“Jo, it sounds fantastic!” Sal exclaimed, setting a real china teacup on her living room table. “So much better than the mail room.” She said the last with a sly wink. Or had she? Jo sometimes had trouble reading Sal; it was hard to be sure with her sometimes.
“The mail room’s not that bad,” she settled for protesting. “The people are pretty cool. Quinn’s there, and the others seem decent enough.”
“But you don’t spend any time with them,” Sal said. Jo noticed a cab pulling into the drive outside; David, just arriving home, looking like he was yelling into his phone.
“Not much time to, so far at least. I’ve been too busy getting caught up on what the company’s doing. One of these days I’m going to have to pick David’s brain, when my own isn’t over-stuffed with all this—”
The door opened then, and David’s voice carried over. He was done shouting, if indeed he had actually been doing that, but he was still a bit heated. “Look, the bottom line is this project is costing a fortune, and now you tell me your initial success reports were wrong?” He paused for a response, nodding a greeting to them as he passed through. “No! You said brain-to-brain, not—…—yes, and that was how long ago?”
He climbed the stairs to the next floor, and the sound of a door closing muted his voice beyond hearing. “Sorry, Jo, he’s so busy lately,” Sal explained, sounding tired.
“I can understand a bit better now that I work for the same company, though actually, I’ve never seen him there.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “The company has several offices, he works out of a different one. It’s not far, though.”
Jo barely heard her. David’s one-sided conversation was intruding on her thoughts like a fly buzzing past an ear. She mentally swatted at it and returned her attention to her friend; she’d put her finger on why it had sounded so familiar later.