On The Market Chapter 36: Will's POV6 - For the Greater Good, a pride and prejudice fanfic

Happy Friday, everyone! This latest instalment takes place between Chapters 13 and 14 - Mac's party and the Marshmallows. I had a version of this scene from E's point of view in the first draft of OTM, but then edited it out and now it's back, from Will's perspective and explaining the origins of his morning coffee rounds.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed and subscribed, it's really great to hear from you. Don't forget: if you can't wait for next week's instalment, A Bee in her Bonnet is another jolly good read by Moi available on this excellent website. Hope you like it - feel free to leave comments on that too.

Have a great weekend!
Mel

He saw her walking a few steps ahead of him on the pavement outside the tube. Unmistakable, with Moby Dick sticking all dog-eared out of her coat pocket, the rucksack she carried her swimming gear in, and on her head that red, mock-Gallic neither-beanie-nor-quite-beret thing.

'Lizzie,'

She turned to face him, hands wedged in her coat pockets against the cold. He could see her breath.

'Morning,' he said.

'Morning.'

'Fancy getting a proper coffee today, instead of that canteen crap? Before we hit the desk?'

She was understandably surprised, but this had to be done. For the greater good of trading, of course. And for Dean's sake but above all: so Will might get over himself.

'Let me get you a proper coffee: there's a couple of things I'd like to go over with you.'

Her eyebrows came together while she thought about it. You could almost hear the cogs working under that adorable red thing on her head, but she didn't put her fuck-off face on. Either she was trying to stay on the right side of him, or else she was thinking of Raj and of the greater good of trading too, but in the end she sort of nodded and started walking again, which he took as the closest thing to a yes he'd ever get out of her.

It felt more appropriate, somehow, to discuss personal matters first, out in the cold morning open air, so Will started with what didn't concern Raj:

'Exactly how close a friend are you of Lily Cheng's then?' he asked without preamble. Preambles were, in his experience, wasted on the quant. They only tried her very scant reserves of patience.

Thus far she had been walking a very respectable foot to the left of him, but when Will asked she pulled even further away and looked at his face, hands still stuffed down the depths of her coat pockets. Then she looked straight ahead of her and said:

'I flatshare with two of her uni friends.'

'So I gather.'

She shook her head a little but said nothing. Some of her hair had escaped the red thing and was blowing into her face, but she wasn't willing to expose her hands to tuck it back. He, on the other hand, would have given his right arm to, but that was neither here nor there.

'Lily's going out with my best friend, Dean,' Will said, and she nodded and this time did take a hand out of her pocket to tuck her hair back, and then she shoved her hand back into her coat pocket, shoulders hunched up against the cold.

'Your friend who's into made-up trading systems, is that right?' she said to the pavement, just as he was beginning to wonder how long he could carry on looking at her without physically plucking her up and starting to rub her back.

'Correct,' he managed to say instead, and again she nodded to herself, processing things under that red hat of hers.

That, Will thought, didn't bode well. What was there to process about Lily Cheng, unless she was indeed a devious muppet-slaying witch?

'So have you seen much of Lily recently?'

'Not really, saw her at a party last weekend.'

They were almost at the coffee shop already, so Will decided to save time and switch to quant language:

'And would I be right in suspecting Lily of two-timing my best friend?'

Again Lizzie swerved away from him and didn't say anything for a bit, until:

'Will, I was really sick at that party. It was… a strange night,' she said, and looked down at the pavement for a bit then back at him again, her face either cold, or blank, of both: 'But suffice to say, even if I had been paying attention to Lily that night, and even if I knew for a fact she was two timing your best friend: what good could it possibly do for me to tell you?'

This time it was Will who stopped for a double take. The quant, what do you know, had got her incredibly pretty head around the "information is power" thing finally, and was attempting not to give the game away. Which was adorable because despite the cold draining all colour out of her, every part of her anatomy was still very much giving the game away.

Kudos to her for making the effort anyway, Will thought. And for taking pleasure neither in telling him, nor not telling him. Which meant that Lizzie wasn't letting her hatred of himself spill over to Dean, which was very decent of her. Shame that wouldn't help Dean one bit when, inevitably, he went and had his heart broken all over again. But that, Will remembered, wasn't the quant's fault. Only Lily's.

A sigh might have escaped him, nonetheless, as he pushed open the door to the coffee shop and watched the quant file past, as far from him as the doorjamb could possibly allow.

'What can I get you?'

'Double macchiato please.'

He watched her take her hat off, then tame her hair back behind her ears with those cold fingers of hers.

'Sure thing. Grab us that table while it's free, will you?'

She nodded and left him. By the time he joined her again she'd taken her coat off, and was cradling it together with her hat in an awkward bundle on her lap. Ready for a quick escape, was the overall impression.

