Page 36 of Art of Love
She looked up and gazed straight into my eyes. “I was vomiting. It was gross.”
Embarrassment washed over her face.
I chuckled. “I don’t care about that. I was worried, so I stayed with you. You could have fallen over and hit your head or something, or faint and drift into a coma. Any of those are worse than vomit. Plus, the fact that you’re beautiful helped loads.”
There it was, her smile. It started with her trying not to, but it came out, along with the soft rose color on her cheeks.
“You think I’m beautiful?”
“I think that’s kind of obvious.”
“I’m sorry you had to see me that way. I’m not normally like that.” She looked away and back out to the cluster of trees on the other side of the river.
“I’d love to see what you’re normally like.”
“I can’t remember.” She spoke barely above a whisper like she was saying that more to herself than to me.
“What can’t you remember now?”
“Myself. But that’s oversharing, and I shouldn’t be telling you that. Don’t want you trying to guess my weaknesses and using them against me.”
I chuckled. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“If you want something badly enough, you can. Like this job. Are you going to tell me you don’t want this job badly? If you say yes, I know it’s a lie. You gave up being a lawyer, and not just any old lawyer either. My friend’s a lawyer too, so I know how big Silvermans is.”
“I want the job badly, Jia. I think we both do. But I’m not the kind of guy to step on people to get what I want.” I wasn’t big-headed, but I was fortunate in life in the sense that I was naturally good at whatever I did. When I was studying and doing my legal training, I excelled without having to do too much. But it was perhaps down to the fact that I had my own ways of understanding things. Everything was art to me. Pictures in my mind that had their own stories.
I’d never had to push myself too much because my world was filled with art, and I never had to be that guy who brownnosed, or whatever you did in a competition.
Sure, I didn’t like this whole idea of us competing for something I wanted, but as for trying to basically sabotage her chances of getting through... nope, that wasn’t me.
That wasn’t winning.
“Everyone else does that.” Her voice broke my thoughts.
“Do you?”
“No.” She pulled in a breath and knitted her fingers together.
“Jia, are you worried I’m going to sabotage you in any way?”
“I wish that were the only thing I was worried about.”
I leaned closer. “If it helps, I promise you I won’t do that. So, I have an idea.”
“What?”
“I never met you at Impasso. That was just a weird life coincidence. I met you at the bar. What if we start over and forget about the job for a moment? We could just be two people in a park sitting by the river talking.”
She looked like she was considering it.
“If we’re not talking about work, then what are we talking about?”
“Ourselves. You could start, seeing as how you just said you can’t remember yourself. What made you feel like that?”
“Everything.”
“Like what?”
