She didn’t dare ask. She’d offered to hook someone up once, only to get a mean scowl. Some men were affronted by that question.
“I am through step one,” Krista shook her head and huffed. He laughed in commissary.
“So what brings you to the Dark Hub?” He leaned back and gestured around him. This guy was the most relaxed guy she had ever met. Ever! She relaxed that much more, itching to sweep the paper in front of her into a pile.
“Well, you, sir, are step two.” She lightly brushed a page toward another that looked similar. Obviously they belonged together; she just had to help Marcus see it.
“Am I?” Marcus said in surprise, easily ignoring her hint.
She tried to concentrate on him instead of his desk. “You are indeed. I did a bunch of research on everything jewelry, and now I am to report to you about new directions to travel.”
“Well then, I shall whirl you around like Dorothy and send you down the yellow brick road.” He turned to his computer and pulled up some spreadsheets.
Cue: avalanche.
The next half hour was her taking quick and fierce notes as he rattled on about this market and that niche, this idea and that scheme. He talked with his hands and stared out at distance ideas. It didn’t seem like he intended to be taken seriously, so he was spouting off anything that came to his head, realistic or not.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to get our little fingers in here and do this?” He’d ask whimsically.
Krista assumed that meant she was supposed to find out if it was statistically plausible, so she tried to outline that idea as quickly as possible before he went on to the next, “I wish we could…” or “Wouldn’t it be nice…” or “I was thinking…”
After his creative genius was expired for the first pass, Krista stiffly straightened from her crouch and returned his pen. He looked at her like he forgot she was there.
“Now what do you do, geek girl?” he asked, leaning forward again with a pleasant smile.
It occurred to her that no one knew what Research did—besides frown and say weird things.
She smiled. “Now I turn your gum-drop dreams into reality, Prince Marcus.”
He laughed. “What? A sense of humor? No wonder that young stud loves you!”
An explosion went off in Krista’s mid-section. She squelched it immediately. The last thing she needed was to get lovesick over a womanizing playboy in front of the biggest gossip in the company. She was not looking for career suicide.
“Well, I’ve always wanted my personal fairy Godmother.” He waved an imaginary magic wand and did something akin to giving her pixie dust. His phone rang during her dusting and he stopped to pick it up with a “Marcus at your service.”
Krista gratefully took that as her cue to get out of the weird world of overly creative people, and hustled back toward her desk. On the way out she got some odd looks, and realized she had probably mussed her hair while thinking about Marcus’s unreasonable whims. That, or she had ink on her face. Or both. It was a bad habit, but running her fingers through her hair, or holding her chin, made her feel like she was getting the brain juice flowing. She always walked away with a plan and in need of a comb.
Back at her office she put her desk into order, even though it didn’t need it, and then put her notes into some sort of order so she could look them over. She typed them up, adding all the detail she could remember, then stared at the screen.
Her music was some fast beats, and she thought they might be distracting her, so she changed it to soft sounds. It didn’t help.
The list was worse than Sean’s because it was so abstract. The ideas were just short of genius, but way too deep in the land of creativity for her to turn into something she could research. The barrier was just too high.
Crap.
An hour later she was still staring at her computer screen. She had shaken her head a couple times, did a couple doodles of ideas that didn’t pan out, but largely she hadn’t so much as changed position. She had no idea how she was going to accomplish this.
But she knew achieving those ideas was the key to their breaking ground and possibly making the marketing hall of fame with whatever elusive client they were chasing. She had to fulfill her end of the Marcus/Krista team. She just wished she was smarter.
Fuck!
In a blind panic, she printed out all the notes and headed home. On the train she continued to stare. Then walking to her house. Then sitting at the table. It was like trying to decipher Sanskrit.
Finally Ben tapped her on the shoulder. She looked up and met a confused expression.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“What? Why? What are you talking about?” She looked at her extremities for blood.
“Well, your hair looks like you just woke up, you have ink all over your face, and you might as well be drooling while staring at white paper. This isn’t like you.”
“Oh. I am trying to find a way into the creative genius of a guy at work so I can do some field research on his ideas. His ideas are just so out there that I can’t find a logical basis to take off from.”
Krista was starting to get teary-eyed, which was the first sign of defeat. She hated failure. No, not hated; she was terrified of it. In school she rarely ever got less than an A-. She worked her ass off to make sure she did well. Overachiever didn’t even begin to describe it, it was a complex.
But no matter how hard she worked, every once in a while there was something she just couldn’t grasp. In school it had been woodworking. No matter what she did, she just couldn’t get it. Every time she went to that class she felt like one of the dumb kids.
For a change of pace, actually, it was the dumb kids from her academic classes who were the ones excelling. The tables were solidly turned. She’d been glad she helped them when they needed it in academics, because when she hit woodworking, her fellow book-smart students all failed miserably where she had mountains of much-needed, reciprocated aid.
Ben’s face turned to one of desperation as he saw her close to tears. Like all men she knew, Ben could not handle when a woman cried. He quickly sat down next to her and looked at the paper she was stewing over.
“Hmmm, I don’t know much about marketing, and I know nothing about jewelry, but maybe I can help you bridge the gap between art brain and logic brain?”
“But you have art brain.”
“I’ve learned to work with business types like you. I just imagine I am the most boring, white-and-black person on earth, and try to condense my thoughts appropriately.” He smiled, trying to cheer her up. She really wished it was working.
“What do you mean ‘white-and-black’?”
“Devoid of all gray matter,” Ben said with a mousy smile.
She really did love this guy. He was so sweet and good. So opposite of her.
“Okay,” she agreed weakly.
