Saving Her Billionaire

Chapter 5

Phoebe was a little taken aback by the directness of Nate’s question. She hadn’t been expecting a question like that if she was very honest. It was a rather rude question, but she didn’t mind. It meant that he was direct and to the point, that he did not mess around.

Phoebe then began to realize that the question wasn’t all that rude at all. On the contrary, it was the kind of question that anybody would ask. Why, then, was she feeling so uneasy about the fact that he had asked it? Why was she feeling like he had done wrong by asking a question that was, all things considered, perfectly normal among people who were talking for the first time?

This made her realize something very important. She wasn’t quite sure if she liked her job or not. Initially she had been extremely worried about the fact that she did not like her job at all. She was worried that she had decided that this job wasn’t for her. However, now that she thought about it, she realized that there were a great many things that she liked about her job, things that she wasn’t afraid to be open about. This surprised her. It made her feel vulnerable. She had not thought that someone she had literally just met would be able to give her such an in depth understanding of what she was trying to do with her life.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked Nate after the silence started to get uncomfortable.

“No, no,” said Phoebe, realizing that her silence might get misconstrued as the result of someone having committed a faux pas.

She didn’t want him to feel like he had done something wrong. He was a very attractive man, after all. He had the jawline of a Greek god, and his hair was perfect. It had the messy, just got out of bed look that she absolutely loved men to have. It was an immensely attractive hair do and it suited him perfectly. She also liked his stubble. It was not the kind of stubble that one grows by accident. No, this was a very carefully trimmed stubble. This man cared a lot about his appearance and Phoebe found this extremely attractive.

She was done with men that did not care about how they looked. She had initially liked scruffy men. Mark had been scruffy. He had been very flippant about his appearance and as a result always looked unkempt. Phoebe had initially found this rather cute. However, after spending time with him, she had started to hate it. It made her feel like the person in front of her was not putting any effort in, that he did not care what people thought. It made her feel, or at least gave her the impression that, the person in front of her would be similarly flippant about what she wanted and what she liked, and this was something that she absolutely could not work with.

She wanted to get to know Nate. He seemed like a very interesting person after all. He seemed to have a lot to say. Phoebe did not know how she knew this, it was just the connection she felt with him. She found it odd that she felt this connected to somebody that she had just met but she couldn’t help but feel this way. Nate just had that aura about him, that aura that made people feel like what they had to say was important. He had a way of looking at Phoebe that made her feel like whatever she was saying was the most important thing that Nate had ever heard in his life, and she really appreciated the earnestness in his gaze.

She had been made to feel unimportant far too many times. She was done with that. This was why Phoebe decided to be honest with him. If Nate had pushed too hard in that moment or seemed even marginally uninterested in what Phoebe had to say she might have not been interested in talking to him anymore and that would have been the end of that. Fate, however, had something else in store, something that would end up changing both of them.

Both Nate and Phoebe felt the ghost of this future in that moment. As they looked at each other, they felt the inertia of their pasts driving them towards each other, pushing them inexorably towards this moment. They felt the magnetic pull of their futures as well, the pull that was throwing inhibition out the window, that was making them feel like being absolutely and utterly open with one another. In that moment, as Nate and Phoebe looked at each other, they realized that they had found in each other something beyond the ordinary.

“If I’m very honest I don’t know,” said Phoebe.

“Oh,” said Nate, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” said Phoebe. “It’s a good thing.”

“Is it?” asked Nate. “I mean… not knowing whether you like your job or not seems like it would be a bad thing. I would not want to be uncertain about my occupation. It’s what I do after all. I would want to be absolutely certain that what I am doing is what I want to do, because I don’t want to have to regret any aspect of my life.”

“That’s true,” said Phoebe, “but up until the moment you asked me if I liked my job or not I was sure that I did not like it and this concerned me, because I had settled on this job after almost a decade of soul searching. I switched majors quite a few times, you see. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but when I became a counselor I had thought that I had finally found something that I genuinely wanted to do. I felt like I had finally found a career that I would like to follow for the rest of my life and this had made me happy, so when I realized, or at least thought I had realized, that I did not like my job I was upset. I felt like all of the happiness I had felt a year ago when I started this job had been a lie, but now I am uncertain. Do you understand why this makes me happy?”

Nate nodded and said, “There is a possibility that you actually do like your job, and this makes you happy because it means that there is hope for the future.”

“That’s exactly right,” said Phoebe. “In fact, that’s exactly how I would have worded it too. It’s like you took the words I had in my head and you spoke them. How did you do that?”

Nate shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “I don’t really know, I just said what I felt about what you just told me.”