Page 28 of Semantics

“Fine. Why did you chug your martini and leave the bar when you could’ve stayed and talked to me for five minutes after agreeing to meet me in the first place?”

“It was awkward. I don’t do well with awkward.”

“Who does?”

“I don’t know, but not me. You seem to be fine with it, I guess. You asked someone you hated a decade ago to have drinks. Of course, I didn’t think about the reason why you did that until today.”

“Reason why I invited you for a drink?”

“The fact that you were only interested in my company and drinks with me because you wanted me to do something for you.”

“I wanted a connection to Russell, yeah. I won’t apologize for that. My job is sales, and I work for a tech company that might be able to sell to them. I didn’t lie to you or pretend otherwise, Violet.”

“But you weren’t exactly upfront with your intentions, either.”

“Would you have even met with me if I started the conversation with, ‘Sure, you can buy my software, but you’ll be small potatoes. I really need an intro to someone bigger. Can you call your daddy for me?’”

“No, obviously.”

“And you’re telling me that as a CEO, you’ve never held something back when trying to do something for your business?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because I don’t have a history with anyone I’d do that with. Not like you,” Violet answered.

“And what is our history, exactly? In your words.”

“You were a pompous asshole. I had one thing that my parents actually thought I was good at and supported me in, and that was school; the fact that I studied hard and brought home great grades. If I went home with anything less than the highest GPA in a very competitive business program and the plaque that went along with it, my life would have–”

“Wait. There was a plaque?” Stella asked.

“Yes, there was a plaque. You didn’t know?”

“I guess I thought we were competing for top of the class because it came with recommendations and networking opportunities that we both needed. I didn’t know there was a plaque.”

“Well, there was. And you were a pain in my ass, always making every class way more complicated than it needed to be, getting great grades without even trying, and–”

“You think I didn’t try?” She slammed her laptop shut. “Um… One of us was the poor girl who could barely afford the program. Of course, I tried. I had no choice. I had busted my ass just to get in. I wasn’t going to waste my opportunity. But you just had to keep answering the questions I knew the answers to, meeting with the professors in their office hours, taking up all of their time, so they couldn’t meet with anyone else, and taking a scholarship from someone else like me who could’ve really used that money in the first place.”

“What?” Violet asked, looking very much offended. “I met with the professors because I was trying to keep up with you. But what about the scholarship?”

“You were one of the scholarship–”

“I won a scholarship, yes. It was a contest, and I won the spot and the money that came with it, but I didn’t take the money. I just took the spot.”

“What do you mean?”

“I earned my spot fair and square, Stella. And I did win a scholarship, but I only took the spot in the program that I’d earned. I told them to keep the money and give it to another student because I didn’t need it.”

“I didn’t know that,” she admitted softly.

“Why would you? I didn’t tell anyone.”

“It doesn’t matter. We just didn’t get along, and it makes more sense to me now than I think it did then, why you bothered me so much.”

“It makes sense to you now?”