6. Nash
6
Nash
Just in Case
I swear I tried not to look back at her ass in her bikini as she walked toward the beach, but I’m not that strong. Or smart.
Cue episode two of her starring in my shower fantasies.
That definitely zapped the rest of my energy and made falling asleep a breeze, so maybe it wasn’t entirely a bad move.
Except the more of her body I see, the more of it I want to see, and the easier it is to imagine. But the harder it is to clear images of her from my brain. Standing in the kitchen, I envision her right where she stood slicing tomatoes last night, but wearing significantly less. Looking out the window, I imagine her jogging back from the beach.
Fuck, you’d think I was fifteen the way this woman plays on a constant slideshow in my head.
I’m still staring out the window when the real Cat stomps up the stairs and walks past with a death-grip on a to-go bag. She flings the front door open and kicks it shut behind her. Then she slams what I think might be my lunch onto the table like it’s a hostage she’s about to interrogate. Her purse flies into the living room and crash lands on the couch.
“Bad day at the beach?” I ask.
“Oh, hey. No. Amazing day at the beach. It was the restaurant that was awful. I got you fried shrimp.”
“Can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it.”
“The food was great. I ran into a fan.”
“Do your fans always ruin your day?”
“No, but this one informed me there’s an online rumor that I was on drugs when I appeared on Lions’ Den!”
“You were on Lions’ Den? Sweet! Did you get a deal?”
She stares at me like I am the most clueless motherfucker on earth. And after a few seconds of deliberation and piecing together the context clues, I have to agree with her.
“Sorry. I didn’t think that through.”
“It’s fine. No deal. Obviously.”
Okay, she didn’t have to reiterate it.
“Right. Well, I wouldn’t worry about online chatter. By this time next week, they’ll have moved on to someone else.”
“Yeah, but everyone who sees it in the meantime will forever think I made the biggest pitch of my life while high.”
“Eh, I don’t think you’d be the first person who got high before they went on that show. Those investors can be brutal when they reject an idea.”
“Trust me, I’m well aware how brutal they can be.”
Yikes. I can’t say anything right. “Keep me company while I eat. Tell me all about it. Sometimes, talking through a problem helps.”
She walks into the living room and retrieves her phone from her purse. “Talking about it won’t help, but I’d rather show you the whole segment than have you search for it later and find the edited clips.”
“There are edited clips?” I use a fork to scrape mashed potatoes off the plastic lid of the smashed to-go container.
“Apparently, some people have nothing better to do with their talents.”
Cat stands her phone against her water bottle and cues up the video. I spin a chair around and brace my chest against the wooden back while I lick my fork clean.
Her eyes burn holes into the side of my face as she watches me do it. I’m not sure if it’s my inappropriate chair usage or my licking of the fork tines that has her staring lasers. I wrap a fried shrimp in a piece of garlic bread and take a bite of my improvised sandwich as the video starts.
She looks great. What are all those binders on the table next to her? I watch as she picks one up and opens it while a screen above her shows an enlarged image of the page she’s pointing at, which is actually also a screen, just a much smaller one encased in what looks like a normal binder. Her spiel starts with an explanation of the table of contents her finger is following.
Wait. That’s what she pitched? A tablet with brightly colored case options? What does that have to do with organization?
I must be missing something.
She holds up a stylus, and then she touches it to the small screen in the notebook while smiling at the screen above her. Nothing happens. The panic in her eyes is unmistakable. Cat shakes the stylus. Then she tries again. Still nothing. She stabs the page with it. Tries to scribble across it.
Her arm shakes as she sets the notebook on the table and frantically types something into her computer that’s sitting open on the table with the binders, never taking her eyes off the big screen above her.
“Can we break, please? I need to make a quick phone call.”
“Unfortunately, no. Maybe you can tell us what’s supposed to be happening.”
“Sure. Yeah. So, um, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed, there isn’t actually paper inside this notebook. It’s an e-paper screen. And you probably already know you can write on e-paper, so just like you could have a hard copy of your information in any of these binders, you can also opt for the electronic version to store your data in the same aesthetically pleasing formats.”
One of the lions asks, “Why would anyone buy this? More importantly, why would anyone invest in it? Doesn’t this already exist?”
“No. This actually comes with templates that look just like pages from one of my analog planners. You can even get electronic sticker packs. So, whether you like to keep hard copies or digital, your information will still look the same. No eye-straining spreadsheets or boring reports. Everything is efficient, while also being pretty. There’s science behind it. It’s called data art or data aesthetics. When the data looks less intimidating, it makes recordkeeping less stressful. It can even evoke emotions.”
She’s talking way too fast, and her arms are flailing now. She looks like she’s about to short-circuit.
“My product line is all in jewel tones, so, of course, all the digital charts and graphs also display in those same bright colors. So, here we have more science in play. Color Psychology tells us that highly-pigmented, bright colors can increase energy and clarity, which will—”
“But we can’t see a demonstration right now?” One of the lions asks.
“No. I think your internet might be down.”
The lion on the end pulls out his phone and dances his thumb over the screen. “No,” he says. “I’m connected, and it’s working fine.”
The camera pans over all four of the potential investors’ faces. They all look as anxious as I feel.
“Does it have to be connected to the internet to input data? It’s entirely web-based? No offline functionality?”
“It does have that, and it worked fine when I tested it just a little while ago. This has never happened. I’m sure it’s something simple.”
“It sounds like you’ve still got some bugs to work out.”
Cat crouches down to drag something out from under the table. It’s a stack of colorful baskets that match the binders or planners, whatever they are. When she tries to stand up, her heel gets caught in the hem of her dress, and she nearly falls into the table. She’s beyond flustered.
