by Anita Claire
I shake my head, “Hita, sometimes I want to call up your mom to find out why you have the emotional maturity of a ten year old.”
Kami looks at her in horror, “Did you laugh this uncontrollably about his name when he took you out for dinner?”
Hita nods her head, finally sputtering out, “Come on, I can’t be the only person who thinks the name Dick Shit is funny. Can you imagine if he’s playing sports? I can just see his parents standing on the sideline yelling, ‘ Hey, Dick Shit, run! ’” She starts laughing uncontrollably again, unable to finish her sentence. Then she takes a deep breath, and finishes, “Could you imagine being married to him? Hey friends, meet my husband, Dick Shit. Or you’re at a party, what do you yell, ‘Hey, Dick Shit, come here.’” She says as the rest of us chuckle more at her uncontrollable laughter than at the poor guy’s name.
Caroline shakes her head, “Hita, now I know why you have problems dating other Indians.”
While I start laughing, “Another guy who will never call you for a second date.”
Hita starts laughing again, “It’s not a loss, believe me.”
Chapter 8 - Vajazzeld
I pull into home feeling relieved my day is over and I’m ready for bed, my brain just hurts from concentrating so hard. Cassie’s car is in the garage. I’m not sure if she’s home or out with Luke. As I head into my bedroom I hear Cassie call out, “Juliette, is that you?”
I think who else would it be, but answer, “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Can you come in here and do a quick favor for me?”
“Sure, give me a second,” I say as I drop my bag on the floor, throw my jacket on my bed, and kick off my boots. Then I head towards her voice, which is coming from her bedroom. At her bedroom door I gasp and start to cover my eyes. Cassie is lying on her side in bed, naked in a seductive pose. I manage to spit out, “Cassie, I’m not into that shit.”
She dryly laughs, “I’m not trying to seduce you. I wanted to give Luke a little gift for being so nice. He just flew out of town. I thought I would send him some pictures, so I got myself vajazzeld.”
I’m standing paralyzed in the doorway, still a little horrified. Finally sputtering out, “Come again?”
She points to her crotch. “I got myself vajazzeld, and want to send a picture to Luke. All my selfies have the wrong angle. Can you take a couple shots?”
I look down her perfect body to her crotch. She’s totally naked and has a design of Swarovski crystals where the pubic hair should be.
“What did you do?” I ask in shock.
Cassie just rolls her eyes, “It’s the latest thing. Jennifer Love Hewett started it.”
“So you went to a shop that took off your pubes and gave you sparkles? What, you never got over your Fancy Nancy stage?” I say, still kind of horrified.
“Ha, ha, come-on, be a sport.” she says as she holds her hand out with her iPhone in it.
I reluctantly reach over and grab the phone out of her hand. Cassie stretches out and puts a sexy look on her face. I click a few photos, then hand the phone back to her as she rolls over on to her stomach to review what I did. Handing me back the phone she says, “Take a few more!” as she fluffs up her hair and rolls over to lie seductively on her side again.
I take a few more shots then hand back the phone. “Cassie, you shouldn’t send Luke shots of you naked. He might share them, they could get out. Who knows where they could end up?”
She smiles real big as she sits up and reviews the shots I just took. “Wouldn’t that be great!” she exclaims. “If I sent them out myself they wouldn’t get any press, they’d just end up on some perv’s site. But if Luke starts sharing them with the other football players…” She shimmies her shoulders in excitement, “then the media might pick up the picture.” Giving me a conspiratorial look, “I wanted us to record our sex but Luke’s way too conservative for that.”
“Yeah, and he might lose some of his endorsements.” I add.
Cassie frowns, “Yeah, I should date rappers. They love this kind of publicity.”
I think my jaw must be on the ground, “Why would you want sex tapes released? Why would you want any of this private stuff up on the internet?”
She just rolls her eyes at me, “Look what it did for Kim Kardashian. Who even heard of her before she had that sex tape with Ray J.” Then she smiles, “You see, Rappers are the way to go.”
