The Starving Years (2 page)

What use was it? He’d never be able to do the corporate act, not even for the few seminars and interviews it would take him to get his foot in the door. He spotted an exit behind the coffee cart. Too far. In the divider that split the conference room from the adjacent room—yes, another one there. That door wouldn’t lead directly out, but even so, it was tempting to go sit in the adjoining empty conference hall, alone in the quiet and the dark, until the Canaan Products recruiters and all the desperate hopefuls fawning over them packed up and went home. Nelson eyed the doors, but he stayed where he was. If he ever wanted to quit clerking at the video store and put his degree to work again, he’d probably need to act like one of those dancing apes—at least for the duration of a seminar.
 

He shook his head in disgust.

Marianne must have thought he was disgusted about Randy stealing his answer, not his own inability to fake corporate dronedom for a single day—and she seemed determined to be upset in his honor. She rose from her chair. “I’m going to tell the event coordinator. I see her right over there, refilling the carafes.”

“Seriously. Don’t—”

“And now for our next teambuilding exercise. It’s time to open up the green envelope from your welcome packet.”

Please
, Nelson thought.
Just shoot me.

When the presenter spoke, Marianne sat back down, clucking her tongue in annoyance as she dug through her welcome packet for the correct envelope.

Nelson checked his watch. Two more hours to go, and then…how long until he’d be notified that of the picks for Canaan Products’ new dream team, he ranked somewhere around fifty out of fifty? Coming to the open call had been a stupid idea. Nelson wasn’t a people-person, a showman. And that’s what you needed to be to look like a winner in a sea of interchangeable faces.

“Inside you’ll find a puzzle piece.”

So stupid. Unbelievably stupid.
Who thinks of these exercises?
If he could ever get over his loathing of the whole corporate culture, there might be money to be made in thinking up some better games. Not that Nelson thought he could ever get beyond that initial stumbling block.

“Your piece represents one of the top flavors of manna—except plain, of course…because we had a little trouble finding a symbol for plain.” The crowd laughed, all except Marianne, who glanced down at the empty square on Nelson’s brochure, then gave him a pointed look.

On Nelson’s other side, Randy sat down and began to dig for his green envelope, still grinning about his big score. Nelson tipped a puzzle piece into his palm. Green leaf, serrated edge. Mint.

“Be the first to find someone whose puzzle piece fits yours, and you’ll each take home one of these.” The announcer held up a box covered in plain paper. It looked about the size of Canaan Products’ Exotic Spices line—a spectacular flop. Thirty dollar value when it first came out, but now that it was in every clearance aisle, you could score it for under twelve. “Ready? Set?”

Nelson rolled his eyes—and then noticed that Marianne was holding her puzzle piece so he could see if it fit his. She had half a piece of cheese on hers. He shook his head slightly, and she scowled.

“Go!”

Marianne and Randy were off like rockets. Nelson sat for a moment and wondered if he should just put himself out of his misery and go back home, sneak out the way he’d come in now that everyone was milling around, but he figured he’d already wasted six hours of his life in the futile endeavor, so what difference was a couple more? He stood, turned, and managed to collide with one of the jigsaw-clutching hopefuls yearning to find the other half of their souls. Honestly, were they so eager to dance for the monkey-masters they didn’t even look where they were going?
 

Nelson turned to glare at the guy who’d jostled him…and stopped dead in his tracks. The guy
couldn’t
have been looking where he was going, because on that side, he had an eye patch—and not a disposable-looking “I’m recovering from a speck of dirt in my eye” eye patch. A very permanent black eye patch. With a scar that extended out from below it, down his cheek, all the way to the corner of his mouth. Less than a second ticked by as Nelson took it all in, but he dropped his gaze fast, like he’d been caught staring, to the other Canaan Products hopeful’s name tag.
 

Javier
.

Chapter 2

“Sorry,” Nelson said, and it was torture to keep his eyes averted, because what he really wanted to do was get a good, hard look at this Javier. The rest of his face—if you could even see beyond the patch—was graceful and beautifully proportioned, in a swarthy, exotic, Latin way. He was slim, even a bit on the pretty side, with thick, black hair that fell over his collar, hair too long for a corporate drone. But the eye patch, the scar…Nelson might spare a second look at an attractive guy, but it was Javier’s flaws that made Nelson want to linger. “So…what’s your puzzle piece?”

