On May first, Arielle arrived early at the office, lugging coffee supplies and snacks that she’d bought with her own money because the new owner had cut the office supplies budget to zero and installed crappy vending machines in the break room.
It was unethical to pay people with one hand and then grab that money back with the other for a damn cup of overpriced coffee and a packet of stale crackers. She hoped that the new owner lost money on those damn machines.
Those big old machines made the break room hot, too, which made the air conditioning work harder, which ran up the electric bill because the temperature outside was already over ninety degrees because it was May in Phoenix. The Easterner new owner probably wasn’t netting nearly as much money as he thought he was, and it served him right.
And now, the damned new owner was going to add insult to injury and hold a press conference at noon to announce the official launch of Match Play, the dating app.
A dating app.
Jeez, no wonder her father had taken what little money he could and left instead of staying through the transition. Even though the app was theoretically golf-related because the first dates were all a round of golf that had to be booked through the app, it still felt like a betrayal of everything her father had built.
And she hated to admit it, but the golf courses were signing up their tee times with them again because Match Play was charging inflated rates for booking the times, which netted the courses more money than they made with that mega-store app Golf Wow, damn it.
Moreover, during the beta test, the cancellation rate had dropped to zero.
Because there was an optional box to check for subscribers saying that they would pay for the tee times if they matched and specifying what courses they would play, women golfers were signing up in unprecedented numbers even during the beta test.
Was it just for the golf?
Who cared?
The app’s retention rate was nearly a hundred percent for all genders, which was phenomenal for a dating app, even for just the first month.
But now the beta test was over, and the app was opening up to anyone to download and start “Matching” that day.
Arielle shoved the cookies and chips she’d bought into the drawers just like they always had been and ripped open a new box of artificial sweetener packets.
The new owner was going to arrive just before the noon press conference started. He was just going to blow in and order everyone around like a king.
It was stupid.
He was stupid.
She stomped out of the break room and into the main office.
The new owner even had a ridiculous Easterner name, they’d discovered, Mitchell Saltonstall. What kind of a stuck-up prig had a snooty name like that? She was surprised it wasn’t Mitchell Saltonstall the Third or Esquire or something. It had too many consonants, especially L’s. Arielle liked nice, normal names like Joanne, Julio, Rosita, ShaDonna, Ladonna, Kumar, Jamal, Guadalupe, Ming, Carlyn, Sunil, Anjali, Tyrone, Emma, and Dylan, which were the names of the employees gathered in the office’s main area, waiting for Mitchell Saltonstall to arrive.
They were standing in small, dejected clusters, muttering about what would happen that day.
Those were friendly names, regular names, not the kind of names that would ruin a guy who had taught in public school his whole life and was now tutoring high school kids in a learning center and desperately trying to find a teaching job for the fall. Mitchell Saltonstall was probably a sniveling guy with nasty hair and a chain-smoking habit who stole pennies from the convenience store change-sharing trays.
Mitchell Saltonstall. It just sounded stuck-up.
Arielle’s molars slid against each other, and her jaw clicked. The teeth grinding was new, her dentist had said and told her to knock it off.
All morning, Arielle liaised with the event planner who’d marched in and demanded half of the cubicles be shoved aside to make room for a podium where Mitchell Saltonstall was going to stand and launch his stupid dating app.
He was already literally shoving Match Play’s employees aside to aggrandize himself. Such a typical move for a narcissistic psychopathic business tycoon.
Arielle slapped a smile on her face and helped out with the preparations because that’s what she always did.
The event planner was a middle-aged Black woman named Lourdes who was in charge and knew it. Everyone instantly did her bidding. The offending cubicle partitions were broken down, and half of the desks were moved and stacked faster than Arielle thought possible.
Meanwhile, the other employees whispered that Saltonstall was doing his presser at the office because he was going to distribute pink slips to half of the staff right after the press conference. He needed them to be smiling while the reporters were there, so that’s why he was doing it afterward.
That sounded just like a venture capitalist. Arielle completely believed the rumor.
At a quarter until noon, the podium had been erected in front of dark blue curtains hanging from a rod nailed to a blank wall.
Like Mitchell Saltonstall, Arielle stewed. Fake, superficial, and self-important.
Reporters began to trickle into their office.
Lourdes, the event planner, met them at the front door, shaking hands and showing them to the long table of submarine sandwiches, snacks, and carafes of fresh coffee laid out just for them while the hungry employees watched.
Arielle tapped her foot because this could not be any more of a metaphor if she’d tried to make one.
The clock at the back of the office clicked, and both hands were pointing straight up toward high noon.
Arielle had worn a scarlet red cocktail dress that day that hugged her curves because she was Frank Carter’s daughter, and she was not going to fade into the background of the new owner’s press conference like a despairing little mouse.
She had finagled a spot right beside the podium but facing in because she was going to force him to stand there and do all his evil dirty work while he knew she was watching him.
If he had any shred of decency left in his twisted soul, he would at least feel bad while he did it.
Through the glass front door of the office, they all watched a long black town car slide to a stop just outside.
The chauffeur hopped out and opened the car’s rear door.
Of course, Mitchell Saltonstall would insist that a servant open his door for him. What a giant dick.
The glass on the front door was slightly warped from the Arizona heat and sun, but they all saw long legs and a tall man unfold from the back seat of the limousine.
He reached for the door with one hand while buttoning his jacket with the other. His long strides covered the carpeting that was a little dirty because the cleaning service had been cut to half-time.
Arielle had just been about to launch a mental tirade about idiotic psychopathic narcissists who wore suits with suit jackets in Arizona in May as if they thought they were special and expected the heat to part for them like the Red Sea for Moses, when Mitchell Saltonstall approached the podium and looked directly at Arielle.
His eyes were brilliant green above sharply cut cheekbones, and his dark blond hair was tousled and fell over his forehead. He moved like an athlete, quick like a tennis player, and had a lean body to match. He watched her, his eyes flicking downward for just a second at the red dress she wore that had become just a little tighter from emotional overeating during the last two months, and he smiled right at her before he breezed by and stood behind the podium.
Mitchell Saltonstall was tall, astonishingly so. The entire crowd of nearly fifty employees, the reporters, and the event coordinator looked up as they watched him take the podium.
He grasped the sides of the podium, grinning, making him even more ridiculously handsome. He almost started to speak, but he caught Arielle’s eyes and smiled a little wider with one side of his mouth.
It was just the red dress, Arielle told herself. Her scarlet dress was so tight that her boobs were plumping out the top, and that’s what was attracting his attention. She shouldn’t have worn it. She didn’t know what to do when a smoking-hot man like that smiled at her.
Mitchell Saltonstall blinked as he looked back at the crowd and announced, “Welcome to the new Match Play.”