Page 63 of Semantics
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“I’ve got three people who I think might be interested,” she told Jen later that day at the office.
They were in the kitchen. Jen was making herself a cup of herbal tea, while Stella was on her second cup of coffee, and the strong kind, too, with the maximum amount of caffeine on offer. She needed to get some sleep tonight if she was going to be fully present for an important meeting tomorrow with a potential huge client that they were trying to woo, and especially if she was going to stay up late tomorrow night with Violet.
“But she told you not to help,” Jen replied.
“I’m not actually helping anything. I thought I’d email and see if any of them are even looking for a new investment to make. It’s possible, they’ll all say no.”
She stared down at her coffee as the machine mixed the water with the grounds trapped in the black pod.
“And if they say yes? Even one of them?”
“I’ll give them some more info and see if they want to move forward. If they say yes, I’ll give them Violet’s info, but I won’t make an introduction.”
“So she wouldn’t know that it’s you? Isn’t that kind of lying, Stella?”
“One step at a time. And I’d tell her if anything came of it. It’s not like there are any guarantees. She might meet one of them, and they offer her a nice investment. One of them is more into acquisitions and tech specifically, not really the business, so I don’t know if I’ll reach out to him.”
“What do you mean, the tech?”
“He likes to buy the tech behind the software, not the business itself, and use the base code for another one of his businesses to give him a head start there. If he has something that could use a translation tool, for example, he’d buy the code and repurpose it. Violet and her people would get paid for that, but they’d then be free to work on something else.”
“You think she’d want that?”
“No.” Stella shook her head. “I’ll hold off on reaching out to him. Maybe if things get more dire, she’ll want to talk to him to at least recoup some of her investment. I’ll bring it up then if it comes to it, but hopefully not.”
“And you’re sure this won’t backfire?”
“Nope. But like I said, it’s just a couple of emails, and she can say no. It’s her business. She’s got a lot of pride, and I understand where it comes from. I used to dislike her because she had everything – the head start, the money, the automatic job after graduation, and the easy path to CEO of a giant corporation one day, while I had to work for everything and nothing came easy for me – but there are downsides to both, I suppose.”
She took her full coffee cup from the machine and carried it over to where the sugar was on the counter.
“And what has you feeling this way all of a sudden?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re having sex with the woman.”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“But you’re trying to help her with her business.”
“Yes. What’s so wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It just sounds like she said that she didn’t want that help. And if you’re only having sex with her, why are you even offering to help her with this?”
“Because I’m not a dick. I’m a good person, I hope. If I can help her, why wouldn’t I try? Sex or no.”
“I don’t know. Seems like you’re getting pretty invested in this non-relationship. Did you even look at the link I sent you this morning?”
“Will you stop trying to hook me up with women on some app?”
“She’s not from some app. I met her in college,” Jen told her. “She followed me on Instagram a few weeks ago, and we’ve been messaging back and forth. We were friends back then, but she recently came out, noticed that I was out, too, and since she only lives about an hour from here, she wanted to know if I would like to hang out.”
“Why are you sending me her info, then?”
“Because she’s not my type. I was never into her like that. She’s great, though. I thought if she were going to come here and the two of us were going to hang out, you could come, too, and maybe sparks would fly.”
