Nerd Girl

by Lee, Sue

  Copyright © 2013 Sue Lee

  All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the property of the author and your support and respect is appreciated.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Edited by Erin Roth, Wise Owl Editing

  Cover design © Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations

  Formatting by Angela McLaurin, Fictional Formats

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Falling in love is a lot like executing a project plan. No matter the objectives, there were some fundamental things you needed to do to ensure everything stayed on track.

  1. Keep it on a strict schedule

  2. Assess and mitigate risk

  3. Have a good, strong team supporting you

  4. Learn from your mistakes

  5. Work your ass off until you reap the rewards

  After seven years at Megasoft Software Corporation, one of the most iconic technology companies in the world, I’ve had a lot of experience keeping projects on track. Over the course of my career, I’ve saved trains from skidding off rails, rescued colleagues from drowning, and put out four alarm fires. That’s all figuratively speaking, of course. If there was one thing that I knew I was good at, it was my job.

  You’d think all that practice would’ve carried on over to my personal life, but at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I, Julia Hayes, was perpetually stuck on point number four—I couldn’t seem to learn from my mistakes. I think it’s the main reason why, when it came to love, I hadn’t yet been able to reap any rewards. That and I’m a serious control freak.

  Being a tad OCD, I have a bad habit of analyzing everything to death. So of course, I’ve tried analyzing this one anomaly in my life. Where I had succeeded in business, I had failed miserably in love. A corporate-driven project was predictable and controllable; risks could be mitigated and mistakes were learned from and hopefully not repeated through post-mortems.

  Easy stuff.

  Falling in love and getting to my happily ever after? Let’s just say my track record hasn’t been so good.

  Unlike my color-coded underwear drawer, when it came to matters of the heart, there was no set of rules to follow. If my relationships veered off track, I couldn’t just increase the budget and extend the deadline. So if a boy broke my heart, I did the only thing I knew I could control. I managed my heartbreak by occupying myself with something I was good at—I focused on my career.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. Chocolate cake sobfests work for some people, and I felt just as defeated as anyone did after a failed relationship. But eating sugar and hitting replay on sad Taylor Swift songs about relationships gone astray lead to more misery and ten extra pounds. I didn’t like being in any sort of free fall. Being in a free fall meant losing control. Do you see a theme here?

  When my boyfriend of three years, Andrew, confessed to cheating on me and proposed to the other woman, I thought it appropriate to change jobs. I was working a ton of extra hours in an effort to occupy my days, not to mention the evenings, but after three months, I realized overtime wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was time to do something more drastic. I now found myself walking across the Megasoft campus, crossing the street between Building Eighteen and the athletic fields, on my way to a job interview.

  I love that MS (this is what we call Megasoft for short in Seattle) is so supportive of employee ambitions and encourage moving about within the company. There were many privileges of being an MS employee, and having access to all the job postings before they were made available to the public was one of them, along with free software and soda.

  I strolled along the sidewalk, watching a soccer game that was in progress across the street. I admired the fact that at MS it wasn’t considered out of the norm for people to be playing soccer outside in the middle of a workday. My first interview was scheduled for ten o’clock. I looked at my watch, which read 9:35. I was right on track to arrive early with at least fifteen minutes to spare to mentally prepare myself for what would be about five or six hours of interview grilling.

  As I continued my walk, I mentally rehearsed potential interview questions. I really hoped they didn’t ask me vague, puzzle, “gotcha!” questions. I really hate those “gotcha” questions. When I was first hired into MS, I was twenty-two years old and straight out of college. During my first round of interviews, I actually had a lead software developer ask me a question about light bulbs. When it came to MS interviews, asking candidates a question about light bulbs was almost a cliché. If you were in one room with thee light switches and there were three light bulbs in the room next door, which switch went to which bulb? You could only go into the other room once before you provided your answer. Personally, I never understood the point behind these questions, other than intending to make you squirm and feel like an idiot, but some jerk asked one every time. For the record, I got the light bulb question correct.

  As I went through the mental drill of reviewing mock answers to classic MS questions like, “How do you deal with ambiguity?” I noticed a soccer ball rolling across the street, heading directly towards me. Without any hesitation, I walked into the middle of the road and reached down for the ball. I was carrying my laptop between my chest and left arm, so I picked up the ball with my right. As I stood up, I heard tires screeching and looked to my left in surprise, only to see a black SUV slamming its breaks. The car had slowed down enough to round the corner, but couldn’t stop fast enough to miss a girl in the middle of the road, and before I knew it, the bumper knocked me down with brute force.

  My laptop propelled itself out of my arms, made a skidding, crunching sound, and bounced a few feet away from me. I cringed. Despite the fact that I had just been hit by a car, the first thought that came to my mind was, Oh shit! My laptop’s toast!