I take a few more shots of her, and then head back to my room. I lie down and stare at my ceiling totally dumbfounded. Cassie’s view of the world is diametrically opposite of mine. My biggest fears are her biggest fantasies. How did we end up as friends?
Chapter 9 – Meeting with Flint
My work day proceeds normally, until Mark comes to my desk in the early afternoon. “Flint called a meeting. He wants to see how we’re doing.” His jaw is tight, he’s nervous about this session.
“When, where, what do I need to bring?”
“Twenty minutes. The Evergreen conference room.” Then, leaning over in a conspiratorial manner he says, “Don’t bring anything up. Let me handle it. Are we cool?”
Slowly, I nod my head.
Looking over at Mark, I see that he’s gathering his stuff. He’s not the most organized guy. His desk has a couple layers of papers, soda cans, T-shirts and all kinds of other office flotsam surrounding his two monitors—that look like they’ve just emerged out of the debris. Under his desk are Buddy’s dog bed and a bunch of dog toys. Just looking at his desk is overwhelming; I could never work with all that clutter.
We enter the Evergreen conference room, the blond haired woman who was at the last meeting is sitting at the table working on her computer. Mark told me she works for our VP Sid, managing the engineering calendar. Mark tips his head and says, “Hi Terri.” I smile and give a friendly, “Hi.”
Within a minute, Roger comes in and then Jim shows up with Rajive, who’s another junior guy. An air of arrogance permeates around Jim. Roger looks directly at Jim and Mark. “Where are you?”
Jim’s saying something esoteric about the power of algorithms as Flint, one of the company’s founders, enters the room. Everyone’s body position changes with his entry. Buddy, who is lying against the wall like she’s playing dead, lifts up her head; even she’s at attention.
Flint gets to business fast. After about an hour of heated discussion, Roger, Mark, and Jim are now leaning against the table while Flint plays with his marker as he thinks. Flint finally says, “I don’t know, I think we’re missing something.” I lightly elbow Mark and give him the eye; with a very small movement he shakes his head. Knowing he doesn’t want to revisit the re-entrant library idea in front of Jim, I don’t push the issue.
The room is temporarily quiet as the guys ponder their next move. That’s when Terri pipes up. In a coy, little girl voice she says, “Flint, this sounds like a re-entrant library call problem. I know we investigated that already but I think we should look there again.”
We all turn and stare at her. She has a flirty look on her face. My jaw literally drops. Jim’s neck turns bright red, the red spreads to his ears. Rajive gives me eye contact; you can tell he’s thinking: That’s exactly what you said last week. The muscles in Mark’s jaw clench even more, while Flint squints his eyes in wonderment as he stares at Terri. Roger looks at Flint, gauging his reaction.
Mark finally breaks the silence by saying, “Juliette and I have been doing some preliminary work on that end. We’ve been running the kernel in debug mode. I think we isolated the area in the code that’s causing the problems; I have Juliette going line-by-line through the code to see if we can find the call.”
Flint now looks at Mark, “And you were going to tell me you were working on this… when?” Mark noticeably gulps before explaining, “Jim and I looked there before but our current actions aren’t resulting in a solution. Juliette and I decided to revisit the re-entrant library issue. I figured we’d wait until we had something concrete.”
Flint looks hard at Mark and then says
, “Okay. Jim, work on what we discussed today. Mark, keep me posted on this new development.” He then walks out of the room.
Roger backs up, pulls out his phone and takes multiple pictures of the ideas illustrated on the walls.
Mark gives me the not now look as he says, “Buddy, up.” Buddy and I follow Mark out of the room. On our way back to our desks, I start to ask Mark what went on in the room.
He shakes his head, “Not now, not here.” As we get closer to our desks, he says, “I need to give Buddy a walk, come with me.” Putting my notebook down, I watch Mark get his dog’s “chuck it” toy, and then follow him outside.
