CHAPTER 5 #2
When two o’clock rolled around, Violet found herself nervous and went for a walk around the block, which wasn’t something she did all that often.
By two-thirty, she was back at her computer, but she’d moved it to her bedroom, where she had a small desk in the corner that she used whenever she wanted to work on her own and not in the communal spaces.
She didn’t want Stella to know that they were working from their house, though, so she used the blur effect on Zoom to block her room from view and waited for Stella to join the meeting.
She couldn’t believe that she would be seeing Stella Ross for the first time in a decade and that, for the first time, she felt like she really had the upper hand.
“Hi,” Stella said when her face appeared on the screen.
“Hi,” Violet greeted, but her brain had short-circuited for a second initially because Stella was still just as beautiful, if not more so, than she had been back then, and that picture she’d had online hadn’t done her justice at all.
“Yeah, hi,” Stella repeated. “Um… Good to see you… again.”
“Is it?” Violet asked.
Stella laughed, and Violet wasn’t sure she had ever heard her laugh before. It was deeper than she would’ve expected, and it sounded really nice. Violet almost smiled, but she held it in so as not to give Stella the satisfaction.
“Right… Big old elephant in the virtual meeting room. Should we get that out of the way first?”
“The fact that I was a bitch to you in college?”
“The fact that I sent the email. I was referring to that. I know I said that before in my email, but I really am sorry. I’m embarrassed more than anything, and I still can’t believe I did that. Do you ever start email drafts that you have no intention of sending but you just have to type them out?”
“Yes, but I don’t hit reply first, or I leave the recipient blank so that I don’t accidentally send it.”
“Right.” Stella nodded. “I should’ve done one of those things. Again, I’m really sorry, Violet. I am a lightweight, and I had a date last night where I had too much wine, and… I’d just checked my email, noticed that you still hadn’t requested a demo, and I went off, which I shouldn’t have done.”
“It’s fine. We can just, I don’t know, move past it. I’ve got a few demos booked, and I just need to know if I should cross Cerebral off my list or give it another meeting, so we can move into the demo if you want and keep things focused on business.”
“If that’s what you want. Can you tell me a little about what you do over there? I read that it’s a language translation software.”
“Yes,” Violet said, feeling right in her element now because talking about business was what she did best. “Our goal is to provide accurate, real-time translations.”
“Audio or text?”
“Both. Better than anything you could get with a free service by a wide margin, and it takes into account cultural norms, differences in how people greet each other, et cetera. There are other components that we’re working on now, but that’s the basic part that we would want Cerebral’s help with.
We have one translator on staff, and she can only do so much herself. ”
“Do you use freelancers?” Stella asked, making a note.
“Not regularly.”
“How many languages do you have right now?”
“Twenty-four.”
“You have one translator working on twenty-four–”
“She’s a polyglot. A very, very smart one. She can learn a language pretty much in its entirety in weeks, really, and speak it fluently not long after that. We have her work checked and verified by native speakers, but she’s very good.”
“Damn. Here I thought I was smart because I can ask where the bathroom is in Spanish.”
Violet laughed for a moment but then caught herself because she didn’t want to laugh at Stella’s jokes.
“Okay,” Stella said, clearly noticing. “You’re looking for a tool that will help her translate into other languages, and she would verify, I assume?”
“That’s the gist of it, yes,” she replied. “Yours is one of the few that seems to have a multi-language option.”
“We do, yes.”
“Can you show me how that would work?”
“Let me share my screen.”
A moment later, Stella’s screen appeared in the meeting window, and she toggled over to a new tab.
“I used your existing business info to help set up a short demo. Are you really located over on Pike Ave?”
“Yes, we are,” Violet confirmed, hoping Stella didn’t know that Pike Avenue was in a residential area. “Why?”
“I’m on Monroe Street. Well, the company’s satellite office is, but I probably live, like, thirty minutes from your office. Small world, huh?”
“Yeah, small world,” she replied.
“Have you been to Buddy’s over on Fifth and Cross?” Stella asked.
“The bar?”
“Yeah.”
“A few times, I guess. Why?”
“Really small world,” Stella noted. “I go there a couple of times a month.”
“You do?”
“Maybe we can meet up in person, and I can buy you a drink? I know it won’t make it up to you, but I could at least try to atone for my massive email mistake.”
“A drink?”
“Why not? We can reminisce,” Stella said. “You can tell me about how much smarter you are than me and remind me for the millionth time that you have a girlfriend back home, and I can listen and pay the bill to try to get karma back on my side.”
Violet wanted to laugh at that, too, but she held it in and replied, “You’d have to buy me several drinks to make up for calling me a bitch.”
“Okay. Whatever. Wait. You don’t drink the fancy booze with the gold leaf floating in it, do you?”
“I might at Buddy’s when you’re buying.”
Stella laughed and replied, “I’ll do the demo, and if you want the gold-leaf alcohol, I’ll buy.”
Violet nodded before she could stop herself.
She didn’t know what had come over her. It wasn’t like she wanted to get a drink, even a free one, with Stella Ross, but it was highly likely that they’d both grown and changed a lot in ten years, so maybe they could share a drink, put the past behind them, and Violet could get her company a nice discount on Stella’s software.