Beyond the Point(66)
“That’s actually quite poetic,” Dani said, wishing she still had her pen and paper to write it down. She lifted her bag to her shoulder and started toward the door. “You know, I used to want to be a coach.”
“Used to?” The guy laughed. “You don’t look old enough to have a dream that died. How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Ah, a geezer,” he said. “So why aren’t you coaching?”
Dani remembered the salary that had been listed under his name. “I don’t really know,” she said. “For one, my basketball career didn’t really go as planned.”
“Well, that’s a dumb reason not to do what you love. Nothing ever goes as planned.”
They stood there looking at one another for a moment before Dani shrugged and headed toward the door. “It’s been good talking,” she said, reaching her hand out to shake his. “Thanks for the interview.”
“Hey, before you go, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Are you single?” he ventured, putting his hands on his hips. “I don’t mean to pry, but I was thinking I could set you up. There’s this girl—my sister actually. She’s a few years older than you. But smart. Quick-witted. I think you two would really hit it off.”
“Oh,” Dani said. “I’m not . . . I’m straight.”
“Oh shit. Well now I really feel like an asshole. I just thought . . . the short hair . . . the . . . Right? God. My bad. Forget it. Forget I said anything.”
“Don’t worry about it. Honest mistake. And hey, thanks again. You gave me a lot of good stuff to work with here. They’ll send you a check in a few weeks for your time.”
ONCE SHE’D MADE it into the back of a cab, Dani leaned her head against the window and groaned deeply. Shaking her head, she reached for the bottle of Advil in her purse, swallowed three pills dry, and carefully pulled the emotional dagger out of her chest.
At every turn, people got it wrong. Black people thought she acted too white; white people saw her as black. People knew she was an athlete, but any time she tried to succeed, they thought she was cocky. For years, she’d fallen more and more in love with Locke, but he simply saw her as a friend. And now, James O’Leary had tried to set her up with his sister. Clearly, the energy she was putting off was completely different than the energy she wanted to put into the world.
Was she too masculine? Too intense?
What was it going to take for someone to finally see her for who she really was? And like what they saw?
In her reflection in the window, wet tears glittered on Dani’s cheeks, mingling with her freckles. Wiping the wetness with the palm of her hand, Dani blew air out of her lips and pulled herself together. There was no use in getting upset.
“Where to?” the cab driver asked.
She wasn’t expected back at the office for a few more hours. And while there was plenty of work to do unpacking this interview with James, both professionally and personally, Dani knew she couldn’t do it yet. Not when her frustration was this raw. In just a few weeks, everyone she loved would arrive for Thanksgiving. Her parents were driving from Ohio; her brother, Dominic, and his partner, Charles, were flying in from Chicago. And despite their crazy schedules, Locke, Avery, and Hannah had all found a way to travel to Boston, too—significant others in tow.
She’d be the only person at the table alone. The odd one out, who’d invited everyone in.
She thought about the fresh money in her bank account and the winter displays that had appeared in the windows of her favorite boutiques downtown. The idea of brand-new clothes with fresh tags, perfectly folded in a thick shopping bag, soothed her, and she hadn’t even spent a dollar yet. Retail therapy. It was cheaper than real therapy, she told herself.
“Back Bay,” she answered. “Anywhere on Newbury Street.”
A FEW WEEKS later, the office buzzed with the chaos of a deadline. Phones rang loudly. The graphic design team moved their mouses briskly over multiple screens, deftly adding color and pizzazz to the research Dani had painstakingly compiled in the past year, hoping the numbers would tell a story. The first deliverable—another stupid marketing term that Dani loved to hate—was due to Gelhomme, and unfortunately, the French didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. No one was going home until the report was complete.
“Pete,” said Dani, rolling her chair out of her cubicle to peer into his. The lead graphic designer was an overweight thirty-two-year-old with a muss of brown hair and a patchy beard. He wore a black hoodie to work every day and was so good at his job, no one even mentioned the fact that he smelled of cottage cheese. “For the final slide, we need length of shave time, number of shaves a week, and number of razor brands purchased in a year—all averages. Got it?”
“On it,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the screen.
Dani nodded, closed a few windows on her browser, and breathed. Wait ’til Gelhomme sees this, she thought brightly.
She’d never been so proud of a project in her life. A year had passed since she’d joined E & G’s research team, and she relished sifting through all those dry figures spread out across Excel spreadsheets. Survey answers coded and entered as numbers, each in its perfect little cell. Human motivations measured and analyzed. She could get lost in the matrix for hours, like a pirate searching for treasure. It didn’t even bother her that this report would go up the chain of E & G without her name on it. In her view, excellence was far more important than ownership.