  My life was in that machine. At MS, your laptop was like another appendage; it was an extension of how you functioned. If my hard drive was damaged, I was screwed. If the hard drive was somehow saved, but the machine no longer functioned properly, then waiting a week to get it fixed would be like trying to walk with one foot.

  The fact that I had just been hit by a car didn’t really seem to faze me and I was quickly getting over my worry about t
he laptop. The fact that I might be late to my interview was freaking me out a bit. The worst first impression you could make in an interview was to be late for it. It translated into this person is unreliable and inconsiderate of my time. Not to mention, I had less time now to mentally prepare for my five hour grilling.

  I looked around on my hands and knees to locate my laptop. I spotted my machine a few feet away and noticed the battery had fallen out. Shit. Shit. Please let it be okay. As I attempted to scramble back up into a standing position, I noticed one of my Jimmy Choo heels, the ones I bought in Palm Springs last winter, had fallen off. I was relieved to find that the heel was still attached and started crawling towards it.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” The nearby voice was concerned and alarmed. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t see you!”

  I didn’t turn. I was so focused on getting my shoe and my laptop and the stupid battery and onto my interview that the voice was just white noise.

  He asked again more urgently, “Are you okay? I didn’t see you step off the sidewalk so quickly.”

  Still in shock, I looked up and found myself looking into the most arresting blue eyes. They were the shade of the ocean just before a summer storm, almost a gray blue. The color suggested calm, but they were anything but. They were anxious and distressed and I sighed as a wrinkle set between them. I fought the urge to reach out rub it back to a smooth, unfurrowed state.

  “Oh, I think that was our fault,” said another voice.

  I looked towards the direction of the second voice and saw it was one of the soccer players. His face had a pained, guilty look. I hoped I didn’t lose their ball.

  I felt pressure pulling me up by my arm, which shook me somewhat out of my accident-induced haze. Looking at Mr. Blue Eyes’ face again, I blinked a few times to get my bearings. Wow … Not bad. His hand on my arm felt warm and tingly and very comforting. He smelled so good, too, like soap and … what was that wonderful smell?

  While I tried to identify the intoxicating scent, I realized he was talking to me again.

  “I’m so sorry … Are you okay?” He really did look very concerned. “Do you need me to call for an ambulance?”

  I did a quick mental inventory of my body parts. Nothing felt misaligned or in pain. In a panic, I blurted out, “Oh God, no! No, please don’t. I’m fine. Really!”

  The thought of sitting in an ambulance or having some emergency team tend to me in the open MS campus was mortifying. My interview! By now, I probably had less than ten minutes to get there. I would need to run to make it on time. I tried to gather the rest of my things with as much composure and dignity as my panicked state would allow me.

  “I’m okay, you only just bumped me,” I replied, frazzled. “I’m late for an interview, though, so I have to run.” I stood up as straight as my 5’5” frame would let me and did a little shimmy, trying to shake myself out of my momentary state of shock. I brushed my white blouse and black pencil skirt down tidily, put my heel back on, and tried to pat and primp my long dark brown hair to make sure it wasn’t disheveled before my interview. “Really, I’m fine,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

  When I looked back up at Mr. Blue Eyes, I caught him watching me and noticed he had a slightly amused expression. He quickly caught himself and the furrowed brow returned. He spoke slowly with his head slightly tilted to his left. “Uh … I just hit you with my car.” He paused to let that realization sink in with me, because I was obviously behaving unlike any sane person would’ve after having been hit by a car. “Don’t you want to discuss it more and we can make sure you’re okay? I feel really terrible about this.”

  I just stared back at him with a blank expression. His face was completely mesmerizing. Car. Interview. Blue eyes. Car. Interview. Blue eyes. Shit! Late!

  He placed a hand on each of my arms, steadying me, and looked into my eyes. His pupils moved back and forth, left to right. His face was so close I could feel his breath. He did the once over look down my body, pausing slightly at my legs, and back up to my eyes. Satisfied that I didn’t appear to have any injuries, he stared deeper into my eyes.

  Neither of us moved.

  If we were in a movie, someone would’ve pushed pause; it was as if that moment was frozen. I became suddenly and keenly aware of his proximity to me. I noticed how warm his hands were on my arms, yet ironically I felt goosebumps. Odd, considering that it was quite warm today, in the high seventies. He was more than “not bad,” he was unarguably attractive. Very attractive. He had English boy good looks, sandy brown hair, and a gorgeous, slightly crooked smile. And those eyes looked so intensely that they pierced right through me, holding me helpless in his gaze. Hmm … and those lips …

  He caught me looking at his mouth and he looked at mine in return. What? I licked my lips in an involuntary response, starting to feel flushed and a little off center. I felt breathless and I know my heart was thumping loud enough for him to hear. Maybe that car bumper hit me harder than I thought. Maybe it had hit me in the head as well.