Once outside, I ask in a low voice, “Can you explain to me what’s going on?”
Mark shakes his head in wonderment as he throws Buddy a ball. “Terri was in last week’s meeting when you proposed the re-entrant library idea, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, there is no way she could have possibly come up with that idea on her own. She thinks a library is a big building with books.”
Then he laughs, a good hardy body laugh. “Well, I could never have done that—presented an idea in front of Jim without him going nonlinear. With that woman you never know if she’s friend or foe, but I’ll take any gift I can get.”
“Why can she say something without Jim going down her throat?”
Mark laughs again as he picks up the ball and throws it to Buddy, “Yeah, when they first started this company, Flint and Tyler hired only aggressive young engineers with advanced degrees—and hot looking women.” He looks me up and down, “Well, they still have a thing for hiring hot looking women.” He kind of clears his throat realizing he got sidetracked.
I hope he’s not hitting on me. Anyway….
“But, it can be a bad mix—having a lot of young, single guy engineers and hot looking women running around.” He looks at me again, shakes his head. “Some of the women used their looks to manipulate the environment.” I think I get what he is saying.
“So, Terri?”
“Yeah, Terri.”
“Early on Jim had it bad for her, he might have asked her out, they might have gone out, I don’t know. I do know she dated Stuart—who ran Project Management. That’s when she all of a sudden got a big promotion and started running their calendar.” He looks at me. “Stuart left sometime last year. Most recently I’ve heard her name associated with Sid.”
“You mean, Sid, the VP of engineering, her boss?”
“Yeah, she’s moving up the company org chart in more ways than one.”
“So…?”
“So, I don’t trust her. Terri only has her own self-interests in mind. I don’t know why she repeated what you said. But we’re going to use it. Just, don’t let your guard down around her.”
He picks up his dog’s poop as we head back in. This afternoon has sure been an education.
Chapter 10 – Girl Talk
On Friday and Saturday I was with Zach, but I haven’t heard from him since, even though he said he’d text. Nate’s been diligently texting me every morning since we first met. I like that. My bubble bath text has gotten us back on track with fun flirty texts. Every once in a while he falls back into boring texts. Then again I read that there is no correlation between guys who are good at sexting and actual sex. If that’s the case I bet Nate is great at sex since it turns out I’m pretty good at flirty texts.
Nate: We actually had snow flurries today. Winter with you in California is sounding real good right now.
Me: Reading that makes me cold even though I’m under my blanket. Hold on for a minute, let me put on some clothes.
Now that was fun.
Thursday afternoon I get a text from Zach. It’s taken him almost a week: Happy hour at Steins 6 p.m.
I look forward to talking to the other women at lunch. I need some clarity. Jessica has brought another young woman to our table. Our group has grown to six women; all of us are in our early to mid-twenties, eating lunch together. The new woman is Megan. She works on the web design team. She and Jessica ride the company bus from San Francisco together. She’s a petite pretty Asian American with long, shiny hair with an under layer of bleached blond highlights. Her right eyebrow is pierced, and because her hair is braided over one shoulder, I can make out part of a starburst tattoo on the back of her neck. Megan is wearing chunky platform boots, a long black, floaty skirt with a cream-colored cable knit top over a yellow tie-dyed cami. She has this artist aura about her that makes the whole outfit work.
I look at her in fascination. I’ve always dressed conservatively. Even though her ensemble totally works I would feel foolish dressed like that. I’ve never hung with the creative types. Jennifer’s my only friend who doesn’t have a technical degree, since hers is in Liberal Arts. I secretly wonder what it would be like to dress funky and go to unconventional parties with artists. I bet she goes to Burning Man. It makes me think of all the wild things I would do if I weren’t me. My mind digresses; maybe I too would go to Burning Man, and I could get a wild henna design drawn all over my body. Which is kind of freaky since even in my fantasies I’m too conservative to get a tattoo.
After our introductions, I jump right in. “Explain this to me, I met this guy Zach—”
“The hot swimmer?” Caroline interjects.