“Chili,” Javier replied cautiously. “I guess it’s supposed to be verde.”

Definitely Latino. The way he pronounced
verde
sounded hot enough for phone sex. The cloud of ennui Nelson had been struggling under? It lifted and dispersed as he mindmapped twenty ways to score Javier’s phone number. “I think I’ve got cilantro,” Nelson said as he eased up closer and tried to read Javier’s body language to see if his appetites leaned the same way Nelson’s did. It looked like they might.

Javier held up his puzzle piece. Nelson could tell it didn’t fit with his, even from the small glimpse he’d given his own piece, but trying to force them together would give him a reason to keep talking.

He placed his puzzle piece against Javier’s and poked the tab on his into the other piece’s blank. The tab curved up, but the blank was round. They clearly didn’t fit. Javier reached up and steadied Nelson’s hand, rather than taking the piece from him, and tried to fit the obviously dissimilar parts together again. Pleasure zinged down Nelson’s arm. Definitely queer. “I don’t think that’s cilantro,” Javier said. He even made the word
cilantro
sound sexy.

“You sure?” Nelson eased closer—enough to make it clear he was flirting, without sounding
too
sleazy—and said, “Try again.”

Javier smiled. It was a subtle smile, and hard to read on him, because the scarred corner of his mouth curled up a bit from the tautness of the scar tissue there. “You need to find someone with mint,” his gaze dropped to the adhesive-backed nametag, “Nelson.”

“So, you’re a marketing guy? Design, maybe?”

“And you say that because….”

He
had
to be a creative. Not just because of the eye patch, or the fact that he was one of the few minorities there. Because he looked like he should be scaling a volcano or white-water rafting down the Amazon? Nelson couldn’t say that. It alluded to the scar, and even he wasn’t uncensored enough to bring up something like that within the first thirty seconds of meeting someone. “You haven’t given me the secret food science handshake.”

Javier’s subtle smile crept wider. His teeth were brilliantly white against his dark skin. “Copywriter.”

“I knew it….”

A burst of shrieks startled Nelson out of his seduction trajectory. “Cheese! Cheese! We have the cheese!” Across the room, Marianne jumped up and down like she’d just won the lottery. She waved her piece in the air, and hauled the arm of the accountant-looking guy beside her up and down along with it. He placidly accepted that it would be easier to resist a force of nature.

The glitzy presenter strode to the edge of the stage with the mystery boxes. “Whoever said the cheese stands alone? Not today.”

Shit. Couldn’t Marianne have waited another few seconds to start screaming about her cheese? Nelson went into overdrive on his phone number acquisition attempt. “And here’s the part,” he said, “where they tell you to get the contact information of whoever you’re talking to.”
 

Not particularly smooth, but it promised a better outcome than hoping he’d run into Javier at the subway station afterward, or tearing the puzzle piece out of Marianne’s hand, calling her a liar, and insisting the exercise carry on until he could find a better way to get Javier’s number. He pulled a business card from his pocket and held it out to Javier expectantly. Javier looked at the card like he didn’t buy that it was part of the exercise, but was deciding whether or not to humor Nelson anyway, when the presenter said, “All right. Everyone back in your seats. I’ll call out the names of the flavors and we’ll split you into teams….”

Javier looked from the card to Nelson’s eyes, and made a micro-movement as if he was about to turn away. Nelson stuffed his card into the pocket of Javier’s sportcoat. “No way I’m going to get picked out of this crowd for a real interview—but if you hear of anyplace else that’s hiring lab guys, let me know.”

“Okay…sure.” Javier turned and made his way back to his seat without giving Nelson a card in return. Nelson sighed and went back to his table. He hadn’t ranged even five feet from his starting point.

Marianne plunked down next to him and peeled back the corner of the paper that covered her big prize. She clucked her tongue in disgust, and whispered, “Exotic Spices? Ew. They all taste like funk.”

Nelson agreed. “Too much turmeric.”

She leaned in close. “So that jerk next to you gets a hundred bucks and I get this? That blows.”

“I’d tell you no one ever said life was fair, but then I’d have to put a dollar in my cliché jar.”

