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Consulting
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He had his eyes closed for the entire lift ride. With the metal moving box all to himself he felt less self-conscious about letting these few moments of silence to himself pass as though he was allowing himself a power nap.
He was too tired to be here.
Lately his whole life had been about his job because there hadn't been anything else to distract him from it. The moments of silence he had; he didn't want them filled with the endless stream of content available on Netflix. It was too unproductive. He needed to see that he'd accomplished something at the end of his day. If he felt that he hadn't done anything that day, not had anything to show for it, then he'd check his Fit App on his phone and try and crush his last highest goal achieved.
There had been a lot of days with nothing to show for it workwise, all his work projects were stuck in limbo waiting on someone else to do their fucking job. This meant he'd had a lot of late nights trying to crush his last fitness goal before the clock turned to midnight.
It was why he had taken on this new project, even though there were six other projects that had yet to be finalized. He needed something new, something that would involve a big, long checklist and the satisfaction of crossing those items off.
It was easier to start a fresh new project rather than try and finish up the last tedious stretch of completing the last one and twiddling his thumbs as the emails and attached documents made the slow process of jumping through the correct hoops. The closing part was pretty well someone else's job anyhow, his name was just on the project. He was the intro-man.
His boss called him a workaholic, and he was.
Obsessive Compulsive might have been a better way to classify him though.
His job title though, it was a Professional Consultant. He'd stumbled onto the career by chance; fresh out of Uni with a degree in Film and Media Studies and working as a Barista at a Costa Coffee, that was when he noticed the same man that came into the shop two to three times a week and set up to work on his laptop.
Harry kept catching glimpses of the laptop and was able to figure out that the man was trying to make a user-friendly website. It started with one comment about layout, then he mentioned something about the colour contrast, then he told the guy that whatever the website was supposed to be about, there was no way to tell from the look of the site itself.
He wound up getting hired on as a part-time, unpaid intern at the man's company by that man, his name was Kingsley.
Kingsley had hired him on full time with a decent wage after three months. That had been five years ago now, his salary had tripled since then.
Harry loved his job, but it was entirely exhausting.
Now he was on his way to another start-up company that was all about green energy.
Every new company was about green energy now; that was going to be a huge hurdle for him if he was going to make this one stand out among all of the rest of them.
The gist of the company's mission was to combine solar and wind energy and bring it to a smaller scale so that residences could provide energy for themselves. It was a worthy cause, and it was an expensive feat to make work. He didn't know how this company had enough money to hire his firm, but he was here, and he'd do all he could to make the company grow from start-up to established.
The door dinged open and Harry's eyes shot open at the sound. He hadn't realized how tired he really was until just then. He cleared his throat and stepped off the lift. There wasn't anyone there in the corridor that had seen him nearly entering REM sleep before jerking to life once more, that was something to be grateful about.
It was the thirteenth floor of a building previously occupied by government offices. Since the government had scaled back on its need for office space during the pandemic the start up must have gotten the space for a steal. He did wonder though how a start-up about Green Energy was going to come off looking like they believed in their own brand when they were working out of a building like this instead of somewhere where they could run their own products to power their business.
That was what his first suggestion was going to be.
He'd already scoped out the competition, read up on autonomous homes, checked with government subsidies available for homes converting to energy efficient units and looked into buy-back options that power companies were willing to pay homeowners that were generating more power than they were able to use themselves.
He felt ready for this.
Now he just needed to meet the team.
The door to their office was propped open so he walked in. There was no receptionist waiting to greet him, and the entire room was an open floor plan, a very open floor plan. There were several desks set up along the South facing windows and a single conference desk before them. It was dark where he was standing, just by the entrance, but the light coming through the window was plenty to illuminate the model units they had on either side of the makeshift aisle between Harry and the conference table and desks; there were solar panels and turbines on display with a few stocked in boxes behind them.
He kept moving into the room and saw there was a diorama on the conference table that depicted a neighborhood, each home had the solar panel and wind turbine set up, there was a decibel meter in the middle that was turned off. They must have been checking how much noise output the mini models would product, that was an issue when it came to wind turbines. Smart of them to consider it.
"Porn!" announced someone loudly from the last desk to Harry's left.
Everyone in the office jumped up and went over to the desk to look at the screen over the persons shoulder.
"Too much man-scaping," one guy said.
"Why always the mirror?"
"Is he in a changeroom?"
"Who do you figure that was meant for? Someone in particular, or something for the dating sites?"
"Well, let's just take a look, shall we?" suggested the woman that had called everyone's attention. "I'm guessing it was for this chick going down on him."
"Christ! Who takes time off during a blow-job to snap a pic?"
"Maybe he was saving it for when he had those long days on the road?" she suggested. "From the number of sex pics on this baby I'm guessing he wasn't home much. That, or he's just a sex addict."
The whole group made a sound at what Harry assumed was the next picture.
"Damn, and we thought he did a lot of manscaping."
"Girl had to have been getting waxed," the woman said with a chuckle.
Harry chose then to clear his throat loudly and several of the men around the desk turned.
"Oh shit," one man laughed. "You must be Potter, I guess it is that time, isn't it?" He was about thirty and had a dress shirt on, like he'd been planning for them to have a professional meeting. "Sorry about that. We work off of recycled computers and just got a new batch in. Gin was going through and wiping the hard drives."
