Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
“I’d tend to agree with you.” Jess hands me back my phone, nodding to the screen where a text has landed from my new contact labeled British McHotpants. “Except I think he just did.”
nine CONNOR
The next time Felicity Chen walks into my office, she shows up ready to play. Instead of ripped jeans and boots, she’s wearing a black tailored suit and an expression that leaves no doubt she’s planning to oversee everything from this point forward. She politely passes on Brenna’s offer of coffee and crosses the room to where I’m standing in front of my desk to greet her.
“Felicity, it’s good to see you.”
She gives me a handshake alongside her wide smile. Amazingly, she makes the ballbuster aesthetic look like a good time. “Call me Fizzy. No one calls me Felicity, except the guy at the DMV.”
I laugh. “Fizzy it is.”
Instead of sitting at a chair at my desk, she settles down onto one of the small leather sofas framing the coffee table. I remember reading once that confident people use furniture wrong. They sit sideways, they loop an arm over the back of an adjacent chair or sit on the edge of a desk. Fizzy isn’t doing any of those things, but she’s still a portrait of confidence. Her posture is relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, hands casually crossed at the wrist, one index finger and thumb tapping as if she’s counting down to something. Her shoes are bright blue suede with heels at least four inches tall. It takes more effort than I’m comfortable with not to let my eyes linger on the tiny glimpse of her exposed ankle.
“How are you?” I ask, dragging my eyes away.
“I’m great.”
I sit down across from her, working to look as casually confident as she is. Normally, I am. Normally, I’m hard to fluster. But the duality of the intensity of her demeanor and ease in her body is distracting.
“Thanks for taking my meeting,” she says. Her hair is up in a bun; a few tendrils have come loose, and they fall softly against her long, delicate neck. She wears minimal makeup, I guess, but her lips are this perfect, soft red. However much of a shit show this program will end up being, this woman is going to be beautiful on-screen.
“Absolutely.” I swallow, trying to get my voice to sound less strained. “We still have a lot to hammer out.” An understatement. The requests her agent sent over read like a foreign language, but Nat told me to trust her so here we are. I feel like I’m stepping into a dark, foggy alley with nothing but a rolled-up newspaper to defend me against surprise knife attacks. This will be either an inconvenient but brief project that gets me what I want from Blaine, or the worst mistake of my professional career. “But before we get too deep in the details,” I say, “I wanted to ask if you have any experience with the DNADuo. Past user profiles are obviously confidential, but our legal department needs to know if we have any previous Gold Matches we should filter or add to the list for The One That Got Away.”
“I’m familiar with the app,” she says, smoothing a hand down her thigh to straighten a soft wrinkle there. “And, uh, I stopped checking my matches before I ever saw any Gold ones.”
“Okay.” I jot down the note, sensing there’s more beneath the surface there, but she doesn’t elaborate. Closing my notebook, I meet her eyes across the table. “Well, if you think of anything that seems worth discussing, let me know. We don’t need to know your dating history, but also don’t want to put you in an awkward position with someone you’ve met and didn’t like.”
“Thank you.” She keeps nodding but doesn’t take her eyes off my face.
Needing something to do under her scrutiny, I sit forward in my seat, reaching to pour us each a glass of water from a pitcher on the coffee table. “Is there something you wanted to discuss?” I ask.
“I can’t quite figure you out.”
“What would you like to know?”
“What’s your background?” She runs a thoughtful finger beneath her full lip. “North Star’s website doesn’t go very deep. Google doesn’t tell me much about you. All I know is you usually make documentaries and grew up a young pirate in Northern England.”
I laugh at the callback to our first meeting. “Blackpool. That’s right. Had to quit the looting-and-pillaging industry at fifteen, when my American father brought me to the States.”
“Fifteen.” She winces. “That’s rough.”
It was, but no reason to linger. “I went to USC for film and ended up here. And yes, until recently I’ve worked on documentaries. Coastal climate change, marine animals, you know.”
“USC for film but ended up in San Diego at a small production company,” she says. “Either you aren’t very good at your job, or you have a personal reason for being here. It seems like an important distinction if I’m your newest collaborator.”