Page 22 of Advanced Chemistry

“About what?”

“The, uh…” If this was a sign of my verbal skills for today, we were epically fucked. All I could do was point to the living room.

“Is it about the meeting?”

No, it was absolutely not, but I took the easy way out.

“Yeah. Are you feeling good?” I asked.

I usually wasn’t this much of a chicken. But this wasn’t some guy I was letting down with a standard “It’s not you. It’s me.” speech. This was Sebastian, who was sporting a frustratingly unreadable face at the moment.

“I’m feeling great,” Sebastian said flatly. “We’re prepared. We have a great business. Craig is going to be blown away.”

“Yeah, totally.”

“Cool. Well, you can’t go into Hollis Property Management wearing that.” He cracked a smile.

I suddenly felt very naked under my towel. I hightailed it to my bedroom before I sprouted wood in front of my friend.

I appreciated Sebastian never taking his eyes off the ball. He sacrificed a lot for Beverage Solutions. With his intellect, he could have done anything he wanted. He had unlimited paths to any career. And he chose operating vending machines with me. I wasn’t going to fuck things up with weird thoughts and feelings about one wild night. Sebastian didn’t have a crush on me. It was the heat of the threesome messing with my head. It was still for the best that we at least acknowledged the elephant in the room, even if just to laugh it off. But we could do that later.

This morning, we had a meeting to crush.

* * *

The Hollis headquarterswere located at the end of a cul-de-sac in an office park with a large man made lake and fountain in front of their parking lot. We’d never tried to sell our services to a company with their own lake and fountain.

This was the big leagues.

“They’re a company like all of our other clients. Doesn’t matter the size of their building,” I said.

“We got this,” Sebastian said.

We bumped fists and headed inside.

The lobby was buzzing with employees coming to work. They weren’t nervous. They were enjoying their coffee and chit chat. This was a regular day for them.

The receptionist gave us passes and instructed us to head to the third floor.

“Third floor. Not the top floor,” I noted in the elevator.

“Makes sense. Craig is head of procurement, but he’s likely not the final decision maker. He’s the layer before the final C-suite approval,” Sebastian said.

“True.” Sebastian was the researcher of the two of us. He probably knew the names of every Hollis VP already. I noticed a hint of shaving cream just under his jaw. “You missed a little.”

I licked my thumb and went to wipe it off when Sebastian smacked my hand away. Hard. He was tightly coiled, but was it just because of the meeting?

The elevator doors opened, and we walked to Craig’s office in silence. His office was small and windowless, made to feel even smaller because of the hefty man behind the desk. He had a bushy beard, a combover, and wire-framed glasses perched on his large head. He reminded me of many of my friends’ dads, a not-uncommon feeling I had on sales calls.

“Good morning.” I knocked on the doorway to get his attention from his computer.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“It’s Anton and Sebastian from Beverage Solutions. We have a meeting on the books for eight-thirty,” Sebastian said.

“We do?” Craig looked at his computer. “Oh, I see we do.”

He looked up at us again, likely calculating the realization that he couldn’t shoo us away as easily as he could hang up.

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