Gin, the woman with all the desk porn, held her hand up from where she was seated and waved at him casually with the back of her hand, not removing her eyes from the laptop so all Harry could see of her was her red hair that was pulled into bun style pigtails and the purple shirt she was wearing.
"It's a little office thing," the man explained. "Keeps the moral up, you know."
"To look at porn in the office?" Harry asked, thinking it was a strange thing to bond over. The man chose not to respond. "How about we just get started? Are you Cedric?"
"Yes, that's me," he held out his hand and Harry shook it, they were roughly the same age, Cedric was a bit 'prettier' than Harry thought himself to be. He looked like he could have been in a television show about teenagers and been a pin up heart throb if he'd decided to earlier in life. "And that's Gin, Michael, Tyrone, Caius, Albert and Rooster, er, Jake, but, we call him Rooster," he pointed to each of them, working his way down from the only female.
"Tell him why," Rooster, or Jake, called over from where he was, now back at his own desk.
"No," Cedric said shortly then turned his focus back to Harry. "Why don't I give you a tour of our operation?"
"Sure. Any way I could grab a cup of coffee first?" He was going to need caffeine and a notepad to keep track of whatever popped into his head; because if anything did pop into his head there was no way he was going to retain it in his mental state.
God, he really hoped he would come up with something today that made him feel like he achieved something, he needed a solid eight hours.
"We can make that happen. Caius, can you get the kettle on?" Cedric called out. "Do you need anything in it?"
"Black will be just fine." Harry watched as Caius plugged in an induction element with a kettle on it and then added more coffee grounds to a French press that still had grounds in the bottom from a previous brew.
"It'll take a minute, so I'll just give you a walk through of the office and you'll have a cup by the time we get up to the roof."
"The… roof?" Harry asked.
"Yes, just one floor up. Another reason we were happy to get this space. Top floor and roof access. Building management has allowed us to cordon off an area for our own use."
'Own use?' Harry wondered what exactly that meant. "Well, I'm really interested to see what you've got going on then, so, lead the way."
Harry followed behind Cedric as he explained about how they had the bottom windows along the entire floor set up with solar panels, their own product, and each of those was connected to a battery bank for storage. They weren't drawing any power from the building at all, solely working off of power that they provided, and they had a set up with a few other offices in the building so they could work in trade, one of the offices was for web-design, another was a local magazine that didn't have a huge circulation, but did do a few pieces about their company in trade, and two of the offices simply paid them fifty pounds a week for their battery banks. He pointed out the plants that they had growing in the potted plants whenever they passed one. Except they weren't just ferns and such, they were fruit and vegetable plants, and the soil that they were in was made of the compost they produced mixed in with dirt from their homes.
"We talked about doing a proper compost here, you know, worms and all, but we just don't produce enough waste to make it an option at the office," Cedric went on.
"Geez, you could do a whole lifestyle bit about how to run an eco-friendly office," Harry commented, and wrote it down on his notebook.
"Oh, we'd love to. The Quibbler two floors down, like I said, they've done articles about us, but they don't have the reach that some of the other print media does that we'd like to get into."
"Print media?" Harry questioned.
Cedric gave him a crooked smile. "Those that can afford to make the switch still read The Resident and London Magazine."
Harry nodded. "Plus, if the London high society start doing it, it will take off." He looked around at all the potted plants again, it was like a greenhouse in there.
"So, the water we get, it is from the roof."
"They still operate off of water towers?" Harry was baffled by that.
"No, the water we use is from the roof. The building is set up with plumbing and such pulled from the city supply, we just don't use it unless we have to. Rooster set up a filtration system that takes the rainwater and turns it potable. We store the water and test the PH before we use it for anything ingestible, such as coffee. Any batch that we get that isn't up to snuff, you know, polluted London air too much that day, it get's stored in the loo for filling up the tanks."
"Excuse me?" He had no idea that they had gone to that extent to make their business eco-friendly.
"Yeah, we've got everything set up. Come on, your coffee should be ready by now, let's grab it and head on up."
Harry added the bit about rainwater to his notebook as well.
Caius handed him a steaming hot cup of coffee in a mug that depicted a cat holding onto a branch that said 'Hang in There' on the bottom. He chose not to comment on the choice of office supply.
Cedric led him to the roof via the stairs. "So, the team, Albert and Rooster are our engineers, they are currently looking at ways to make everything look sleeker and more appealing; thing is, we want to use as many recycled materials as possible, so Tyrone, in Research, helps them out with that. Michael is also in Research, but he mostly checks out the competition, market, off sales on defunct units and such. Caius is in Marketing, but he helps out Gin a lot too, she's our IT person. I float around between all the groups and set up and take meetings with people we are trying to work with, like you."
He opened the door to the roof. It was a sunny London day and Harry needed to shield his eyes. He looked down at the gravel and followed Cedric's shadow as his eyes adjusted.
"And here we are," Cedric announced.
Harry looked up and saw there were four wind turbines set up and there was a tarp or something strung between then that came down in the middle like a funnel, emptying into a barrel that had pipes coming off of it.
