Chapter 3
Ash
The whiskey, it wasn't a good idea. Not a good idea at all.
I knocked back the rest of it anyway.
I peered at the woman beside me, the one who'd played a probability parlor trick while I tried to figure out whether her eyes were both the same color.
All that staring and I still didn't know whether they were dark blue or dark green, or whether the cabin lighting was tricking my mind into believing one was blue and the other green.
It was annoying. There was no need for complications in eye color.
Nor was there need for staring. I never would've stared at someone the way I was staring at her if whiskey hadn't been involved. "How did you do that?"
The aircraft rolled away from the terminal. Her lips quirked up. "Which part?"
I leaned back, resting my head against the seat. "Start from the beginning. How do you know half of this flight is business travelers? Where are you sourcing that data?"
She stifled a laugh as she unzipped the purse slung across her chest. "Where am I sourcing my data," she murmured, now busy rifling through her bag.
"Come on, man. Do I look like LexisNexis?
I'll solve that problem for you too. No, I don't look like LexisNexis but I do know that business travelers account for something like fifteen percent of all air passengers.
When taking into consideration the time of day, day of the week, and day relative to holidays and other travel-ish events, it's reasonable to conclude this flight has a much higher concentration of business travelers than the fifteen percent, even if I can't remember where I saw that statistic.
It was probably one of those graphs on the bottom corner of the USA Today cover. "
"That's reliable science," I quipped. The pilot broke in with a muffled update about our position in the takeoff line. I heard but I didn't process. My shoulder fucking hurt and her eyes were annoying. "And the ratio of locals to visitors? Was that an infographic on Facebook?"
She—Zelda, her name was Zelda like legends and Fitzgeralds—leveled me with a glare.
"What's the real reason I'm a hard pass?
Because it doesn't matter whether I find a pen and show my work all over the back of an arm-long CVS receipt right now.
It doesn't matter whether I can remember where my stats come from.
It only matters that you passed before I logic'd through the odds of us sitting next to each other on this flight. "
I still had my coffee cup tucked against my chest like a shield…or a security blanket. I wasn't sure there was a substantive difference between the two, not in my current predicament. "While that was—uh—bizarre, I'm looking for a specific skill set."
Zelda's brows creased as a flash of understanding crossed her eyes. "Yeah, about that. Which job did I apply for?"
She had a streak of blue hair right behind her ear. I noticed it only when she tucked her hair back. I'd noticed it sixteen times. "Auditing assistant."
Her eyes widened but she chased that reaction away with a shrug. "All right, well, you tell me what the job involves and I'll tell you why I'm perfect."
"That's not really how—no. No." We weren't doing this. It was a bad idea and I was far too distracted by blue hair and mismatched eyes and my fucking shoulder to deal with this. "Look, I'm sorry you heard what I said. It was—it wasn't professional. But this isn't a good fit."
I shifted my attention out the window just as her fingers slipped through her hair, dragging it over her ear a seventeenth time.
The terminal faded from view as the plane taxied down the runway.
Denver faded as we took off. I studied the sky, the clouds, the mountains until hearing the loudspeaker's chime.
I had my laptop out of the seat-back pocket and open on my tray table before the flight attendant spoke.
And I found myself staring at Zelda's résumé once again. Motherfuck.
"Let me see if I can get this too," she said, both hands held up in front of her as if she was about to conjure magic.
And she could. I hated to admit it but I knew she could.
"You prefer things to be"—she held her thumbs and forefingers an inch apart—"just so.
You need someone who can organize your things and prepare it all such that you're able to go ahead and do everything because you don't trust anyone to do anything correctly.
I am wonderful when it comes to handling egomaniac micromanagers.
I have lots of experience in that arena and I don't notice the toxic air quality of being treated like I'm incompetent anymore.
I adapt to shit situations shockingly well. "
"Excuse me" was all I could manage. And then, "I am not an egomaniac micromanager."
She dropped her hands to her lap and gave me a patient smile. It was the kind of smile reserved for small, feeble, clueless things. "It's okay, honey. I understand. We don't have to use those words."
