After their drinks arrived, he turned to her. “So, what do you do?”

That was always a hard question for her. “I’m sort of between jobs right now. I’ve done a lot of different things, but I’m trying to figure out what I’m really interested in.”

He shook his head. “Not me. I’ve always known what I wanted to do. My parents got me a computer when I was nine and my mom always says that was when I just blossomed.”

Lucy tried not to frown. How come she’d never blossomed? “You work with computers?”

“You could say that,” he said with a smile. “I went to school for computer engineering with a double major in computer science. Now I work at a startup.”

“Neat. I worked at startup once. It was sort of chaotic, but we had a lot of fun before it all fell apart.”

He sat back, crossing his arms. “The startup where I work isn’t going to fall apart.”

Go on. “Oh?”

He took a sip of his cherry coke. “We’re developing a proprietary technology and it’s going very well.”

Lucy tried to feign surprise. “That’s cool.”

He then launched into a twenty-minute story about his interests leading up to his position in the company, what he worked on in college, and that he graduated magna cum laude.

Just in case she had the audacity to think he wasn’t impressive, he explained to her that his GPA was considered phenomenal at his school, whereas at a state school it wouldn’t have been considered as impressive.

Lucy muted her thoughts. If he’d asked her, he would’ve found out that she’d gone to a state school and not graduated, honors or otherwise.

He did not ask her anything, however, and eventually steered himself back to talking about his current company.

“We have the best client on the line – the government – and it looks like our parent company might be selling, too.”

“Oh no,” she said flatly.

“No, it’ll actually be amazing. I own stock in the company and it’s going to go nuts.”

“I thought you said that the government was your buyer.”

He nodded. “Oh, I see how you could be confused. They’re going to buy the product, not the company. They’re going to license it. It’s better this way, because they’re paying every year to use it. It’s brilliant, really.”

She forced a smile. “Sounds like it.”

“We’re about to be bought out by a venture-capital firm out of New York – Steel and Steal. Have you heard of them?”

Lucy shook her head. “Can’t say that I have.”

He described, in detail, what it meant for his stock portfolio.