"Impressive," Harry nodded and sipped his coffee. "And all this, plus your solar panels, it's enough to power all of your computers and other things and you have enough to lease out battery banks to four other offices in this building?"
"Yeah," Cedric stated proudly. "Building Manager said that since they opened back up, he's barely seen a change in the power bill thanks to us."
There were several chairs set up under the shade of the tarp. "I gather you lot spend a good amount of time up here as well?"
"Here, down there, sometimes sleeping in one of the closed offices if the work takes us too late into the evening. We're a small company, but we believe in what we're doing and are trying to get everyone else to see the benefit of it all as well."
"And with minimal changes to their current situations as well also," Harry agreed. "What about HVAC?"
Cedric shook his head. "Haven't dipped into HVAC yet. Those companies themselves are trying to come up with the greenest option you can go with. The building is still functioning on radiators, but when it comes time to replace them, if we're still here, then we'll try and push them to go the Heat Pump route. It is the friendliest option when it comes to renewable energy."
Harry wrote down 'heat pump'. "If you are still here?"
"Yes. If. We've come up with the products, we've begun the implementation, we've found the investors to get us going up until this point. We've proved that this is all possible. I think the next big thing for us is to get our name out there, be known, then hopefully be bought out so that we can fly under the umbrella of a bigger corporation and have them switched over to run at zero emission as well, further proving that we can make the difference the world needs."
"That sounds like a solid plan. An achievable one too, if you have the right people to get you there."
"Do you think you are the right people?" Cedric challenged him.
Harry took another sip of his coffee and thought about all the different systems that Cedric had showed him they had in place. "I haven't failed yet. I believe I can get the right people remembering your name in a few short weeks."
Cedric grinned at him and held out his hand. Harry shook it.
"Let's talk hard brass then," Cedric directed him to take a seat.
They discussed the fee for bringing on Harry's company, the amount of involvement Harry would need to have in the company and for what duration. They discussed everything that Harry had done the research on before showing up and Cedric had answers and explanations for everything.
Harry hadn't realized it was lunchtime until the other six from the office came up to join them, each of them was carrying a different container and plates or cutlery.
"We do a communal lunch here; did you want to join us?" Tyrone offered.
"If it's alright with you lot that I didn't bring anything," Harry nodded and peeked at the dishes, hoping that it wasn't going to all be quinoa or some kind of vegan dish that he wouldn't be able to stomach. Instead, he was looking at crudites, garden salad, pork chops, dessert squares, bread rolls and some kind of casserole. It looked delicious.
"I'll go and get the drinks," Cedric announced and hurried off.
"How's everything going then? You taking us on?" Rooster asked him. He was also about the same age as Harry, he had a friendly face, but something about him came off a bit cocky.
He was distracted for a moment as he watched Gin start to load up her plate. She was cute, and something about the way she was so at ease around the group assembled gave Harry the impression that they all got along great.
"We are," he replied finally. "It is a really impressive operation you have here and I think I can make Cedric's goal happen."
"Yay, livable wages!" Gin cheered and held out her fork, to which all the others held out their forks and all tapped them together.
"We haven't talked budgeting yet but I'm certain a salary increase would be part of the deal if you are under a corporate umbrella," Harry smiled.
"It isn't like we're only making pence now, but given the overtime we put in, breaking it down we're at minimum wage," Caius told him. There was a touch of resent there, then again, Caius looked to be the oldest of the group, around late forties, and was likely wanting to ensure his retirement fund was up to snuff.
"I'd gather that means that you are all very invested in the company," Harry turned the conversation.
"We were all working for other companies and making about the same money," Albert told him, he was plump man approximately around his late thirties. "Except we had the security of pensions and benefits and such then," he added with a smirk then. "And then Cedric found us."
"Ah yes," Michael picked up in a wistful tone. "Twas a cool September morning," the youngest member of their group began.
Rooster gave Michael a friendly shove on the shoulder. "It was boiling hot that day, and you know it." He turned to Harry then. "We were all at a rally, or strike if you want to call it that."
"It was a strike," Gin confirmed. "You know who Greta Thunberg is, correct?"
"Of course," Harry replied, looking straight at her and seeing just how deep brown her eye colour was.
"Well, she's the reason we all met. We were at a Fridays for Future strike and were surrounded mostly by kids. Cedric was there and introduced himself, then one by one we all met each other as the day progressed. Two weeks later and the company was born. I was just one of a hundred IT Support Specialists at a huge company before this. It's a similar story for all of us."
"We'd all been having idyllic ideas about how to make our carbon footprint less and less," Rooster said just as Cedric came back with a pitcher of something and several glasses. "And this guy convinced us to try and turn the world around by actually making something that would allow everyone to do it with less 'hassle'."
"It is hard to make the general population give up on gasoline or pre-packaged meals," Harry conceded.
"And we know that the world is ages away from doing that completely. We won't see it in our lifetime," Cedric agreed. "You are here to help us to convince businesses to set an example and help us figure out who to turn to to get our products mainstreamed."
"Builders, Contractors, Home Stores," Harry told him easily. "Have you lot seen how many new homes are going up for those that no longer need to commute into the city? The suburbs are exploding with new homes." Harry listed off all of the new home developers he could think of, getting even one builder to have a neighborhood with these units already set up before homeowners moved in would drive other builders to look into it and create interest for a corporation to take a look at buying them out and bringing the company under their umbrella.