'There you go,' he said, putting her drink in front of her. With her mouth she said a very polite:

'Thank you,' while with her face, starting to colour again in the indoor warmth, she screamed an ear-splitting:

'WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!'

So he told her.

He didn't tell her that this very small coffee she'd had him order was in fact a peace offering. Of course not. Maybe, just maybe, she'd work that out eventually. The point of this, he reminded himself, was for him to man up and start behaving towards her with something approaching basic decency. The point wasn't for her to notice. What difference would that make, anyway?

To the point then. To Raj's-single-dream-team-pulling-together-for-the-greater-good-of-trading vision:

'So, Lizzie, are you familiar with the procedure for VP promotions?' he asked with his best shot at a nice normal friendly sort of voice.

'Well let's see,' the quant said, her face just short of the full French fuck-off, 'Paul only started three days ago so no, Will, I'm sorry but I've not made it a priority.'

Fair enough. Will had never thought his normal friendly voice was his best, but the point was that he'd given it a bloody good shot, and was going to carry on giving it a bloody good shot, un-natural though it might feel to be nice and friendly to Raj's pretty, pink-cheeked pet.

'That's fine, Lizzie. I was just wondering whether you'd help me out with Neil's.'

'Neil?' a completely different quant replied: the lesser-spotted, happy quant. The delighted quant, even. And heart-achingly delight-ful, too.

'This stays between you and me and these walls,' Will said as sternly as the sight of her flushed, suddenly re-animated face would let him.

'Sure. But it's such great news!'

'I'm glad you agree, Lizzie, but it's hardly a done thing. Won't hurt for you to put in a good word with Raj next time you two speak, by the way.'

'Don't worry, I probably have already.'

'Thanks, he does listen to you.'

'Aha, sure.'

He nodded.

'Oh, and Will: I'll be sure to bring it up on my next hang-out with the Exec Committee as well. Seriously, you didn't bring me here to help with the networking aspect of this, did you?'

He smiled at the cool, proud little weirdo that she was. She owned it and fair enough: she sure made weirdo-nerd look good right now. Like she had back on the reception sofa, the day of his interview…

'Yeah maybe leave the Exec Committee to me, if you don't mind?' he said while it almost felt like he was on a winner. 'But the thing is, I've not been here that long. So I was hoping you could run some historical numbers to help me back the case?'

Her face went blank again – what had he said now?

'What kind of numbers did you have in mind?'

He'd been hoping she'd suggest some, but right now she was looking at him like all the numbers in the world were her numbers, and not his numbers, and she wasn't giving him any, ever.

She wasn't giving him any numbers, that is. Obviously she wasn't giving him any, ever, not in that sense either. Oh, Jesus effing Christ, Will: not relevant right now. Stay with the script, for fuck's sake, stay with the fucking script:

'I don't know, Lizzie, maybe just break things down by trader and see whether you can make Neil look good?' he said in his phoney friendly voice. She saw right through it, shook her head at him and started fiddling with the coat on her lap again. You could tell she wanted to give him the fuck-off face, but wasn't letting herself, which was even worse. It was also less of a turn on, mind, which was probably a good thing right now because, as Will had to remind himself yet again, he was here to be good, not to have a good time doing it.

'I'm sorry, Lizzie, is that difficult? Is that too much work?'

'No of course it's easy enough,' she replied, shaking her exasperated head at her coat, then making some huge effort to look back at him, almost politely:

'But firstly,' she started, holding her right index finger with her left, such very pretty fingers, and thank goodness for them, because that charcoal roll-neck she was wearing today was a lot tighter than she thought. Or maybe it wasn't and she'd bought it with Estonia Tom in mind, which was no good either. Anyway, Will managed to keep his eyes on her fingers as she went on something like:

'Firstly, if I break down the history by trader, you realise that if Neil comes out well then someone else will come out bad. And that won't be very helpful to you at the next round of promotions. Secondly,' she said grabbing her middle finger too, the one he'd bashed and was starting to heal, but a bit of its nail had turned an accusatory black, 'I can tell you right now that Neil's going to look better than Yoda or Andy both in terms of mean and variance because he trades large cap names and they're way cheaper, as we all know. So thirdly,' she grabbed hold of her ring finger, 'we would have to look at Neil in terms of his realised trading costs versus the expected trading cost model and guess what: I calibrated that using the last three years of history, so by construction Neil's going to be level with expected costs. I just didn't have enough back history so right now we've only got four months of out of sample data, and that's not enough to build a case for anyone or anything.'

Will made sure to smile and nod at her before he looked down and took a sip of his coffee. It did vex him that the quant should have forgotten so completely all that he'd tried to teach her just the other day, about how to win friends and influence people during work meetings. Or else she just couldn't be arsed to try and be friends with or influence him...

'I'm sorry, but it's just not that simple,' she shrugged, in that shoulder and boob-hugging roll-neck of hers.

Simple this wasn't, no.

