Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
LUKE
I take a quick look at my reflection in the window of the bar as I pass it. I’m wearing a pair of black jeans, and a blue, short sleeved t shirt. I wanted to look presentable, but not like I was dressed too over the top, and I think I hit the level I was going for. I am wearing my most expensive cologne though.
I reach the door of the bar and pull it open. The place isn’t packed, but it isn’t empty either. It has a nice ambience about it where it feels like it’s quiet enough to talk but loud enough not to be overheard. I spot Louisa sitting on a bar stool with a glass of something in front of her and I make my way across the as yet empty dance floor.
Louisa turns her head in my direction as I step up beside her at the bar.
“Hi,” she says. “Should we get a table?”
“Wow,” I reply, looking at her as she slips off the stool.
She’s wearing a short black playsuit with printed daisies on it and brown wedges. She has a yellow bag slung across her body. She is wearing her hair half up and half down. The down half is in beachy curls, and I have to physically stop myself from reaching out and running my fingers through it.
“Nice answer,” she says. She smiles and then looks down as though she’s almost afraid to make eye contact with me.
“What can I get you?” the bartender says to me.
“Scotch on the rocks please,” I say. I look at Louisa. “What are you having?”
“A gin and tonic please,” she says.
I nod to the bartender, and he fixes the drinks while Louisa goes to get us a table. I watch her walk away. The playsuit isn’t particularly tight fitting, but it does cut in at her waist and it makes me want to rest my hands there as I kiss her.
Louisa chooses a table – a good choice in my mind. It’s not too close to anyone else, but it’s not like in a dark little corner somewhere which would be a very different vibe to drinks with the boss, which at the moment, I assume we are still pretending this is.
I pay for the drinks and go to the table and sit down. Louisa thanks me for the drink and takes a sip.
I pick up my own drink and raise my glass.
“Welcome to the company,” I say.
“Thanks,” Louisa says, tapping her glass against mine.
We both drink and I decide to put out the feelers about her maybe staying on. It’s a safe topic compared to what I would like to say to her, and it is an opening into a real conversation hopefully.
“Karl is very pleased with your work,” I say. “He showed me the app page you designed, and I am too.”
“Thank you,” she says. She smiles playfully. “See I can do things other than filing you know.”
“I didn’t doubt it,” I say.
Louisa snorts out a laugh.
“Bullshit,” she says.
“Ok, you got me. I did doubt it. But you as sure as hell proved me wrong on that one,” I say.
“I hope that means I’ll be getting a good reference,” Louisa says.
“Or maybe I’ll give you an awful reference so no one wants to hire you, and we can keep you,” I say with a laugh.
She gave me the perfect lead in there and I had to take it. She laughs too but she doesn’t say whether she would actually like to stay or not and I don’t want to push her.
“You make it sound like you’re going to lock me away in a tower somewhere,” she jokes.
“You’d better be on your best behavior, or I just might,” I fire back.
“I can do that, but something tells me you would prefer the naughty side of me,” Louisa says.
“I can’t imagine why you have that impression of me,” I reply.
Louisa laughs softly and takes a drink. I watch her throat work as she swallows it. She sees me watching her and smiles self-consciously.
“What? Do I have something on my face?” she says.
I shake my head. I force myself to look away. Flirting is one thing, but I don’t want to make her uncomfortable or come across as a creep.
“What made you decide to go into web development?” I ask.
“I was always quite creative growing up, but I wasn’t a good drawer or painter or anything like that. I tried graphic design, but again, I wasn’t a great drawer, and my stuff never came out like how I saw it my head. I discovered web development as an accidental side line to that really. I discovered I liked playing around with other people’s graphics and fonts and putting them together in new ways. From there, I learned to code so I could do it without it looking like a bad photoshop job. I had several friends ask me to work on websites for them and word of mouth reached a few local businesses and they paid me to design websites for them and that’s when I realized there was a potential career in it.”
“I suppose I could have left college and started my own business doing that kind of thing, but I felt like that wasn’t what I wanted. I think running a business is great if that’s your thing, but for me, it would mean that I had to do a thousand and one tasks I didn’t want to do and less and less hands-on work. So, I decided to get my degree and go down that route, but with the aim of working for a company.”
She finishes up and takes another sip of her drink.
“How about you? What made you start Sold?” she asks.
“I was the opposite to you,” I say with a smile. “I knew from quite early on that I wanted to run my own business. I didn’t know what I would do at first, but I knew I didn’t want to work for someone else. I got the idea for Sold when I started to use eBay as part of a retail business I tried. I found it to be a good tool for the most part – certainly the best available at the time - but there were lots of things I felt would work better a different way and the more I used the site, the more strongly I felt about it and so I decided to start Sold. I talked to potential investors, and they believed in me and my ideas, and I got enough money together to make it happen. I hired people to build a website that worked faster and smarter than the alternatives, and one that had more focus on the sellers. After all, they are our clients really, and I find that eBay in particular put way too much focus on siding with buyers, even when the seller can prove the buyer is lying. I was lucky – I got into the market at just the right time and Sold just took off.”
“I think it was likely more than luck,” Louisa says. “The timing obviously was right which helped, but it sounds like a hell of a lot of work at the beginning and that’s not luck, that’s determination and a damned good idea.”
“Maybe a bit of that too,” I say.
“So, you’re the sort of man who sees what he wants and goes for it then?” Louisa says, not meeting my eye.
