker might be exactly who he’d been looking for.
*
Jedidiah wasn’t surewhat she’d expected when she showed up at Trevor’s for her first day of work, but it hadn’t been what she got. First of all, he’d apparently forgotten he’d hired her, or that she was due to start work that day.
She rang the doorbell three times before he answered. He was barefoot, wearing jeans that looked legitimately torn and worn rather than ripped as a fashion statement, and an ancient short-sleeved T-shirt with a faded JazzFest logo on the front. His dark brown hair was messy, as if he’d run his hands through it. A pair of tortoiseshell glasses were propped on his head and he wore an expression of near total surprise.
“Jedidiah?”
“Hi,” she said, walking inside. She’d worn a nice pair of slacks and a button-down blouse but she was already mentally revising her work wardrobe to include mostly jeans. He was still staring at her as if he had no idea what to do with her. “You hired me to be your assistant, remember?”
His expression cleared and he laughed. “Oh, sorry. I was involved in a project and totally forgot you were coming today. Come on and I’ll show you the office.”
The office appeared to be his entire den—a large open-concept room with an attached kitchen and a small table with a couple of chairs on one end, and a flat-screen TV hanging on the wall at the other end. There was a couch facing the TV and a coffee table in front of that, but it was clearly arranged to take up the minimum amount of room. Shoved against a wall with papers piled high and overflowing was a traditional rolltop desk. On another wall was a bank of file cabinets. Large flat computer tables, some with shelves, some not, populated most of the room. Electrical power strips were abundant. There was a sweet setup that she thought must be his main station. Three computer screens were hooked up to a desktop computer, and an ergonomic chair—which she’d once lusted over and finally decided she couldn’t justify the price of—sat in front of the table. Nearby on another table, a LaserJet printer sat. Several phones, tablets, and laptops were also strewn over the remaining tables. A few random chairs were scattered around.
A couple of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were on the same wall as the file cabinets, mostly holding technical books, but there were a few fiction books distributed among them as well. An eclectic mix as far as she could tell. And there was more paper. Everywhere. Scraps of paper, notebooks, notepads, sticky notes, and the like. A couple of huge whiteboards hung on one of the walls, both with equations written in different computer languages and other notes and drawings scrawled across them. There were more cell phones and tablets lying around, some plugged into an uninterruptible power supply, some free-standing.
The walls that weren’t occupied by a TV or whiteboards held a number of framed prints by M.C. Escher. Some she was familiar with but some she’d never seen. Interesting, since she was a fan of his work herself.
“I need help organizing stuff.” He gestured at the room. “And after that—You know Java, right?”
“Yes. And Swift, though not as well as Java.” Swift was a coding language for Apple’s operating systems. “I also know Adobe Photoshop and several other programs that might be useful. And I’m somewhat familiar with Sketch.” Sketch was a digital design program that many app developers used.
“Good. I use all of those. We’ll talk about what you know and what you’ll need to learn after you’ve organized things. I warned you that you were overqualified,” he added. “So if that’s a problem for you you’d better quit now.”
“No problem.”
“If this works out, I’d like you to work with me on developing apps. I had a team in Dallas, and we tried to keep going when I first moved here. But everyone drifted apart. It was hard to maintain the same closeness when I was on Skype or Zoom and they were all together in person at the same location.”
He started picking up papers and notebooks and looking beneath them, muttering something incomprehensible while he did.
“Can I help you find something?”
“My damn glasses. I need them for the computer.”
Jedidiah tapped the top of her head. Trevor raised his hand and touched his glasses. “Well, shit. I should have looked here first but I don’t usually. They go missing a lot.”
“Maybe you should design an app to find your glasses. You know, like find your phone only find your glasses.”
“Not a bad idea.” He looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “But I’m in the middle of something right now.”
“What do you want me to start with?”
He looked around. “How are you at organization?”
“It’s one of my strengths. What do you want organized?”
“Everything.”
Jedidiah blinked. “Everything?”
“Not all of it today, of course.”
“Of course.” He was crazy. That’s all there was to it. “Is there anything in particular youdon’twant me to mess with?”
“I’ll be working over here,” he said, gesturing at the table with multiple monitors. “So don’t worry about that right now. But, uh, it’s a bit of a mess so it should keep you busy for a while.”
Wow, understatement of the century. But she smiled and said, “I’ll get to work, then.”
He smiled back and held out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”
Damn, the man had a killer smile. She took the hand he held out and shook it, ignoring the twinge of awareness that went with it. “Thanks.” He had a bit of the absentminded professor vibe going on. She’d never thought that would be appealing, but on Trevor it definitely was.