Harry was excited about this. He kept talking with them all through lunch, making sure to direct his focus at each one of them in turn. He wanted all of them to feel like he was just going to be another one of them in their group and they should be comfortable with his temporary Visa into their world.
It was a small business, but it had immense potential. The team was great too, they were all really invested in the company and product, which made it all the better.
When he got home that evening, he looked around at his place and wondered what he could do to cut back on his wastefulness. He bought a book on building a sustainable home for his Kindle and made a list of all the residential builders in the UK, he created his to-do list and felt satisfied with it.
He went to bed at 9:30pm that night and woke up refreshed and ready to go at 6:30am the next morning.
He wanted to have a more detailed description and understanding of how each and every product Reduce, Reuse, Replanet worked (R-Cubed for short) had available. He wanted to know about their trial-and-error issues, and he wanted to know how they would suggest he make changes at his place.
First thing first, he needed to give Kingsley an update. The email was brief, but he was sure that his excitement about the new client shone through.
As Harry was about to click the box on his computer to print off a copy of the Contractor Agreement for Cedric to sign, he stopped and downloaded it instead, figuring they wouldn't appreciate him killing a tree for something that was going to wind up being copied and stored digitally anyhow.
Instead of taking the underground to get there, he started walking. It was seven miles from his place to the R-Cubed office, but it was early, and he felt motivated.
When he got there, he found no one at their desks though.
It was nearing nine in the morning, but the door was unlocked. He thought that was odd; there was valuable equipment in there and everyone just left the door unlocked?
He perused the turbines and solar panels, checked out the connection for the water filtration system, as he was wandering and taking a look at the plants along the windows he noticed one of the inner office doors was open and peeked in there; and was surprised to see that the office was set up like a bedroom, with Gin sleeping on the mattress.
Cedric had mentioned that occasionally one of them wound up sleeping there, but he didn't know they had made a bedroom for that purpose.
He pulled back and looked down the hallway to see if there was another office like this one, wondering if they might actually all slept there to cut back on living expenses. There had to be a rule against lease holders using the offices as homes. Harry looked into the room again and saw that there wasn't anything in the office besides the mattress and a coat rack that held a few items of clothing.
Then Gin shifted in the bed, rolling from her front to her back, her arm coming up over her eyes.
She was around the same age as him. He'd thought she was cute when they were talking over lunch with the others yesterday, now her hair was down and she had clearly removed her bra for sleeping, he could perfectly make out the shape of her breasts through her shirt.
Not wanting to stand there any longer because it felt lecherous, he moved back from the door, pulling it closed with a click and headed back to the desks, hoping he could figure out how to get the induction stove to work so he could make coffee.
Before he had the opportunity to fill up the kettle where he'd seen Caius do it the day before, Gin came out of the office she'd been sleeping in and was wiping her eyes and yawning, her long shirt rising up from her arm being raised and showing him a good amount of thigh. Then she stopped short when she saw him there. "Oh… hi."
Harry nodded at her and politely averted his gaze. "Is it just you that sleeps in the office?"
"No," she smirked, completely unabashed at her state of partial dress. "We usually all take a turn on the mattress, it just depends on who's got the project that needs the most attention." She came over and plugged in the stove, bending over to do so and he caught just how high on her legs the bulk of her freckles rose. She stood up again and took the full kettle from him, setting it down in the right spot.
"You were working late then." It was getting difficult for him to keep his voice from going up or down an octave. Her hair was all mussed and it looked like she'd just gone a round on the mattress with someone, she had this tired morning glow about her.
"If you're asking if I'm homeless, the answer is 'no'. I just wanted to get through running diagnostics and updating the new computers. When midnight rolled around, I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore."
"I didn't mean to imply," he started.
"Sure you didn't," she nodded her head gave him this smirk that made it perfectly clear she didn't believe him. "The others will be here soon enough. We try to all be here for nine and list off our projects for the day."
"Hey," Harry called out to her as she started walking away in the direction of the bathroom. "Was it really just Greta that got you interested in all this?" He was curious. He probably could have waited until she was freshened up and dressed to ask her that question, but she was here now and they were alone, and it just slipped out.
"You can narrow it down to her, yeah."
"What does that mean?"
She came back towards him and rested her arms casually on the back of one of the office chairs, effectively blocking his view of her legs. He didn't know whether it was on purpose or not, she was so smooth about it. "It means that I was incredibly bored at my last job, then I hear about this kid in Sweden, a decade younger than me, doing everything she can to convince the world that now is the time we will make or break our planet. I set up a challenge at the office to see who could reduce their waste the most, had everyone logging what they threw out and recycled, checking their electricity bills, recording what method they used to get into the office that day and back again. We had a points system. I kept trying to get more and more points every week. It still didn't feel like enough. Then I met Cedric and the others."
He was familiar with that story, it was the same with him and his Fit App, just a different goal in mind. "There has got to be an App for that."
"There are several." She drawled, then turned and began walking away from him again. "I'll be back in a few."
Only a minute after she closed the door to the loo, the door from the hallway opened and the rest of the team marched in. "Hey!" Cedric greeted him with a smile. "Getting here first, that's what we want to see in a consultant!"
