It Had Been Years (6 page)

Vin
was setting the expectation that he had no intention of keeping pace with the librarian in the fuck me dirty shoes, and she thought his self effacing humor was genuine.  He was as cock sure as any man who had shown an interest in her that she’d met recently, or even in years for that fact.  There was a lot of false bravado, and arrogance but it was rare that a man was genuine in his confidence and conversations unless forced to be or driven by more primal urges.  Hidden agenda’s were a part of
life,
this guy was right upfront or at least seemingly so.  He said what he wanted, starting with a sharp wit and insults, he didn’t back down and pushed a little himself. 

In the few seconds that it took for these thoughts to occur, Donna had made her way across the bar with the Husker in tow,
and Vince was telling Steve, “Hurry up with the lady’s drink.  And add an Apple-
tini
and an espresso to the order for her friends.”

“Hey love, how are you
?,
”  the voice was familiar but doesn’t register right away.  It’s Donna. 

“Slamming and you?”

Fuck,
and once again worlds collide,
Nadrea
thought. 
Nadrea
had completely forgotten that she told Donna where she was going not 30 seconds before walking into this place.  The compulsory introductions were made and within seconds the men seemed like nothing more than window dressings.  They were nice, something to have at the moment, but like last season’s discarded fashions they were ultimately forgotten about.  Still the ladies conversation continued as each informed the other about the horrors of the weekend.  Life for Vince was as uncomplicated as it was is the polar opposite of a public figure.  Donna was adorned in nothing more sophisticated than a well worn pair of jeans, a casual blouse only bordering with the concept of being at all trendy and a pair of black 2 inch heeled dress sandals.  The Husker was in his same worn Levi’s, a tired pair of Nike running shoes, Red Polo Shirt and matching red hat.

Donna’s
movements were less than her characteristically intense and measured shifts.  Instead she was leaning back in her chair, left leg bent, tucking her foot under her right leg from behind. She was continually stroking her long dark hair, gathering it all in her hands first completely to her left side, fixing it back into place tucking her flowing locks behind her ears to reveal her face, and then gathering it again in her hands not seconds after it had come to rest and repeating the entire ritual to the opposite side.  This continued during the entire conversation. 
Each speaking so quickly and listening so intensely that there was seemingly no time for a breath for either of them.
 
Nadrea
discussed dinner with Daddy, the anguish, the confusion, and his typical lack of interest.  As the each spoke they became more lost in the conversation with each other, the rest of the world simply didn’t exist.  Vincent found his way around the pair to engage the Husker in his own byline of conversation.  Boys will always be boys and in accordance with that the conversation was not about how they had met the ladies, or their feelings as to what might become of the interludes.  There was no discussion of family or feelings only basic facts and
obvious male opinions.  Donna paused for a drink, only to again begin
primping,
passing her hair from hand to hand,
Nadrea
finished her third since she entered.  As the boys talked the Husker switched to Cappuccino & Vince back to soda moving away from his untouched Vodka, the Husker stated that he worked for the Government and Vince in Technology Finance.  Both were understating their day jobs, but in general this kept things far less complicated, neither felt like explaining what they did in detail to the other.  

While the girls shared more of the details of the day the men talk sports. 
Nadrea
pined on with her usual list of complaints, her daddy issue at hand.  Donna was not herself, her newly relaxed manner and not her typical type “A” pushy demeanor may not have been noticed by anyone else there that knew her but should have been a signal flashing bright red that something had changed, perhaps she didn’t even know it yet.  One could see plainly on her face that she was tired but continued to talk with girl like enthusiasm, for the moment she wasn’t a poor hick slut, or a professional anything she was nothing more than a friend at the end of a long listless day.   The evening wore on and the Husker took his leave, Vincent was not far behind as he said his goodbyes.

“You’re not going to try to fuck me?”
Nadrea
asked.

“Nope, never my intent, just a little pleasant conversation.”
 

This sent her reeling, her entire purpose for approaching him was for a potential interlude, if for no other purpose than her pleasure and amusement.  She didn’t need or want a friend.  Seeing her instant irritation he became intentionally more aloof. 

“Really, are you afraid you wouldn’t measure up?” 
Nadrea
struck right for the heart of many a man’s ego.

“Oh no, the Ruler was quite kind to me
”  Vincent
replied, continuing without pause “I’m just not sure you’re my type.  You seem like you might be a nice lady.” As he paused he watched her displeasure continue to go.  “But I like my companions a little, well a little more liberated. 
Kind of trashy actually.”

“Fuck You! You Fuckwit!” she yelled.

“See you’ve even lost your great sense of humor that made you so attractive in the first place. 
Gotta
go.”
  This
was  where
his life was once again uncomplicated, Vincent possessed the simple gift
of being able to detach himself from a situation, not put himself in harm’s way and coolly step aside.

“I’m here a lot, if you want to see me again just stop by” he said as he smiled and hugged Donna then turned to offer the same adieu to
Nadrea
.

“What if I…”
Nadrea
began.

“Want to have dinner with me?” he added which was not the conclusion to her sentence. Her proposition was going to be a much more forward one.

“I’m here on Thursday” he said with a wider smile
“ I
eat at 7:00 if you care to join me, if not no worries.”

He was greeted with “Not likely” in a cold harsh tone.  The tone was stinging more with the adulation of a petulant child than a woman who had just had a professional swordsman pass on a casual interlude.

“Well, the offer still
stands,
I was looking forward to finding out what a fuckwit is.  I’ve never been called one before.  Good night ladies.”  And with that he simply walked across the room, stopping for a few brief words with other patron’s here and there before disappearing into the street.