The presenter said, “We’re going to do sweet on one side of the room and savory on the other.” Another chance to bring the mysterious Javier around to his obvious charms? Nelson perked up for a moment, but then realized that he had sweet mint, and Javier had savory verde. No problem, he’d trade. Marianne would probably be willing to give up her cheese, although who knew if she’d need that game piece for a real reward later, since the Exotic Spices seemed perilously close to a booby prize.

“Along the right wall, I want the following: coconut, chocolate….”

Nelson turned toward Randy. “What do you have?”

Randy actually had to check his puzzle piece. What, he’d been looking at it for the past ten minutes and he still didn’t know? “Uh…a jalapeño pepper.”

Unbelievable. Nelson plucked it from his hand and shoved the mint piece in its place. “Here. Now you’re fresh and zippy. Go stand by the cute girl in the orange sweater.”

While Randy might have wanted to balk at being told what to do—especially by a long-haired homo misfit like Nelson—the girl in the orange sweater really was awfully cute. Nelson saw she had a wedding ring on, but Randy would probably be too busy staring at her rack to notice.

The savories all trooped to the other side of the room, where Nelson picked Javier out from two dozen other hopeful Canaan Products employees, and sidled up to his sighted side.

Javier’s eye went to Nelson’s hand, as if he could see through it to the puzzle piece. “Aren’t you on the wrong team? Or are you just a creative cook?”

“They say mint and lamb went well together—but, hey. They still eat termites in Ghana, so what do ‘they’ know?” Nelson held up his half of verde. “I’ve never really been much for mint.”

Javier looked amused. He didn’t seem like the type to be amused lightly, either, which only made Nelson want to try even harder. “Where’d you get the verde?”
 

“Does it matter? We’re lucky we didn’t score that particular prize, trust me.”

The presenter dipped into his big box of tricks and pulled a bunch of clotheslines, a stack of index cards, and a wad of bandannas.

“It’s time for a little game of ‘Make that Shape.’ Five people from each side will lead the team by giving directions, and the rest of you will need to form the ropes into the shapes the callers describe to you—blindfolded.”

“It just gets lamer and lamer,” Nelson whispered, but when he looked to see if he could elicit some agreement from Javier, instead of a complicit disdain, he detected something entirely else: dismay. Javier’s olive skin looked ashen, and his mouth was set in a stiff line.

Of course. Only a jackass would blindfold a one-eyed man in a room full of strangers. Even Nelson, who prided himself in being the poster boy for self-involvement, knew that much.

“So I’ll need the five team leaders from sweet and five from savory to step up and get the gear….”

“Go up there.” Nelson gave Javier a little shove toward the stage. Did he need to be more explicit about his reasoning, or would Javier take the ball and run with it? “You’d make a good team leader.”

Javier looked spooked, but either he intuited Nelson’s plan to keep him from being blindfolded, or he trusted enough in Nelson’s confidence that he was willing to lead the way for the savory side.

“That’s the same guy you were talking to during the ice breaker,” Marianne said.

“Really? Are you sure it wasn’t one of the
other
guys with eye patches?”

The sarcasm rolled off Marianne’s back. Tenacious girl. “Are you cruising him? You are, aren’t you?”

Nelson sighed. “It’s not like I’m deluded enough to think I’m going to get a job out of this thing. I’ll settle for a phone number.”

“He kind of looks like a movie pirate, doesn’t he?”

He did. An especially
hot
movie pirate. All he needed was a puffy shirt. Nelson warmed toward Marianne a bit, though he kept his expression neutral, as he didn’t care to show anyone the chinks in his armor on such short acquaintance.

“I guess you can’t actually say that,” she went on. “It would be like telling an amputee that their prosthetic turned you on.”

“Do you mind? My subconscious already has plenty of awkward things to blurt out. It doesn’t need any more ideas from you.”
 

Javier returned with a clothesline, plus four bandannas, which he passed out to Javier, Marianne, an a couple of other white guys in ties. It felt awkward to take the bandanna. Nelson suspected he’d blown his chance at a date by acknowledging the eye, even in such a roundabout way—though if he’d let events unfold without saying anything, it probably would have ended in Javier bailing on the conference right there and then, or even worse, suffering some kind of mortifying post-traumatic panic attack. So any way he looked at it, Nelson figured the date was an unlikely outcome.