This is hard to watch. I don’t understand how the incredibly confident woman who barged in here yesterday, insisting she was right and I was wrong, got so easily shaken.
Her balance isn’t fully shored up yet when she turns to face the camera again, and the baskets fly out of her grasp like they’ve been smacked by the upswing of tennis racquet. They bounce all around her feet.
She just stands there in the middle of them, rambling about color coding and insisting organized shelves and spaces don’t have to be boring. She’s repeating herself a lot. Jewel tones is her catch phrase. Or crutch phrase. She’s said it at least a dozen times already, as if the colors themselves make her system a worthwhile investment.
But she’s stopped talking about how the digital planner works completely. She is just going on and on about the psychology of color. It’s like she’s physically there, but her voice is a prerecorded message that’s gotten hung in a loop.
She smiles at the lions with her lips visible shaking. And then she loudly proclaims that purple inspires people to be bold and take creative chances. The binder in her hand is yellow.
The first lion taps out, immediately followed by the second and third.
Before the fourth mogul can react, Cat steps closer to her and starts talking even faster, which I wouldn’t have believed possible, and making less sense with every sentence she sputters.
What’s left of my garlic bread sandwich falls from my hand. I can’t eat while I watch her choke like this. Is she sure she wasn’t high?
I slowly shake my head, trying to imagine what could’ve caused her to implode like that. “How long ago did the episode air?”
“Last week. We filmed three months ago.”
“What happened, Cat?” I’ve definitely seen enough, but I can’t look away from the screen.
When she doesn’t answer my last question, I turn to face her and immediately see the tears streaming down her face. Our eyes meet and she starts talking again.
“I’d hardly slept in almost three days. The developer was supposed to go with me in case something like this happened, but he’s one of Aiden’s closest friends, and he bailed on me with no warning. I kept telling myself nothing would go wrong, that he’d worked out all the kinks. He swore it was good to go. I was so well prepared before. I knew . . . I-I just . . . I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I—”
Oh, shit. She’s going to hyperventilate. I stand and wrap her up, pulling her back down into the chair with me. I face the correct way this time, and she curls into my lap like she can’t make herself small enough. Her body trembles in my arms.
Reaching around to stop the video, I lay her phone facedown on the table. She needs a blanket.
I carry her to the couch, but when I try to release her, she clings to me, so I sit and let her curl back against me as I drag the blanket from the back of the couch and pull it across her.
“Don’t try to talk. Just breathe. Just breathe, Cat. Just breathe.”
She smells like the beach, but she’s shivering like she just came in from the snow.
I don’t know what to do other than hold her. Her breathing finally steadies, and her body stills. She doesn’t move to leave my lap, so I keep my arms around her. It takes a few minutes for me to realize she’s fallen asleep.
I slide further back on the couch and wait until I’m sure she’s sleeping soundly before I lay her onto the cushions and tuck the blanket around her.
The shrimp and mashed potatoes hardly have any taste at all to me now, and I have no idea why I’m staring at the wall like there’s a movie playing on it.
It’s getting late in the day, but I need caffeine. I make a fresh pot of coffee, down half a cup, top if off, and take it into the living room to get some more work done.
Cat’s still asleep on the couch, curled on the cushions with hair covering her eyes. Brushing it away might wake her, and I think she needs more sleep. A lot more.
With my headphones in place, I restart the game. I’ve got one more report to finalize before I start playtesting with the developers in a few days. She picked the right day to nap on the couch.
Her reflection in the TV screen makes me jump. I drop the controller. That sequence will have to be replayed.
“How long have you been sitting on the coffee table behind me like that?”
“Long enough to know you’re not very good at this game.”
“No one is good at this game. It’s not even out yet.”
“Huh. So, this is really a job?”
“Yes. How are you feeling?” I turn around and have to fight to ignore the fact that she’s sitting cross-legged on top of the table and I’m sitting on the floor, which puts the crotch of her shorts at eye-level for me. Or it would be if I looked straight ahead. I keep my eyes fixed upward on hers.
“I’m good. Sorry I freaked out on you like that.”
“There’s no need to apologize. I just want to be sure you’re okay.”
“I am. I’m going to go up and take a bath.”
“You sure you’re okay to do that?”
“I don’t need you to supervise my bath. Nice try, though.” She unwraps her legs and swings one over my head.
I grip the back of her thigh just above her knee before she can walk away and give it a gentle squeeze. “If I’d been trying, you wouldn’t have said no.”
An involuntary quake racks her body, which is exactly the reaction I want, but shouldn’t tempt right now. I glide my hand all the way down to her ankle before breaking contact with her soft skin. She doesn’t jump out of reach when I touch her. She doesn’t move a muscle until I take my hand away.
Even then, she lingers for a breath before she leaves. She never looked back at me, just let my warm palm trail over her cool skin. And now she walks away as if it never happened.
My eyes track her up the stairs until they change direction at the landing, turning her out of my sight. I listen for her padded, nearly silent footsteps all the way down the hall, unable to convince myself to put the headphones back on until I hear the faint sound of water running into the tub.
I replay the sequence that her reflection shocked me into exiting so abruptly. Twice.
I’m still not sure I haven’t missed anything, but I know I’m no more likely to catch any errors on a third attempt. I’ll come back to it tomorrow.
I’ve almost finished the game when the pipes rumble with her draining bath water, drowning out my audio. I have the volume set far lower than I normally would, just in case she needed me.
I didn’t actually expect her to need me, but that instinct she activates insisted I needed to be able to hear her. Just in case.