Nerd Girl(38)

The same list of search results that I had seen last night appeared in front of us. Ryan scooted closer to me to get a better look at the screen.

“Hmm …” was all he said. However, both of his eyebrows were raised in moderate surprise. “Oh man, that’s a really old article … and that one was, like, two years ago.”

I shook my head and laughed at his childlike curiosity at the results of his own name search. As he continued to scroll down the results page, he would click on the occasional link. Our knees bumped into each other and our thighs were flush against each other, but neither of us moved away. Being this close to him made me a little breathless. I started to feel warm and tingly all over.

“Okay, enough.” He chuckled to himself. “Who knew?”

I gave him a peculiar look. I was still shocked that he never did a search on himself. I can’t believe he was never curious enough to look before. What did this say about him? He was probably too busy to worry about his own search results, or maybe it meant he didn’t have a big ego, which was refreshing for someone in his position.

We got back to the task at hand. After about an hour, we were almost done. I adapted the scribbles on the whiteboard into a format that was the culmination of our joint ideas. Ryan took a photo of it on his phone and emailed it to me. As he finished up jotting notes in my laptop, I thought of the picture in Catherine’s office. I decided to mention it to him.

“I saw a picture of you in Catherine’s office,” I said.

He momentarily stopped typing. “What was the picture of?” he murmured absentmindedly, continuing to type out our remaining notes.

“It looked like an old launch party event or something. When did you guys work together?”

“We still do, sort of.” He looked up at me. “I mean, even though we’re in separate orgs, I have teams that rely on her team … as you already know.”

“I recognized you, but I didn’t know your name at the time,” I added. “I didn’t ask Catherine about it, though.”

He looked relieved when I said that last bit. I’m guessing this was probably because he didn’t want others to know about our fraternization. It would be a bit awkward to explain to others. In fact, I couldn’t help wondering what my team would think if they knew that the Ryan McGraw, US Subsidiary CVP, was sitting next to me right now typing out scorecard notes.

“We actually go a long ways back,” he said, pulling me out of my reverie. “We’ve known each other since we were kids. Our parents were family friends. Working together is just a coincidence.”

I was surprised by this new information. Had I asked Catherine about the picture, I wondered what sort of reaction or comment she would’ve made. In retrospect, I was relieved now that I never had the chance to ask her further about it. For some reason, I wanted to keep this whole thing, whatever it was between Ryan and me, strictly between us. If she had a family and childhood history with him, it would’ve been too personal. I didn’t want to start that sort of relationship off with my new manager. She wasn’t dumb and I bet she would’ve been able to see right through me.

Before I could respond to this latest information, Ryan said wearily, “Julia, I have no right to ask you this,” he looked down uncomfortably at his hands, “but can we keep this meeting … and all of our meetings, to just ourselves?” He looked at me cautiously. “I just don’t want to have to explain my personal life to people at the office. And I don’t want us to be the focus of office gossip.”

I nodded emphatically. “Yes, I completely agree. I can only imagine the reaction of my co-workers if they knew about … any of this.”

His face softened with relief.

I liked his reference to “all of our meetings” and the “us” part. Did this imply that we would be seeing more of one other? Neither of us was addressing the elephant in the room. What exactly did this liaison of ours mean? Frankly, I didn’t really need to know right now. It was enough for me to know that he wanted to see me today. He’d thought about me, it seemed, just as much as I’d thought about him over these last several weeks, but there was certainly some danger in what we were starting here, whatever it was.

The rumor mill.

Could rumors hurt his career? Would other executives care who he was seeing? Even though I didn’t report into his chain of command, was there possibly some HR violation that I didn’t know about that said this sort of relationship was forbidden? I knew that it could certainly hurt my reputation. I would be accused of sleeping my way to the top, or having an unfair advantage of some sort. Whatever this was between Ryan and me, I came to the conclusion that it was best to keep this private. Apparently, he agreed.