  “Here’s your laptop,” said the soccer player whom I’d just realized was still standing next to me.

  Funny, I’d forgotten that anyone else was there. I nodded toward him and mumbled, “Thank you.”

  He handed me my laptop. “The battery cover looks like it fell off, but it doesn’t seem otherwise damaged, at least as far as I can tell.”

  The soccer player’s intrusion seemed to put the movie back on play. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until Mr. Blue Eyes released me and I exhaled. He looked as stunned as I felt. I’m not sure what force compelled me at that moment, but I softly caressed his right cheek with my hand. With gentle sternness, as if I were talking to a child, I whispered, “I’m okay.”

  I’m not sure why I did that and the whole thing felt inappropriately intimate, but a strong need to reassure this man came over me. I don’t know why, since I was the one who’d been hit by the car, but for some reason, I felt the need to make him feel better. I wanted to reassure him and let him know that he hadn’t hurt me, so he could continue on with his day.

  He backed up a few steps. He was tall, probably six feet plus an inch or two. It seemed like we’d been standing there for several minutes, but in reality it was probably no more than thirty seconds.

  I dazedly noticed traffic was starting to back up a little around the intersection with inquisitive faces peering from behind their steering wheels. In a moment of clarity, I remembered my interview.

  “Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “I’m going to be late!” I quickly gathered my things, said my thank yous to both the soccer guy and Mr. Blue Eyes, and ran off.

  I’m not sure why, but I turned around to take one last look at the scene of the accident. I guess I just wanted to reassure Mr. Blue Eyes again that I was okay. I waved goodbye with a few of my fingers and gave him a little smile. He looked surprised and perplexed by my erratic behavior and sudden departure. He probably thought I was nuts. His head was cocked a little to the left and his mouth was slightly open. I thought I heard a sort of gasping chuckle come out of his mouth. Ironically, the look on his face was that of someone trying to figure out what the hell had just run him over.

  I thought I was the one that had just been hit by a car.

  A few days later, on a Thursday afternoon, I got the call. It was Catherine Galer, the hiring manager for my potential new job. I began tapping my foot nervously under my desk.

  You know how you sometimes just sense when something went really well and the situation was totally in your favor? After my interviews, that was the feeling I had walking out of Catherine’s door. Despite my little accident, I had made it to the interview on time, and I never did get any of those “gotcha!” questions I had worried so much about.

  “Hi, Julia, I’m calling to give you some good news,” Catherine said. I could almost hear the smile on her face. “Our team discussed the interview and we’ve unanimously agreed that you’re the most qualified candidate for the role. If you�
��re still interested in the position, I would like to formally extend you an offer.”

  I didn’t hesitate before I answered. I couldn’t hide my excitement. “Yes, I accept the position! I’m really excited! Thanks so much, Catherine.”

  “Oh, that’s so great to hear!” she replied cheerfully. “I’ll reach out to HR and let them know your decision. You’ll get a formal offer via email from them and then we can figure out the transition details.”

  “Okay, that sounds great.”

  “What do you think would be a reasonable start date?”

  “Maybe two or three weeks, would that be fair?” I asked tentatively. “I’m fairly certain my manager would agree to this.”

  “That would be perfect. I’m heading out in a couple of weeks to the APJ and EMEA regions. Ideally, I’d like you to start before I leave so we can set up some deliverables you can work on while I’m out. I’ll get in touch with your manager and we can negotiate the transition details. I’m sure one of us will keep you posted.”

  “Okay, great. Thanks again, Catherine.” I was positively bursting with excitement.

  “We’re so excited to have you join our team, Julia! Speak to you soon.”

  “Bye!” I hung up the phone and for the first time since Andrew and I broke up, I was feeling hopeful about the future. This was cause for celebration. I called my sister, Anna, to see if she was up to meeting for dinner and drinks at Betty’s tonight.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said buoyantly.

  “Hey, Jules, what’s up? You actually sound happy about something.”

  I rolled my eyes at her attempted sarcasm. I knew I hadn’t been exactly Comedy Central lately and I was starting to feel bad about it. “Well, I’ve got some good news for a change. I got the job!”

  “Yay! I’m so excited for you! That is really great news!” Anna cried. I knew Anna’s enthusiasm was sincerely genuine. If anyone had ever had my back, it was Anna. Not only was she happy for me about my new job, but she also knew that this was going to help take my mind off of Andrew.