“Yeah, the hot swimmer…. He’s invited me to join him and his friends for happy hour again. He paid for my drinks and walked me home last time. The next day, I joined him and his friends for breakfast after workout. Again, he walked me home and said he’d text. When I see him at swimming, he smiles and says hi. Today, almost a week later, he finally sends me a text, inviting me to join him for happy hour again.”
“And the problem is?” Hita questions.
“The problem is, if he’s into me, don’t you think he would have contacted me sooner? Does he like me, but just doesn’t ‘like, like’ me? Could he be friend zoning me this soon?”
“Do guys even friend zone?” Kami asks.
“Guys categorize women.” Megan replies with a tone of experience. Holding up a finger, she continues, “Category one: I’ll sleep with them but never want to see them again.” Holding up a second finger; “Category two—whatever.” Holding up a third finger, she says, “And then there’s Category three—I want to go out with them. Pretty much all women can fall into category one or category two. It could be he’s trying to figure out if he wants you to be in category two or three. He might not want to move too fast because it’s complicated to move women that are in category three back to category two.”
“So you think he might like me and that’s why he isn’t calling?”
“He did text, didn’t he?” Megan responds.
“Well, yes…but…” I answer.
“But, it just doesn’t sound like he texted on your time table.” Megan continues.
“Hmmm, that could be it. I guess I’m just trying to figure out if he likes me as a friend or if he wants more.”
“Sounds like, he’s thinking the same thing. He wants to see if he likes you as a friend or if he likes you more.”
“You know you could always call him. It is the twenty first century.” Caroline interjects.
Now I’m having a hard time not giving her an eye roll. Caroline isn’t someone I would ever take relationship advice from. She has a tendency to come on too strong, push to the next level too fast, and then finds herself with a guy that just isn’t really into her.”
Looking at Megan, I try to understand. “You think it might be a good thing that he’s not blowing up my phone.”
“Most relationships that start hot fizzle quickly, since the only thing keeping them together is the heat. Something real takes time.” Megan says with a sound of authority.
“How can you be our age and be so wise?” Hita asks in awe.
Straightening her back and acting very professorial, Megan says, “I was reincarnated from the Dali Lama.”
“Really?” Kami asks.
The other
women look at Kami in surprise-except me, that comment was just classic Kami.
Megan continues, “Hey, I’ve been around the block, my friends have been around the block, after a while you see a trend. Every once in a while the hot relationship works, but mostly the friends who seem to have the stable relationships are the ones who took a while before they got serious.”
Thinking about Cassie, I can’t imagine her waiting any amount of time for a guy. She has such a low threshold for delayed gratification. Megan brings an exotic sense of experience and depth the rest of us don’t have to the lunch group; I like that.
After thinking about it I decide I’ll text Zach that I’ll join them.
We move on and talk about what men the other women like. When we’re about ready to get up I ask. “By the way, have any of you ever heard of getting vajazzled?”
They all look at me and shake their heads.
I shrug, “Yeah, I had never heard of it either. But my crazy roommate Cassie got it done.”
“What is it?” Caroline asks.
“Some kind of Henna treatment?” Hita asks.
I smirk, “Surprisingly you’re on the right track.” I respond. Shaking my head and then figuring out how to explain it I say, “You shave off all your pubes and get sparkles applied to where the hair should be.”
Jessica is finishing up her drink and blows it across the table, finally sputtering out, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Hita’s brow is knit, finally she questions, “Wouldn’t that feel terrible under tight jeans.”
Kami blanches, “Can you imagine vajazzeling people for a living. You’d spend your day removing some chick’s pubes and applying sparkles to their private parts. Sure makes me appreciate my job.”
“So do you think that would turn a guy on?” Caroline asks.
“With Cassie’s body I don’t really think she needs any special gimmicks. What she’s hoping for is for her boyfriend to share her vajazzled pictures with his friends and it gets picked up by the press.”