“Okay.” Ben pulled his chair closer so they could look at the notes together. “Why don’t you take me through these notes?”
“Well, maybe it would be better if I take you through the notes that actually came from his mouth?”
“Oh yes, that would be much better, yes. The horse’s mouth, as it were.”
Krista pulled her scribbled notes from her handbag and laid them out in front of Ben.
Ben squinted, eyes scanning the pages. “Well, maybe you should read them out loud so we can both look over them?”
“In other words, my writing looks like something a five-year-old would do?”
Ben just smiled encouragingly, which meant that it was exactly what he was thinking but too nice to say.
With their heads together, the two spent the next two hours going over the notes from Marcus, then what Krista thought they meant. It turned out she had it all wrong. From the first word out of Marcus’s mouth, she was not on his wavelength. Her brain was too organized and logical. Marcus was too haphazard and creative.
Ben was the perfect combination of both, thank freaking God! He literally spent two hours saving her ass. She had no idea how she was going to thank him, but she would, and it would be spectacular. Possibly expensive.
The next day she showed up to work early to get started on Marcus’s real ideas; the ideas Ben translated. It was totally doable once she had the decoder ring in place.
She flew through the company databases and that of the library both. She even took to the streets looking for newspapers, magazines, and sometimes crowd watching for a new take on data collecting. Real stat style!
She needed a TV show about this stuff!
Once she had a good start, she catalogued, organized, graphed and once again stuffed data into nooks and crannies. She kept a stockpile of things that still didn’t make sense, and just chugged away at the new onslaught of data that did.
Finally hitting a roadblock, she headed back down to the land of the Dark Hub. Marcus was at his desk, talking on the phone once again, this time to someone about this new style of shoe that was making a comeback in today’s market. It sounded legit and work-related until he said that that was a perfect reason for him to own a pair. Making a comeback meant he would be the forerunner in fashion!
Half of her wanted to roll her eyes. That was the half that was working. The half that was female, with a life, wanted to listen in. It was a great idea. She might need a pair.
As before, he saw her and said he would talk to the person on the phone another time.
“My favorite geek girl! How is it going in the land of Nod?”
“It’s going. Slowly, steadily, but grindingly going.”
“I hear they got you out of that stuffy math hole and put you in your own office?”
Apparently, this marketing genius had been checking up on her. That was probably bad news.
“Yeah. I went from a bunch of anti-social people to no one at all. I’m not sure which is better.”
“On your own, darling, of course. At least now you can sing and talk to yourself in peace.”
The record screeched off the track in her head. Firstly, had she been singing and talking to herself?
Judge’s ruling? Yes, she probably had.
Next question: Was he spying, or was someone else checking up on her? She hadn’t seen Jacob in a while. That was a sobering thought.
Or was he getting the information from his old Research chums? Which meant she was loud enough that they all heard her at the other end of their department. All good questions. All also very daunting.
Rather than ask about it, she played it cool. No reason to get worked up that her embarrassing little quirk was common knowledge. If she let on that she was disturbed, then she would look guilty or paranoid. Which she was, but that was a secret.
“Definitely, but it was always nice to get a good chorus going. Now I have to carry it all myself!” She feigned being put out.
Marcus laughed in glee. “Girl, you just bring it down here and I’ll give you a little bass when you need it!”
Okay, business time; Krista was getting antsy. She still had a mound of work to get to. The problem was, talking shop seemed so taboo when dealing with Marcus that Krista thought she better ease into it with a little “Office Space” humor.
She really hoped he’d seen the movie, or else this would be more embarrassing than singing to herself…
“Will do. Say, listen, I need to talk to you about your TPS reports…”
As hoped, Marcus leaned back in his chair and guffawed. He slapped his desk and wiped a fake tear from his eye. “A woman after my own heart. I LOVE that movie. LOVE it. Okay, little Miss Workaholic, what can I do for you?”
“Okay, well I‘ve gone about as far as possible on your ‘wouldn’t it be nice …’ list. I’ve hit a couple snags.”
“Just a couple? Most of the stuff I come up with isn’t even remotely doable. But it’s nice to know you’re trying, math-geek mine.”
“I wouldn’t be a proper Fairy Godmother if I didn’t work the impossible, right? Okay, the thing is that the last couple ideas might be doable, but it’s lost in the translation. I am going to need you to go over it again.”
“No problemo. Only thing is, I spit out new ideas so often that I lose track of the old ones.”
“Just call me a spittoon. Said spittoon knows how to write things down and keep track of them.” She pointedly looked at his paper-strewn desk. He just shrugged. “So I will read back what I have, hopefully spark your mental pistons, and you just let it rip again. Will that work?”
“Yes, ma’am. Fire away!” He actually sounded impressed that this could be done. The guy didn’t write down much, it seemed.
Krista read back her notes exactly as she had written them down, daring to push a couple pieces of paper toward a couple others that were similar. When she’d gotten the idea out, and had found some clear desk, which helped her mental state, Marcus’s eyes lit up with remembrance.
“Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “That was a good idea. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that, but …”
Krista was ready this time. She took notes frantically, trying to catch every last word he spit out that might help the translation factor. They went on to the next idea, then the next. There were four in all, and by the time they reached the fourth she was completely done in.
She straightened painfully from her crouch.
“No more,” she shook her head and held up her hands. “No more of your insanity. My geek brain can’t handle such an extended tour into your art brain. It gives me a headache.”
Marcus sobered for a moment as he looked up at her. “You’re really working on making these ideas happen, huh?”
Krista’s confusion seeped into her features. Distractedly, she picked up a few stray pens and pencils and put them in a holder. “Uh, yeah. Why? Is that wrong?”