"Gin was already here when I got here actually. Just how often do you have employees crashing on your mattress?" He gestured down the hall.
"Oh geez, I'm there once every other week," Rooster said. Albert shrugged and nodded in agreement, indicating he was about the same. It made sense that the Engineers would want to work together until a project was completed, Harry supposed.
"We've all taken a turn," Cedric shrugged.
"And how often is the door unlocked when that's happening?" he pointed towards the hall, thinking that it wasn't safe to have Gin sleeping there alone without the door locked.
"Oh, shit. Er, not often? We've got a pretty secure building here. Someone would have to really want to get in. I doubt a locked door would prevent them if they were on a mission to steal our tech," Cedric explained.
"I was concerned about that initially, but then I was worried about how Gin was here all night by herself and the door was unlocked," Harry pointed out.
The six of them looked surprised at the insinuation, then gave sideways glances at each other, seeming baffled. "Erm. I guess that is a valid concern," Cedric agreed.
"What's a valid concern?" Gin asked as she came back into the room, appearing to have freshened up in the loo. She must have kept a change of clothes in there and a hairbrush.
"That we need to lock the door if we know you're going to be in here by yourself all night," Michael answered.
"Just me?" her eyebrow went up, an edge in her tone. "How about we just make that a blanket rule; if there are less than four people in the office, we lock the door," she suggested. "Nice that you guys are trying to look out for the token female here, but my kind isn't fighting for gender equality so we could be treated differently than the rest of you."
Tyrone shrugged and went to turn on his computer. "If it helps, I forgot you weren't a guy."
She grinned, "that does make me feel better, thank you."
The awkward feeling in the room dissipated from the air after that. Everyone but Cedric went to turn on their computers, then took a seat at the table as Cedric pulled out a whiteboard and they went over everyone's mission for the day. Harry joined them and requested he sit in with Rooster and Albert for the day to learn more about the units. While he was sitting with them, his gaze kept going down to the far end of the desks where Gin was sitting. He couldn't see how anyone could be oblivious to her being female.
She was really attractive. He knew now that she had no make-up on and the colour on her cheeks, the slight tan that should be impossible for a ginger, it was natural. Her lips were really lovely, and the way she kept biting her bottom one as we worked made them very distracting. She had a lot of freckles, particularly over the bridge of her cute nose.
"Give it up, mate," Rooster commented quietly when he caught Harry staring for the third time. "You're barking up the wrong tree."
"What?"
"She's got a type, and not a single one of us here is it, if you catch my drift."
It took a second, but Harry finally realized what Rooster meant by that. "Oh! Oh," he repeated, with much less surprise and a heavy dose of disappointment.
"Yeah," he smirked, "otherwise she and I would definitely have gotten it on already."
Harry opened his mouth, about to ask how he figured that one, but closed it again so he didn't say anything offensive.
Albert shook his head. "In case you haven't gotten it by now, the reason we call him Rooster instead of Jake, is because he's a giant cock."
Rooster grinned at Albert then, as though he was proud of the title.
Again, Harry chose not to comment.
Looking down the desks at Gin again, he wondered if it had just been Roosters assumption that Gin was a lesbian, or if it was a fact. Either way, he was going to try and keep his eyes on what Rooster and Albert were showing him, and off of her.
Harry wound up spending four days each over the next two weeks with the R-Cubed group and had temporarily, probably, switched his fitness App for a Green App that Gin suggested and downloaded for him onto his phone, after helping herself to his image gallery and complementing him on his lack of dick-pics. Cedric had given him a few solar panel units for his place and a battery for storing his power. He'd collected his receipts for take-away and the grocery stores and figured out how he could cut back on his pre-packaged purchases; he'd gotten a few pots for growing his own lettuce and herbs and left a clean one out on his balcony for collecting rainwater. As of yet he was not sure if he was supposed to be filtering that rainwater before watering his plants with it, but baby steps.
Now it was a Saturday and he had taken the train West and out of the city to the first proper country town that had a Farmers Market. He wanted to talk to the farmers about any sustainable practices they had, and it was to his great surprise that every one of the vendors he spoke to was able to immediately list off everything that they were doing that was environmentally friendly.
He'd expected at least one of them would need to take a moment and think about it, but no, every one of them was completely prepared with the answer as though they had been asked the question several times before.
By the fifth vendor he talked to that was able to prattle off the whole list of sustainable practices they had, he asked the man if someone had come to question him about this before.
"Of course!" the man, roughly ten years his senior with long red hair pulled back into a ponytail, answered him. "There are all sorts of grants for having a wind turbine on part of our fields, switching to a natural irrigation system, being part of a farm co-op for compost or for lending equipment. Come tax time we've all got to have that sorted out. Plus, my sister is really into the environment, and she's been nagging everyone around here and at other farmers markets on sticking to more environmental ways of getting things done."
"I prefer the term 'enlightening' over 'nagging'," said a familiar voice from the person who had just come to stand beside Harry.
"Gin!" Harry greeted her in surprise.
She grinned at him, "doing a little more market research?"
"Yeah." He was so shocked to see her there.
"Friend of yours, Ginny?" the brother asked.
