Ride: A Bad Boy Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Since he knew people tended to move from right to left — he’d read it in an article somewhere — he started on the left side of the massive hall. That way, he figured, he would have the fuller attention of the recruiters on that side.

  Zach stood up straight, cleared his throat, and approached the first green-highlighted booth. For an hour, he shook hands, handed out his resume, and talked about his research interests. After a little while, he stopped being nervous.

  They’re here to hire someone, he reminded himself. I’m here to get hired. That’s all.

  It’s kind of like speed dating, but slightly more pleasant.

  After forty-five minutes, Zach felt like he was on a roll, like maybe he was finally getting good at talking to people. Most of them didn’t seem to mind that he was a nontraditional student, a good six years older than the usual college student. In fact, a couple of them confided that they preferred nontraditional students — more driven, one recruiter had said.

  Zach turned the corner of the makeshift hallway and stood there for a moment, between two booths, glancing at his game plan for the next stretch of booths. The job fair was finally filling up, so there was slightly more of a crowd to navigate.

  He looked up from the map, frowning, trying to come up with a plan.

  Then, two male students stepped away from a booth, and there she was, twenty feet away. Just standing there, her hands perched on a plastic folding table, her strawberry blond hair curling just past her shoulders. Wearing a white blouse and close-fitting but professional skirt that hugged her curves in exactly the right way.

  Zach’s mouth went dry, and he swallowed, then licked his lips, then swallowed again. He realized that he was staring, and looked back down at the map he’d highlighted, pretending to read it.

  Instead he sneaked another glance at the girl. Now she was talking to another student, handing him a brochure, nodding as she did and despite himself, Zach imagined standing behind her, his face in her hair, her perfect, round ass against his erection as she sighed, arching her back into —

  No. No. No, hell no, NO, Zach thought. Do not get a boner right here in the middle of a job fair.

  What the hell is wrong with you?

  He turned around, nearly colliding with a bored-looking girl in a badly-fitting blazer. He power-walked past the booths he’d already visited and toward the water fountain by the entrance to the hall, where he took a long drink. Then he stepped away and pretended to look at a bulletin board.

  What if this is what you’ve been waiting for? He thought. You wanted zing, and I think you just fucking got it.

  He glanced back at the job fair, rows and rows of plastic folding tables.

  I came here to get a job, he reminded himself. Anything else would be wildly inappropriate.

  There was an ad for free puppies. He looked at it for a while.

  It’s not like she’s going to hire me, he thought, and looked down at the map he still held in his hands. Most of the tables along the row where she’d been weren’t even highlighted, so they didn’t even hire structural engineers.

  Be cool for once, Zach told himself.

  He turned around and walked back past the booths. He stopped at the corner for just a split second, looking at the girl again. MutiGen, her booth said.

  Not even highlighted on Zach’s map.

  He took a deep breath, then closed the distance between them.

  2. Katrina

  “I’m actually a Classics major,” the kid said, mumbling into the flyer Katrina had just handed him. “You know, Latin and Greek and stuff?”

  “Well, we’re a bioengineering firm,” she said, as brightly as she could. “We don’t have a lot of linguists on staff.”

  Being friendly was starting to feel like a struggle.

  “What are you looking for?” the guy asked, sounding more than a little surly.

  Someone who has taken even one engineering class, Katrina wanted to say.

  “Right now we’re hiring for summer internships, so we’re looking for people with an engineering background, for engineering positions,” she answered.

  How many times can I say engineering before this guy gets it? she wondered.

  “Cool,” the kid said. “You got a signup sheet or something?”

  Still forcing a smile, Katrina pushed the sheet toward him, already almost full of the names and email addresses people who wanted to learn more about MutiGen’s internships. He wrote his name and email address slowly, like he was trying extra-hard.

  “I won the pine box derby in my hometown four years running,” he said, straightening back up and brushing hair out of his eyes. “Catch you guys later.”

  At last, he walked off. Katrina exchanged a glance with Pete, her boss, who was running the booth with her.

  He just shook his head, then lifted the sheet and examined the name.

  “That wasn’t the guy we’re looking for,” he said.

  Katrina just nodded, that uncomfortable feeling in her stomach returning. She didn’t like being here with an ulterior motive, especially not one as slimy as the one they had. Lately, she’d been having mixed feelings about acting as the recruiter at job fairs in the first place.

  It was because she was one of the only female engineers at MutiGen. She knew perfectly well that, whenever discussions about gender equity in the sciences came up, she was brought out and trotted around, along with the one or two others. She also knew that part of the reason she went to the job fairs was because other women were more likely to come up and talk to her, and that was the part she liked. Katrina would talk to college-aged women all day about the engineering world and how to get into it.

  The flip side of that was her suspicion that her bosses thought college guys also wanted to talk to her. She did look closer to twenty-two than twenty-eight, and being short did nothing to help that. The thought of it made her fume, though.