“Yes and no,” I say. “I like to bide my time. When the right moment comes along, then I will go after what I want, but sometimes, I have found myself wanting something and the time isn’t right, so I hold back.”
“Is that why you’ve never gotten married?” Louisa asks me.
It’s a jump to the personal and I’m a little bit surprised by it, but I have nothing to hide, and I am quite open to answering her.
“I haven’t purposely avoided marriage, I just haven’t found the right person yet,” I say. “I guess I will when the time is right for that too. But how do you know I’m not married or haven’t been divorced?”
“I looked you up online,” Louisa says.
I expect her to blush or at least look a bit sheepish at this confession, but she’s completely unfazed by the admission. Because I like her, I suppose I don’t mind the idea of her looking me up, but if I didn’t, would I find it weird? Maybe a little bit.
“Stalker much,” I say, making light of it but letting her know she’s very close to crossing a line.
“Hardly,” she says. “Don’t tell me you never look potential employees up online. Or if not you personally, then your HR department?”
“Sure,” I say. “We look for red flags, but not their relationship status.”
“And people who are about to start working for someone generally do the same thing. Look them up, find out a bit about them, see if they are someone they can work well with. But you have to be the awkward one and not be on LinkedIn, so I had to resort to looking you up on Facebook, where your relationship status is at the top of your profile and pretty hard to miss,” she says.
“Ok, fair enough,” I say. “So do you think I should set myself up a LinkedIn profile, even though I’m not looking for a career change or anything like that?”
Louisa shrugs one shoulder.
“It won’t hurt,” she says. “If nothing else, it means that anyone who is considering a role at the company will have somewhere to look you up without seeming like a stalker.”
We both laugh and I file that idea away for another day. Maybe I will make myself a profile, but at the very least, I am going to tighten my privacy settings on Facebook. Louisa is one thing, but I don’t like the idea of any random person being about to find out details about me and my life so easily.
“Same again,” I say, nodding to Louisa’s almost empty glass.
“Let me get these,” she says.
“Stop it,” I say. “What sort of a welcome to the company would that be?”
She smiles and nods her head.
“Same again then please,” she relents.
I go to the bar and get us both another drink and then I go back to the table, and we spend the rest of the night chatting and laughing and flirting. Before long, it doesn’t feel like I’m a boss taking a new employee out for welcome drinks. It feels like we’re friends on a night out, friends that share a lot of chemistry and are waiting for the right moment to take their relationship to the next level.
Is tonight the right moment though? Everything feels right except for the fact that Louisa works for me and of course her father is on the board. If it wasn’t for those two little details, I would say tonight was the night. To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t need Enrique’s backing for my new idea, I would go for it tonight and throw caution to the wind. Plenty of people manage to date and work together and it’s not like I am Louisa’s direct boss. I’m sure we could make it work. But that isn’t the situation, and I guess I will have to do like I did with my business – wait for the right moment, because if I do jump in to early, I’m risking ruining something that could be really good. I hope Louisa has worked out that when I was talking about timing and waiting for the right moment, that I was letting her know that moment will come for us.
Waiting won’t be easy though, and every time Louisa giggles at my jokes, or looks me in the eye and bites her lip, or touches her hair or my arm, I feel it getting harder and harder to wait.
When the bell goes for last orders, I’m shocked to hear it. The night has flown by, and Louisa seems as surprised by the late hour as I am.
“It can’t be that time already,” she says.
I check my watch and nod.
“It is,” I say, and we both laugh. “Would you like me to call you a cab?”
“Yes please,” Louisa says. “I’ll just use the ladies’ room while you do it.”
I watch her walk away from the table and I call her a cab. She comes back to the table, and we drain the last of our drinks.
“The cab driver said it won’t be long, so should we wait outside?” I say.
“Ok,” Louisa says.
We leave the table and walk across the bar.; I open the door for Louisa. She steps outside and I follow her. It’s a warm enough evening and it actually feels nice to get a bit of fresh air. I lean back against the wall and Louisa stands facing me, a couple of feet between us.
“Thank you for tonight,” she says. “I really enjoyed it.”
“Well, that was never in doubt was it when you get to spend the night with someone as charming as me,” I say with a grin.
“Ah that must be it then,” she says, grinning back at me.
“I enjoyed it too,” I say. “So, you must be a bit of a charmer yourself.”
“I can be when the moment calls for it,” she says.
“And do you think this moment calls for it?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I think this moment calls for something else.”
I start to ask her what, but she closes the gap between us, and the next thing I know, her lips are on mine. I most certainly did not see that coming, but I’m also not complaining. All my reasons why this can’t happen go out of the window now that it is happening, and I wrap my arms around Louisa and pull her against me. She pushes her hands into my hair as our kiss becomes more passionate. Our tongues collide as our lips mash together, the perfect fit.
I have to say, as kisses go, this one is mind blowing. My whole body comes alive as we kiss, and my cock hardens, ready for Louisa to take it inside of her so I can rock both of our worlds. Of course, this isn’t the time or the place for it and I pull back slightly so she can’t feel my hardness against her.
She doesn’t seem to notice me pulling my hips back slightly as she moans into my mouth and kisses me harder, faster, and more passionately than I think I have ever been kissed.
I never want this kiss to end, but end it must, and we come apart at the sound of a car pulling up beside us. I glance over Louisa’s shoulder and the driver gives me a thumb’s up, which I hope means he is our cab driver rather than that he is enjoying the show.