'Never mind, that's fine,' he said to his coffee, which was indeed fine, and by far the best thing about this morning. Hers was only a tiny thing and she'd finished it long ago so they might as well head back to the office, he supposed. Her fingers were playing with her empty cup now, such pretty fingers...

'Look, I'll see whether I can run some trend analysis on Neil's trading costs instead,' she said, Lord knew why. God, and quants' minds, did work in mysterious ways, so Will sought neither to understand, nor indeed to look at her. She sounded less angry already, and that was enough.

'I'm pretty sure large cap t-costs will have come down over the last few months,' she was saying, 'To be honest, that's just down to volatility going down and SETS helping bring spreads down, but I'm happy enough for you to put that down to Neil's trading genius.'

He looked up at her when she stopped, and found that she was looking at him too. Not happy but no longer pissed off either, which felt amazing. Waiting for him to agree - well obviously, yes, the launch of SETS had brought costs down. That was why the London Stock Exchange had started an electronic order book in the first place: to make trading cheaper.

But what was incomprehensible about what she'd just said was that she was… pushing… bullshit numbers?

'The likes of Toad on the board won't know any better, and Raj should be happy to go along too, right? For the greater good of global trading?'

Will smiled with a gush of pure, unadulterated pride. This was like watching Bambi take his first steps, but better. She had listened, and she had remembered, and yes, of course that would work, because Toad wouldn't know a SETS order book if it hit him in his stupid ugly mug.

'OK,' he said, still incredulous. She looked incredulous too. They were deep in uncharted territory here, her trying her hand at bullshit, him at being nice. And yet strangely, neither sought to put the other one down: well might they have to suspend disbelief. How long could this last?

Well…

'But I don't know why don't you just blow them with the spreadsheet and the Rheinland story instead,' she said. 'Quarter of a mil: that's a simple enough number even for Toad.'

'Yes, but that was your spreadsheet, Lizzie, even I know that.'

'Teamwork. Couldn't have done it without Neil. The spreadsheet's nothing without users. And to be fair to Neil he was the first, back when Andy and Yoda wouldn't give me the time of day – not that they really do now, mind. Anyway, Neil gave me good feedback, he made me change a few things. Why don't you call him the early adopter of quantitative methods on the desk or something? Say he converted the others… etc. etc., you know? You probably want to use the words integration and thought leadership. Do you want me to jot it all down for you?'

Will stared at her and smiled, because he was happy and this woman was incredible. Smart, gorgeous, a quick study, evidently, funny and right now: incredibly generous.

To Neil, anyway.

'I might mention that Neil works well with you,' Will said, because there was no way he was stealing her credit over Rheinland. That was hers, and hers only.

'Yeah I'm told that's a real challenge.'

She said it without bitterness, but also without the spark she'd had when she was riffing about teamwork, integration and leadership. He missed that spark already. That spark was the best:

'I didn't mean…' he started, but stopped because that would have been lying, and he was done bullshitting her. Friends, even wannabe-friends, even wannabe-friends with ulterior motives and pretty desperate odds against them, even those kind of friends may team together to bullshit the Chief Investment Officer, but they didn't bullshit each other. And yes, if he thought about it Will had, indeed, implied that she could be a challenge to work with.

Oh but for God's sake: his motives may be more impure than most, but it wasn't exactly as if he was the only one around the office who found her a struggle. Ask anyone in her old team and they'd tell you she was great around datasets, but a pain in the arse. So yes, Neil working well with her would be seen as a plus for Neil: how was that Will's fault?

It would take another couple of generations before men in Will's position realised that all women in hers, i.e. competent women, even perfectly plain-looking ones, had forever been deemed difficult to work with. But for now, Will did at least see the errors of his own personal ways, where they'd met with those of this one, mind-blowingly pretty, humiliatingly competent woman.

' 's OK,' she shrugged, fiddling with her coat again, 'Anyway, I'll run you those numbers, no problem.'

'Is that a lot of work?'

'Some… never mind, I'll fit it in.'

'Thanks, I owe you. Wanna get out of here?' he asked, feeling that was about the only thing he had to offer her right now, which coming from him she might experience as any kind of reward.

She nodded.

OK, then.

'You were right this was really good coffee though, thank you,' she said as she put her coat back on.

'Really?'

Will had to check because, on reflection, this was probably the first time she'd said anything remotely nice to him. She'd done it with none of the obsequious irony she usually fell back on when she had to be even merely polite with him. Which again was nice, but therefore suspicious. Besides, the only thing Will reckoned he knew about coffee, was that it tasted better served hot, something the canteen was structurally unable to deliver. But then Will also didn't play in a band or paint or have a PhD so what did he know about anything?

'Yes, really,' she said, with her serious face on.

OK then:

'I'm so glad we're finding more stuff to agree on. Come on then, let's get out of here.'