"Bill, Harry, Harry, Bill," she introduced. "Harry is the consultant we're working with to broaden our horizons and try and make all the work I do actually make a difference." She smirked at Harry, "and apparently he didn't think to bring this little road trip up over our lunches so I could tell him not to bother, as I've already taken care of this area."
Harry laughed in spite of himself. "Well, it's nearly lunch time now, how about I buy you lunch and you can fill me in on just how you went about 'enlightening' the vendors here?"
He shook Bill's hand and Ginny let him towards an area that had several food trucks set up. "I'm a farmers daughter, in case you couldn't guess by now," she told him.
"Any yet you work in IT? How did that happen?" He was so glad to see her, and even more glad that they were going to be having lunch, just the two of them. He might not be the kind of person she would feel romantically inclined to, but he genuinely liked her and was happy for the opportunity to be friends as well as temporary colleagues.
"My family didn't need my extra two hands to help them out on the farm, so I went off to uni, got a degree in information technology and went to work for Big Brother. It was really boring, then, like I told you before, Greta happened and it was like a switch went off in my head and I realized I could put my skills to use at a company that was working towards a better future, instead of a corporation that only cared about money."
"Then you met Cedric," Harry nodded. He remembered the conversation, he just didn't recall her saying anything about her upbringing or how she had been trying to get the agriculture world into environmental practices.
"Yeah. I don't know if you've looked him up, but Cedric is a trust fund kid, one of the few that doesn't pride themselves on having the best of everything. That's the only reason the company could afford to get to where it is now, and why he needed to hire you on now as well."
"What do you mean?" he asked as she handed him a wrap that she'd ordered for them.
"I mean, I'm pretty sure the money is going to dry up in about a year unless we can get bought out and merged with some company with deep pockets."
Cedric had hinted towards that but hadn't given a time frame. "Don't you have investors?" He knew they did, there was always someone helping foot the bill of businesses such as theirs.
She gave him a wry look. "Come on, Harry. Investors want results too. You've seen how expensive it is to have the stock that we do. Most people hear 'eco-friendly' home and thing they just need appliances with an Energy Star rated sticker on it, they think that solar panels and wind turbines are for new build homes, not established neighborhoods." She took a bite of her own wrap before continuing once her mouth wasn't full anymore.
"You know, when I first made the dive into being eco friendly I was challenging myself to create less and less waste every week, to the point that now I can't remember when I last had to change my garbage can? Then I started on with R-Cubed and Michael showed me all the grants and such that were available, then I brought that research home and shared it with my parents and Bill. They gave in and were the first farm in the area to do so, they showed the amount they've saved to their friends and now every single vendor around here has converted to using turbines and solar panels, sharing equipment, using the most ecological means of pesticide control, etc. The equipment they use, it isn't ours, ours is too small scale for what they need, but they can tell it will be making a difference to their pockets and to the environment. Plus, it gives them all more of a sense of community."
She sounded so passionate about it. He loved listening to her talk.
"And you've done the same thing for other vendors at other farmers markets too?"
"And I talked my parents into starting a farm-share program a few years ago and deliver produce baskets for my mum and dad on the weekends."
"God, you sound so busy!"
She shrugged. "It's a few hours, not much. And me driving the baskets to the customer means that there is only one vehicle on the road, not fifty coming to pick them up."
"Ginny!" a woman called out from a few meters away.
"Oh, bugger," she looked over his shoulder and pulled a smile he could tell was forced. "Well, I guess you're meeting my mum."
Harry turned in his seat and watched as the woman came over, she was a few inches shorted than Gin and had a few extra stone on her, but she had the glow of a woman that was happy with her life. "And who's this you've got with you then? A new boyfriend?" she asked happily.
Ginny rolled her eyes and Harry chose not to comment on the mother's insinuation.
"Harry," he introduced himself. "We're currently working together in the city. It was a coincidence that we ran into each other today. She was just telling me about your farm."
"Oh yes, our Ginny's been very involved in trying to make a difference for a while now. Hopefully soon enough she'll live back out this way and settle down."
Harry saw Gin's jaw clench.
"Well, it was very nice to meet you." Harry shook her hand, politely indicating that she should move on.
"Bye mum, I'll see you later," Gin managed a tight smile. After her mother turned her back to them and was a few yards away, she dropped the pretense. "Thank you for not encouraging her. She wants me and all my brothers to move back here permanently and start giving her more grandchildren."
Harry raised his eyebrows. "Not your end goal then? From what I know about you now and your involvement in the countryside, I wouldn't say you a city girl for life."
She shrugged. "I actually love living in the city. It's independence and opportunity. And it's where our products could make the most difference. It's nothing but skyscrapers there. Every time I drive back to my place from visiting home I see the haze of pollution from miles away and in ten or twenty years I'm hoping that haze will only be apparent the closer I get to the city, and I'd like to know I had a hand in that somehow."
"You aren't hoping the haze will be gone altogether?"
Her expression then had a skeptical look about it. "There are millions of people living in London, there is no way that polluted haze will ever be gone completely in my lifetime."
It was a fair point.
"Did I mention that I've been getting several goals achieved with that Green App you downloaded for me? I've been charging nearly all my electronics from the solar battery bank Cedric let me borrow and even got one of those kitchen top composters for my green waste and have been putting it into the soil for my house… er, vegetables. Well, house plants, but I have a hard time thinking of them as plants because they are more like projects."
