Page 57 of A Fae in Finance
I was in a sour mood, because no one had told me that the pitch was for a potential client who’d never forgiven Jeff for hooking up with his daughter at a Christmas party two decades back.Whythe man had even agreed to the meeting, I couldn’t say. But I felt sure that if I ever had to sit on another video call watching two adult men shout until spittle flew into their camera lenses, I would become fully insane. The sentence “My daughter’s flower of youth was plucked in its prime by a man who only wanted to add it to his wilting bouquet” was uttered.
The sentence “I didn’t pluck anyone’s flower that night, you pompous shitbag” was also uttered.
When I figured out that they were arguing over the virtue of a married forty-five-year-old woman with three children, a dog, and a summer house in the Hamptons, I came off mute. “Hey,” I interrupted, so gently that neither of them stopped speaking.
“Hey,” I tried again, and they both quieted. “Do you want me to start the presentation?” I asked.
“Just a minute, Miri,” Jeff said, flapping a hand at the screen. “Andyou, Ronald, have no leg to stand on here!”
Berating the potential client was an interesting new sales strategy. It proved ineffective.
By the end of the hour-long call, in which my perfect pitch deck stayed on its perfect title page, I pitied the daughter more for her father than for her brief carnal entanglement with Jeff. And that was truly saying something.
So when Sahir reminded me about my next human class, I snapped at him. “Just move it,” I said. “I don’t have any time.” I was still sitting in my desk chair, which I’d turned to face him where he sat on my bed. He had his hands on his knees, his posture as upright as ever. Lene and Doctor Kitten, who’d napped through most of that meeting, lay on the bed behind him.
He only stared at me, soulful brown eyes wide and guileless.Like a cow’s, I thought uncharitably.
“Fine,” I muttered, well aware that Sahir couldn’t move my human class. “I don’t know what to talk about, but I’ll wing it.” I stood from my seat and snatched my hairbrush from my desk. Doctor Kitten stood up and padded over to Sahir. He butted his head against Sahir’s hand.
“What is ‘wing it’?” Sahir asked, looking intrigued, as I yanked snarls of brown hair through the bristles. Doctor Kitten butted his hand again. He still didn’t pet the cat. “You do not have wings.”
I sighed. “It’s an idiom.” I dropped the brush. The plastic handle bounced once, forlorn. Doctor Kitten mewled. Sahir relented and ran a hand down the cat’s back.
“An idiom,” Lene repeated, blinking sleep from her eyes.
“A… a saying that is so common everyone understands what you mean, even though it isn’t what you said.”
“You could talk about those?” Sahir suggested. Doctor Kitten hopped onto his lap, shedding white fur on his black suit pants.
“I don’t know enough about idioms to explain them right now.” I watched Lene swing her legs over the side of the bed. She nudged her head into Sahir’s shoulder, in exactly the same way Doctor Kitten had just done to his hand. Sahir, who was occupied in petting Doctor Kitten, rested his head on hers.
“You could discuss human greetings,” he mused. “I struggled with human greetings when I first joined the bank.”
I stared at him with new eyes. “Sahir, you genius,” I said. “You’re the best person to talk to about these classes, since you’ve experienced the human world from a faerie’s perspective.” I resolved to lesson-plan with Sahir going forward.
He tilted his head. “Just so,” he said. “You may refer to me as a genius whenever it pleases you.”
I snorted. “Come on, let’s get down to the dining hall and set up.”
We left Doctor Kitten in the bedroom because Lene said he had found the pitch meeting “so disturbing to his rest that he required an additional nap to find composure.” I told him he was a weenie and a whiner, because he hadn’t even been on camera. He then apparently told Lene that I was empowered to hang up at any time because the arrangement of my human phalanges meant I could easily hit the correct button on the keyboard or mouse, whereas his limited dactyl range meant that he couldnothang up for me without significant trial and error.
Before I could aska lotof questions about my cat’s knowledge of biological terminology, Sahir said we needed to leave for the lesson. We left Doctor Kitten lying smugly in a nest of pillows at the head of the bed, the black patch on his side glistening in the twinkling light of our resident will-o’-the-wisp.
“Lene, did you make up the dactyl range thing?” I asked as we made our way down the hall. The tail end of the dinner rush was coming toward us. I knew from watching at my window like a tower-bound princess that many Court denizens would go outside in the evenings to enjoy the cool night air.
“No,” she said, sounding a bit offended. “I cannot lie, Miri. And ‘making up’ things, as you say, is just another way to lie.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry.” I pushed on the dining hall doors, gesturing for her and Sahir to enter. “I just don’t know where he learned that.”
“We can ask him later,” she said.
I followed the two of them inside and glanced around. A few stragglers were picking at trays of food. By the far wall, the cafeteria staff stood cleaning up their workstations. Kamare, the snake-lady, glared at me. Milo hadn’t noticed me yet.
“Begin with greetings,” Sahir advised, leading the three of us to the same table as the previous session. He sat to the left of the head of the table; Lene sat to the right. I knew where that left me, and took the seat reluctantly.
“What should we do for the rest of class?” I asked.
Sahir gave me a look that saidYou are not yet privy to the great mysteries of the Fae, but you’re about to be, and you won’t enjoy it.
