Page 2 of Due Diligence

“So, what exactly do you do?” When he finally got up, he launched into yet another stretch that made mestronglyconsider calling in sick.

“It’s not even remotely interesting,” I responded. I leaned against the door of my closet, watching him as he tracked down the clothes we scattered across the room last night in a frenzied race to get naked. “Think about the most boring job anyone could have and multiply it by a power of ten. That’s my job.”

“Worse than accounting?” he asked as he pulled on his jeans over his tattooed thighs.

“Definitely,” I confirmed, all while screaming internally at my heart rate tocalm the hell downbecause we werenothooking up with this guy again. “Way worse. I actually just watch accountants work sometimes.”

Hearing my response, Jackson frowned. He paused and looked at me, eyebrows tight. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?”

I tossed him his t-shirt, which was dangling from the end of my bed. “Not at all. I lead due diligence for acquisitions.”

I may as well have been speaking Spanish. “The hell does that mean?” he asked.

“I lead teams of external auditors who go into companies and basically rip them apart from top to bottom to make sure they’re worth however many hundreds of millions of dollars we’re paying to acquire them. So, I project manage accountants, investment bankers, lawyers, and whoever else we need, and I make sure no stone goes unturned.”

His expression was blank when I finished my explanation. I knew that somehow, I had just become a thousand times less attractive in his eyes, which was fine. I was a one and done kind of girl—I probably wasn’t going to contact him again anyway. He may have been hot, but New York City had no shortage of hot guys with tattoos and piercings and zero qualms about screwing a stranger into oblivion on a Sunday night.

“You’re right,” Jackson answered, nodding. He cracked a grin. “That’s not even remotely interesting.”

“Told you.”

He was finally dressed, wearing last night’s tattered t-shirt and worn-down jeans. He stood in front of my vanity, rubbing his eyes as he scoped himself out in the cheap mirror I bought from IKEA. He was so tall he had to bend at the waist to see himself. He had agreatass.

“So, are you due diligence-ing any companies today?” He was still fixated on the mirror, tucking back stray hairs that had tumbled out of his messy bun. It was at that exact moment I realized that Jackson was in a deeply committed relationship with himself—and honestly, I wished them the best of luck.

His question reminded me I had a hell of a day ahead of me. I respired out, pursing my lips to keep my exhale slow and even, like an inaudible whistle. Today was the first of a sixty-day due diligence process, which was bad enough as it was. However, this particular acquisition was poised to be a dumpster fire. I had been agonizing over this one for weeks, trying and failing to get reassigned. My trepidation finally came to a head last night when I pausedThe Shining, rolled out of bed, threw on fishnets and a dress so short it was basically a tank top, and picked up the first guy I met at the bar.

Jackson didn’t care about my dread or trepidation though. In fact, he probably didn’t realize his question had even gone unanswered until I finally said, “One. But I can’t tell you about it.”

At long last, he turned away from the mirror to frown at me. “Why not?”

In a pointed move, I picked up my old leather work tote and nodded towards the door to my bedroom. “Because if you went and blabbed off to someone about it, you could make both companies’ stock prices change because of market volatility and investor panic.”

“What’s market volatility?” he asked, naively thinking I could explain it to him in the few minutes we had remaining before I needed to kick him out of my apartment—and my life.

“Market volatility is the tendency for stock prices to change as a result of external and human impacts.” I oversimplified to a degree that would have made my professors at business schoolcringe, but it was good enough for Jackson.

He opened the bedroom door for me and motioned for me to pass. “I work at Duane Reade during the day and I bus tables at night. Who do you think I’m going to tell?”

He had a point. And more importantly, even if he did tell someone, I really didn’t care. After all, I sold off my Davenport-Ridgeway shares as soon as I wouldn’t have to deal with the capital gains taxes. These days, I was in no financial position to be investing anywhere else. Plus, like I told him, I worked to live and not the other way around.

“Fine,” I acquiesced. “Do you know Libra? It’s a fintech company. Helps people manage their student loans.”

At once, recognition dawned on his chiseled face. Naturally. Everyone under the age of fifty knew about Libra. Most of us had it on our phones—a lifeline to save us from our crippling student debt. “No shit. I have that app.”

“Well, there you go,” I commented, gesturing with my free hand. “This deal has been in the works for a year. Davenport-Ridgeway made a tentative offer for five hundred million dollars to acquire, Libra accepted, and now I have to make sure they are what they say they are. That’s what due diligence is.”

“That’s kind of cool,” he mused, even though it objectively wasn’t. “Do you get, like, a commission or something?”

“No. It’s just business as usual.”

We were standing by my front door, far too deep in a conversation about my job that I wasn’t even being paid to have. I checked my phone.Late. “Well, this was fun, Jackson. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, you should text me.”

For the record, he didn’t have my number.

We stepped outside of my apartment and found ourselves standing in the dim, peeling hallway with a lightbulb flickering over us in a cliched image of a slummy New York apartment. It was time for the awkward song and dance where we figured out if we wanted to hug or kiss or wave inelegantly before we somehow ended up heading in the same direction to catch the elevator.

But luckily, Jackson tugged his leather jacket over his broad shoulders and saved us from that dreaded choreography by saying, “Actually, the Duane Reade where I work is pretty closeto the Libra offices. If you’re heading that way, we could split an Uber and make out on the way over.”

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