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Meanwhile, it was time to get on with my day and do something productive for a change.

As I reached for my phone, apart from usual let’s-get-a-drink messages from my buddies, I saw there was a message from Jared.

Finally!

He wanted to meet for a drink. Let’s make it casual, it said. Did that mean that I had gotten what I wanted? I couldn’t really tell what he thought about my prospects after we reminisced about his mom and Charlie.

“My people will be in touch with you,” he’d said, when the interview had finished.

Yes, I remembered that he used “my people” and I’d thought it had not sounded good. So why was he sending me a message himself? Whatever it was, it was better than no news. I sent a few messages back canceling some appointments, which also were going to include alcohol consumption. Let’s get a drink with the son of our former cook who was a hundred times richer than me. Drinking was something I wasn’t too bad at. However, I needed something more to take the edge off. It was an important meeting, and I did not want to cock it up.

Just as I was about to get into the shower, my phone rang. The screen showed Natasha.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I said. “How are things?”

Natasha Cunningham and I had been having a relationship for a year, which one could describe as “occasional friends with benefits.” She was one of the most beautiful women I’d evet met, a real head turner when we’d been out together. Natasha knew how to dress to stop other men breathing. She had made a wise decision not to look like a clone of all those celebrities who were famous for being famous. She went for Linda Evangelista type of chic, kept her beautiful hair short and looked gorgeous in everything. She liked glamor and being at the center of attention, which suited me because I kind of liked those things myself – they were good for my business projects. Natasha was a pragmatic lady, maybe a bit too pragmatic for her age. She was twenty-five. Started as a hostess in a fancy restaurant when she was twenty year old, Natasha developed a slew of extremely useful connections with people who kGOlnew people with titles and money. She quit being a hostess, read Dostoyevsky and Dickens to educate herself, became a socialite supported by some generous gentlemen and moved on to more ambitious projects.