"Good for you! If you'd like any further tips and tricks, you only have to ask," she offered.
Her saying that was the reason he found himself in her car on the way back to the city near dark after he'd helped her distribute a few farm-share parcels. They'd run into her mum and dad a few more times at the farmers market, then again at her family home which had a country store and was where the farm-share baskets were assembled and picked up.
He was confused by his interactions with her parents and the way they talked to Gin, like they didn't know she wasn't interested in men. He kept his confusion to himself though.
"You don't live too far away from our office," she commented as he let her into his flat.
"No, I don't. I've walked there a few times when I get up early enough."
"You know, the underground is going to keep running whether you are on it or not," she responded glibly as she took a look around at his walls and the limited art he had.
"That mean you don't protest public transport? Join the fight to advocate for greener emissions?"
"Well, the companies would hardly waste their time entertaining the ideals of persons who don't use their products, would they?"
"Fair point. Did you want something to drink? Or eat?" he offered as he headed for the kitchen, making the conscious decision to pour water from his Brita into a glass instead of pull out a bottle of beer, which had been his plan.
"Whatever you're having is fine," she told him as she continued to explore his space. "I see your plants are sprouting nicely."
"Yeah, if only I could remember what it was I planted there, then I'd be happier."
She grinned at him and took the water he offered.
He looked her over while she checked his solar panels and rainwater collection on the balcony. It was hard to ignore how appealing he found her. Something about the way she moved, how passionate she was about green living without being pretentious about it. And she was very pretty, he couldn't ignore that either.
"I like the way you took the business approach to converting those vendors to zero emissions. I'm sure they had an easier time listening to that than to endless prologues about how they were saving the planet," he told her.
"You know I was raised by a farmer," she shrugged. "They think long term, not short, and they only need to know that at the end of the year, come harvest, they'll be making enough to go another year before the next payday. So, that's how I market to them." As she said this, she started checking what he had plugged in, lamps and such. "You know these draw power, even if the lamp is turned off. Same for your television."
Harry frowned. He hadn't unplugged anything save for his chargers, USB and laptop. "Right." Those things couldn't eat up that much electricity when they were turned off, could they?
"Every little counts," she smiled and unplugged a lamp, just the solitary one as an emphasis to her statement, and walked back over to him. "This is a really nice place you've got here."
"Thank you." She was standing closer to him than before, he felt like he should take a step back and give her some space, but his feet didn't move.
"Looks like the perfect bachelor pad."
"You can tell that from just this area?" She was standing close enough to him that he could feel some of her body heat against his skin.
It wasn't fair that she had this effect on him and the feeling wasn't mutual.
She gave another look around and stared pointedly at the couch. "That," she stated, "is not a couch anyone would be shagging on."
"What?!" That was the last thing he'd expected to hear from her. He had picked out that couch personally. It was the most expensive thing in the room, and it looked great. It was slate grey and was a three-seater, each of the seats curved to show where the optimal spot to sit was.
Gin went over to it and gave the material a poke. "Seriously, what is this made out of? It looks so uncomfortable, and why does it have dips to indicate where you are supposed to be sitting?" She then pushed down on the seams between two of the dips and shook her head before standing up again with her hands on her hips. "If you can't nap on it, you can't shag on it. You can't even sit naked on it, can you? I'm pretty sure you would just get suctioned to the material from body heat and sweat. What were you thinking?"
"It's a statement piece!" he protested her issues. "I spent an entire paycheck on that."
"And you've no regrets?" she wondered at him. "How often do you sit on this?" She then sat down to check if it was comfortable, her shoulders squirming to find the right spot to rest. "God, it isn't even comfortable."
"I don't need to sit on it! It's chic and it ties the room together!" He was both aghast and amused by what she was saying.
"So, you don't sit on it? Do you have guests come over and sit on it?"
"I work all the time, I hardly get the opportunity to go on vacation, let alone throw a dinner party."
"Well, that's good, because you don't have a table for them to sit at, just this incredibly uncomfortable couch."
His mouth hung open and he did a double check of his flat, even though he was fully aware that he didn't have a dining table. "There's space for people to stand around and mingle though," he mentioned lamely.
Gin grinned at him. "Come here and sit down on your uncomfortable couch with me for a minute.
She was sitting in the middle, so either option he chose, he would still be sitting right beside her. "Now," she started once he was sat down, "if you had had a girlfriend or someone with you when you were looking for a couch then you would have tested it out like this." She then lifted his arm to bring it around her shoulder and attempted to lean over against him, which she couldn't do comfortably. "Too awkward to be comfortable." She removed his arm and then scooted over to the far seat and brought her feet up, placing them on his leg, "and this isn't much better."
"So, because of this couch alone you can tell for sure that I'm single?"
"Yes. I'm speaking for my gender, you need to replace this couch. Like most things that are very pretty, it too is also quite useless."
"You're pretty, you aren't useless," he defended.
"Why thank you, I wasn't sure you noticed," she said with a dramatic flip of her hair and fluttering of her eyelashes.
Harry frowned at her. He was so confused. "Are you flirting with me?"