Turning to Donna, “Can you believe that moron?”  She was met with the unsympathetic reply of “He seemed nice enough to me.” 
Nadrea
just shuttered “And the serial killer next door is always nice, average, church going guy.”  From there the conversation turned to his detached demeanor, his redeeming qualities in
Nadrea’s
case was his physical presence that was most appealing and held great promise.

When Vince walked away all conversations like the one he had just had stopped, it was now just a part of the past, filed away with no special meaning or associations. 
If they saw each other again OK and if not it killed some time during a passing interlude.

As he walked up street he thought to
himself  she’s
more like Cosmo than rolling stone he thought to himself causing him to laugh out loud.

Day follows night as was most often the case.  Day didn’t always follow night and night didn’t always follow day because in some cases one simply continued on to become the other.  In this particular case the day that followed the night as was usually the case
was  a
Monday.  A Monday filled with gray skies, and traffic and rain.  As
Nadrea
first stirred it was like any other.  First, turn up the stereo to kill the silence in her home and in this case drown out the reminders that a few solitary moments of quite might bring of the night before.    No victory to celebrate, no conquest to revel in, no new deep dark chapter of her sexuality awakened or no exciting need fulfilled.  To the treadmill as the volume of
NiN’s
(Nine Inch Nails) “Pretty Hate Machine” echoed through the workout room.  Sixty minutes later she was breathing heavily and covered in sweat as her recently taxed body tried to cool itself with a mixture of what could have been sweat and the vodka from the night before.  But there were things to do and other victories to be had “the silly arrogant bastard” she thought to herself.

In yet another part of town the Husker was up an hour earlier than
Nadrea
and in his office reading documents, reviewing briefs and dodging, quite adeptly mind you, Christy’s probing questions.  Friends come and go, but the business at hand was duty, his responsibility to so many others and his life.  Not very often did he have a moment to himself, alone focusing on what he wanted rather than the wants and needs of others.  For just a brief second he lost his focus.  Thinking of something other than the task at hand, he thought of brushing his teeth Sunday morning before coffee, the freedom of for a few briefs hours in a wired and demanding world of being hopelessly lost to most and completely unaccounted for.

Around the midpoint between the Husker being ever so minutely adrift and the time when
Nadrea
entered the office with category 4 hurricane force winds and rage. Vincent heard that his flight “Is now above 10,000 feet.  You may now use approved electronic devices.  However cell
phones,
and pagers are not approved for use anytime during this flight.  For a list of approved devices please turn to page 113 of our complimentary in flight
magazine.”  He removes his
Ipod
from its case, placed the headset in his ears and spent the next six and a half hours on a plane flying from Regan National to San Jose.  He was grateful that he could leave from National, the commute to Dulles was miserable and the train to BWI with bags in tow was not at all convenient.  Other than the brief passing intellectual
ponderence
on whether or not bad airline food was better than no airline food.  He was lost in the happy sounds of an innocent era 50’s Doo Wop & the classic sounds of the late great Momma Cass and the Momma’s and the Poppa’s Vincent was lost in his thoughts and calculations.  At heart he was a geek, a good looking, heavily muscled, socially adept, cruel, sarcastic geek, but a geek none the less.  He spent part of his teen years like so many other outcasts, playing dungeons and dragons, or parked in front of his Atari or
Intelivision
in his working class Baltimore neighborhood.  In High School he took computer classes & developed an unnatural obsession with the laws of probability.  It all started innocently enough with taking a “Chances and Gaming” class that hidden somewhere in the glory of gambling theme was a probability and statistics class.  The school had a formal statistics class…no one took unless all other options for that period were full.  Then an insightful teacher changed the title and the course work to be around the odds of winning in a gaming situation.  Viola, it was over registered for every semester after the first, somewhere between a full house and what’s showing in the dealers hand in black jack it all clicked.  In college, at the University of Maryland, he majored in Computer Science with a minor in Finance.  Code was his gift, the understanding of source code and the probability of certain derived algorithms made him dangerous, very dangerous.  After graduation Vincent took his first job as a programs analyst at a large beltway defense software company.  There he was not only adept at the numbers but had the unique ability to relate the data both financial and technical to the tech and finance challenged in a compelling and meaningful way.

This was at a time when tech was rising to be king and he quickly moved up the food chain before the offer to move on to a company funded start up occurred.  He was offered the chance to jump off into a world of “great” opportunity into the abyss.  Sure he could use his skills and his perception to earn a fortune on
options & other pre bubble pipedreams, or it could all wash away.   The spinoff company developed a web traffic tracking interface that could be used to verify views and clicks for the emerging online advertising business.  It evolved in to that and code based analytics for proprietary search engine crawlers for the goliath that was becoming what public would know as the internet.  They had it second and sometimes in the world of technology first to market isn’t best, second or third to market becomes the ruling deity.  In this case second would come in first and miles head of all the others.  During the boom years the old rules went out the door and a company that had a product, customers and was profitable was all but too good to be true.  Vincent and friends had all three.  The buyout was obscene and it never needed to IPO.  And with that he exited the world of startup creator gracefully via stage left and took up as a partner in a venture firm that specialized in 2
nd
and 3
rd
round private placements and acquisitions of complimentary products to create a complete suite of offers and intellectual property that then could be sold off in larger chunks at a premium.  M&A is what he is best at and his trip to the Valley is to take a good look under the hood of an emerging but cash strapped content delivery company.  The world is changing and if the net brought us into the information age then the next revolution is to change how we received all of our entertainment; video, voice, movies, music and news.  It would be the killer application for the old guard media and new fortunes stood to be made.