  The men on her team didn’t have to wonder if every single person who pretended to be interested in her work was flirting. The men on her team never wondered whether a knee-length skirt was too sexy to wear to work.

  The men on her team got to do their work while she was at this job fair, telling Classics majors that her engineering firm intended to hire engineers. In a couple of years, they’d all get promotions for the work they’d been doing while she’d been standing around, handing out flyers.

  This is the last job fair, she decided on the spot.

  Katrina looked up, suddenly pleased with herself for making the decision. She rested her hands on the crummy plastic folding table and looked around.

  I’m not going to miss this, she thought, her gaze skipping past a tall guy in a deep gray suit.

  Immediately, she went back to him. He was studying something intently, his concentration unbroken.

  At least someone dressed nicely, she thought. Very nicely.

  He was easily six feet tall with a broad chest and shoulders, his suit expertly tailored to him, his dark brown hair just barely in need of a haircut. Katrina knew that she was looking at him too long and too hard, but she couldn’t help it. She did love a well-dressed man. What woman didn’t?

  Then he looked up and right at her. Katrina looked away but not before her heart skipped a beat.

  The guy was seriously good-looking.

  He’s probably a football player or something, she thought. He got lost and now he’s at the wrong job fair.

  When she looked up again, he was gone. She couldn’t help but be disappointed, at least until a group of young women came up and wanted to know if MutiGen had openings for computer engineers.

  Katrina always had time to talk to college women who were computer engineers. They chatted for a while, her boss Pete standing next to her and nodding occasionally, not really paying attention.

  The girls all signed the list, took some flyers, and then left. Katrina couldn’t help but feel hopeful.

  Pete checked the list.

  “They were all women,” she told h
im.

  “Never hurts to double-check,” he said, putting the list back on the table.

  “This seems silly,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Why not just approach this guy, whoever he is, directly?”

  “Carol thinks that’s too suspicious,” he said. He straightened a pile of handouts on the table. “I don’t necessarily agree with her, but she’s my boss, so I do what she says. Most of the time.”

  Carol sure as hell wasn’t going to college job fairs.

  Katrina opened her mouth again, and then from the throng of people, the guy in the gray suit appeared, one hand in his pocket and one holding onto his leather briefcase.

  Up close, it was obvious that he wasn’t twenty-two. Katrina’s heart leapt and then fluttered in her chest, and she could feel her palms go suddenly sweaty.

  He looks like a superhero cartoon, she thought. But in a sexy way.

  “Hi,” she said. She made herself smile through her nerves. “Interested in MutiGen?”

  He looked straight at her, and Katrina could feel a blush come on, starting in her chest and creeping up her neck. His eyes were light brown, almost gold, and she felt like she could have stared into them forever.

  “I might be,” he said, and a smile played around his lips. “I have to admit, I didn’t do my homework. What is MutiGen?”

  “We’re a cutting-edge biomechanical and biomedical engineering firm based in Salt Lake City,” she said, going directly into her spiel. Thank God she’d said this all so many times that she didn’t even have to think about it. “We’re still a mid-sized firm, but thanks to several Department of Defense contracts over the last few years, we’ve been growing quickly. This summer we’re offering a number of paid internships to qualified candidates.”

  He was still looking at her. Katrina began to get uncomfortably warm. Up close, he was even more attractive, tall and built in a way that not many engineers were.

  “Ever hire regular mechanical engineers?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “That’s what you do?”

  “With an emphasis in structural engineering,” he admitted. “More skyscrapers and bridges than... biomechanics.”

  “We have a few pure mechanical people on staff,” she said. She felt a little bad: she didn’t want to give him too much hope, but it was the truth. “One of our big projects is with artificial limbs — hands, mostly — and a fair amount of regular engineering goes into that.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he looked thoughtful for a moment.

  “Are you the firm that’s developing artificial hands that respond to nerve impulses?” he asked.

  “That’s us,” Katrina said.

  “I read an article about that,” he said. “That’s some amazing science fiction stuff, right there.”

  Katrina laughed, a little embarrassed.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Do you work on that?” he asked, his eyebrows going up.

  “I do,” she said. “It’s all still a work in progress, though. Science has only just barely started to understand a lot about the central nervous system, so it’s a pretty exciting thing to work on.”

  “That’s a long way from Captain Hook,” he said.

  Katrina laughed.

  “The hook does have some advantages,” she said. “Advantage one, a hook is probably about ten dollars, and it never needs software updates.”

  “The hook is probably much more threatening, too,” he said. “Which is a big plus if you’re a pirate captain.”

  “Lucky for pirates, feet and legs are also coming along,” Katrina said. “Though not as quickly as hands. There’s less demand for being able to wiggle a specific toe.”

  Next to her, she could hear Pete clear his throat, and Katrina remembered where she was: at work.