"The words are fine," I snapped. "They are fine and they don't describe my management style.
" I pointed to my screen. "Since you've pushed the issue, Miss Besh, I'd love to hear how your recent experience"—I blinked at the screen, forcing myself to reread the bullet several times for fear the whiskey was playing games on me—"managing a spirituality shop, whatever that is, would meaningfully contribute to my accounting practice. "
"Let's start with the spirituality shop piece of this puzzle. It's Denver, my friend. People love their crystals and smudge sticks and tarot readings. Just because you're not pulling cards every day doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile business."
She tucked her hair over her ear again—eighteen—and this was the first time I noticed the tattoo on her inner forearm. The phases of the moon, of course.
"The worthiness of the business isn't my concern at the moment," I replied.
"But it is," she countered. "You said, 'a spirituality shop, whatever that is.
' The implication was clear—my job was at a non-mainstream business and thus my experience is equally non-mainstream.
You're discounting the possibility that I'm capable of managing a retail store and a staff of part-time clerks as well as tarot readers—who, by the way, are paid as independent contractors.
You're skipping over the part where I handled scheduling and ordering and made sense of daily receipts such that the lights stayed on the entire time I worked there. I kept all of the cats alive too."
I wanted nothing more than to glance at my watch. I wanted to know which segment of this billable hour I was losing to a lecture on the goods and services of some new-age witchcraft emporium.
"While that is fascinating, none of it points to experience with SAP or Oracle," I said, taking another scan of her résumé. "I'm not seeing anything in here that gets at Sarbanes-Oxley or even an entry-level understanding of GAAP."
Nineteen.
"I know you believe those things are essential but I stand behind what I said about you doing all the work," she answered.
"And I say that with love so don't get all offended on me now, uh"—she paused, frowned—"I don't know your name.
You're elbow-deep in my life history and I don't know your name. "
"Ash," I replied. "Ash Santillian." I tapped my keyboard to view the bottom portion of the résumé. "Tell me how your degree in"—I smothered a laugh—"archaeology will inform work on financial audits."
"You and your little snicker tell me you don't know much about archaeology." Zelda ran her hands over her denim-clad thighs. "It's not all Indiana Jones and raiding Egyptian tombs."
"Maybe not," I conceded. "But your primary research involves ancient death rituals and something called NAGPRA—"
"The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990."
"Right. Of course." I nodded because everyone knew that. "And why is it you aren't looking for a role more closely aligned with that study?"
"That's a long story and we don't know each other well enough for long stories."
Before I could argue with Zelda, the flight attendant stopped at our row to take drink orders. When I had a bottle of water on my tray table—no more whiskey for me, thank you—I asked, "What's the short version?"
She made a sour face at her can of Coke. "Most archaeology jobs are in academia. That direction wasn't on the horizon for me."
"And that's why you"—I scrolled the document again—"have spent the past ten years in graduate assistantships and retail and…summer camps?"
She hit me with a severe scowl. "Do not come for summer camp. You won't make it out alive if you think you can condescend to summer camp in my presence."
"All right," I drawled. "But the reality is I need someone who can build spreadsheets—"
"You don't let anyone build your spreadsheets and you know it," she said under her breath.
"—and analyze financial documents for the purpose of providing me a high-level overview—"
"You don't trust anyone else's high-level overviews."
"—and push huge amounts of transactions through data-mining programs to identify trends and anomalies.
" I stared at her, waiting for another murmur.
It didn't come but—twenty. "How is this even interesting to you, Zelda?
That's what I don't understand. Even if your background and experience had the slightest bit of overlap with the role, I still don't understand how this job would interest you for more than ten minutes. "
She scanned the document on my screen, touched her fingertips to her lips.
She was quiet a moment. I had to believe she was searching for a way to agree with me while maintaining she was the ideal candidate.
I'd let her have that. I could be right without being a jackass about it. I did it all the time.
But then she grinned. "I'll build you a spreadsheet right now. Tell me what you want it to do for you."
I gulped. Twenty-one.