  “Anyway, we also do some stem cell research, and have been working on artificial skin,” she said, straightening her spine. The guy glanced quickly at Pete, but then looked back at her.

  “And you might need mechanical engineers for an internship?” he asked, hopefully.

  Katrina paused.

  “Maybe,” she said. “It’s a possibility. It depends on what we’re looking at in the next month.”

  The guy reached into his bag and pulled out his résumé, handing it to Katrina, who scanned it quickly. He had a two-year degree from a community college, but he’d graduated high school ten years earlier.

  Her eyebrows went up of their own accord.

  “I’m what they politely call a non-traditional student,” he said, reading her face. She looked up and realized that he must have had this conversation at every single table in the hall. “Impolitely, I had some shit going on, and then fucked around for a few years. But I’m very motivated now.”

  He grinned, small creases forming next to his eyes, and his smile made heat flow through Katrina a little more than she wanted, standing at a job fair.

  “We’ll take that into account,” she said, smiling back at him, totally unable to help herself. “Age is just a number, after all.”

  He laughed.

  “That sounds like you’re justifying something unsavory,” he said.

  “I’m only justifying taking the résumé of a former delinquent,” Katrina shot back, teasing. “If I should just toss it, tell me now.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

  A line was beginning to form at the booth, and the guy looked behind himself.

  “I should let someone else talk to you,” he said, and held out his hand. “I’m Zach, by the way.”

  “Katrina,” she said, putting her hand in his. It was big and strong and warm, and he squeezed just hard enough. For a moment, she felt delicate and dainty, but then Katrina swallowed and squeezed back.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  “Likewise,” she said.

  They held on for just a second too long, and when he finally let go, Katrina was oddly disappointed.

  “We’ll be in touch,” she said.

  He thanked her and disappeared into the crowd.

  Someone else started talking to her right away, but Katrina felt like her ears were buzzing. Pete snatched the resume from her hand, peering at it carefully, reading it like it was a treasure map, totally ignoring the college students trying to get his attention.

  Finally he grabbed a portfolio folder from under the table and placed Zach’s résumé in it, then snapped it shut and shoved it into a briefcase.

  Katrina just stared, a bad feeling gathering in the pit of her stomach.

  “That’s him,” Pete said. Then he pulled out his phone and walked away, leaving Katrina to deal with a gaggle of college students.

  The job fair felt like it went on for days, even as Katrina’s brain went on total autopilot, telling students what MutiGen did and what sort of interns they were looking for. She couldn’t even muster her usual enthusiasm for encouraging women to go into the sciences — instead she was busy thinking about Zach’s eyes, the way her insides squirmed when he smiled at her.

  And, of course, about Pete’s pronouncement, right before he walked away.

  About thirty minutes before the fair ended, Pete came back but didn’t say anything to Katrina, instead launching into his MutiGen pitch for a group of young men in polo shirts and khakis. She wanted to ask what they were going to do now, what the next steps were, but people kept coming up to them.

  Finally, it ended. The last few students trickled out, and it felt like every person exhaled at the same time. She turned to Pete.

  “What now?” she demanded.

  He wouldn’t look at her, but she knew that he knew what she was talking about.

  “Not here,” he said, resolutely stacking flyers and pamphlets together, then putting them into a crate.

  Katrina didn’t like it, but she busied herself taking down the MutiGen sign that hung on the front of their table, folding it neatly and putting it into a box.

  I don’t know about this, s
he thought. If we’re just going to get him in for an interview and ask some questions, why the secrecy?

  She closed the box and folded the top in on itself, then placed it on the plastic folding table.

  Why are Pete and Carol always in her office, talking quietly with the door closed?

  “Hi again,” said a voice behind her. One that she recognized immediately. Zach.

  Katrina turned around, startled.

  “Hi,” she said, one hand on her chest.

  “I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said.

  “I was totally checked out,” she said. “I’ve been talking to college kids for a couple of hours, and my brain is pretty much on strike now.”

  He nodded, a smile playing on his face.

  “That bad?” he asked. He had taken off his suit jacket and it was slung over his briefcase, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thick, muscled forearms. Katrina stared just a little too long.

  “Well, not all of them,” she said, half-smiling up at him. “Just the poets who are confused when we don’t have jobs for them.”

  “Well, someone has to write ‘Sonnet for Fake Skin,’ you know,” he said. “It’s not gonna be me.”

  “I bet you could,” Katrina teased. “How hard can it be?”

  Zach shook his head.

  “Sonnets have rules,” he said. “They’re sixteen lines, maybe? And have some number of syllables and a rhyme scheme?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “We should hire a poet instead of you.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, laughing.

  Pete walked back in and stood behind the table. Katrina stood up straight, suddenly feeling incredibly unprofessional.

  “Did you need more literature or anything?” she asked. “We have a signup sheet...”

  “I already got some,” Zach said. “Actually, I came here to see if you wanted to get a drink tonight.”

  “Oh,” Katrina said.