A whisper of embarrassment went across her face before she removed her feet from his lap and stood up. "Sorry about that. Forgot myself for a moment." She busied herself with pretending to be tending his plants. "We've been working together for a bit and have a while more to go, I shouldn't have." She then turned to look at him and worried her lip. "Do me a favour and don't mention that to the other guys? I don't want to make things weird at the office. They'd just razz me constantly about it."
He was so confused. "But, wait, I thought, I mean, well, Rooster said-"
"What did Rooster say?" she asked, straightening up defensively.
He didn't know if he should admit this, though he felt it was too late to stop that train from continuing down the tracks. "He told me you weren't interested in men."
Gin stood there, unmoving, for what felt like a very long time, then she started to smile and let out a small chuckle. "I'd forgotten about that."
Harry took a mental step back in his truly uncomfortable seat. "Forgotten about what?"
She rolled her eyes and let out a sigh. "When I first met them, all the guys from the office, Rooster made a pass at me and I turned him down, hard." Harry nodded, it wasn't difficult to imagine Rooster being misogynistic and calling her 'Baby Cakes' or some other pet name. "To make things easier for everyone, I told them all I wasn't interested in any of their cocks, particularly the 'biggest rooster'."
Harry smiled, "so you were the one to coin his nickname?"
"I was," she gave a small curtsey, clearly proud of herself. "From that they made their own assumptions. Guess that's what they landed on. I'm not interested in any of them like that which must mean I'm a lesbian." Gin rolled her eyes and gave a small shake of her head.
"For a minute there I thought you hadn't come out to your family; what with all the talk of boyfriends and settling down that your mum was going on about."
"I don't think she'd care about whether I was interested in men or not, she'd just start bringing me pamphlets about adoption agencies and surrogacy."
"Wow, that's some determination to get grandkids."
"You're telling me. As soon as I got my first salaried job out of uni she was giving me tips on how to find a husband."
"That why you're interested in me?" he asked cheekily, and bravely.
Her responding scoff and crossing of her arms eased the tension he was feeling. "You're cute, Harry. I like your personality, but I hate that couch," she chuckled awkwardly. "Guess we'll just chalk this up to me misreading you, yeah?"
"You aren't," he said hurriedly and finally felt forced to stand up due to how the cushion seemed to have suctioned his bottom further down, like memory foam. "I like you too. But, we work together, and I've been actively trying to not look at you like that based on the misinformation I was given."
"Wait, so, are you telling me you really invited me up to your flat so I could give you some tips on how to make it more energy efficient?"
He had, though, now that he thought about it, it did sound like a lame excuse to just get her up to his place. "Er, maybe?"
She took a few steps towards him and placed her hand on his chest gently, like she was only meaning to feel the fabric. "So, you think I'm pretty?"
He put his hand over hers and raised it to his lips so he could kiss her palm. "That was only one of the words I could use to describe you."
There was a shimmer of hope and mischief in her eye as she brought their linked hands to her own lips and gave the back of his hand a kiss. "Just so you know, I'm a bit of a workaholic."
"Perfectly suited there then, because so am I."
"And," she continued, "if anything were to happen between us it would absolutely have to stay out of my office."
He put his hand on her waist and inched forward so they were standing a bit closer together. "I agree, wouldn't want to need HR forms to get involved."
Her smile widened. "And since HR is Cedric, that would mean the head of my company. And we are a very delicately balanced company."
He wanted to reach out and trace a lock of her hair from her forehead down the side of her face and along her jawline until the very tip, so he did just that. "Balance is good, very important." He leaned down to kiss her then, but she stopped him a moment before their lips touched.
"I don't do one-offs, Harry," she warned him
"Good, because I'm interested in more than that."
"Are you sure?"
"No, but I'm seriously considering going couch shopping with you tomorrow."
He assumed that was answer enough for her just then, because she closed the distance between them and he started guiding her, without looking, through his flat to his bedroom, where there was a much more comfortable place to sit and lay down.
()()()
Harry kept double checking his hair in the mirror while he tried to do up the buttons on his shirt, turning his head this way and that to make sure that it looked purposefully mussed, not his standard mess of hair.
"Maybe I should wear a hat," he wondered.
"Maybe I should wear a hat. Only a hat. It might help alleviate some of your stress," Ginny suggested. She had asked him to not call her Gin anymore, Gin was what she'd told the guys at the office to call her, in her personal life she preferred Ginny.
And Harry had happily been part of that personal life for just over a month now.
The first two weeks had been a little difficult to remain acting as though they weren't involved when he was at the office, then he hadn't needed to be at their office as much anymore, he and Cedric were visiting with builders and taking meetings with potential investors. It had still only been four out of five workdays that he was dedicated to this project, and when he was at his office instead of theirs, he found himself exchanging several texts throughout the day with Ginny, raunchy ones.
Cedric and he had managed to get a builder that was adding subdivisions around towns North of London to install one of the full systems at his own home so he could see for himself that there wouldn't be any noise louder than an air conditioner and the energy bill would go way down. That same builder had then agreed to relay the option to New Build Home Buyers and R-Cubed suddenly had an entire subdivision of 50 new homes purchasing their product at full price.
Which led to today.
Today was the big meeting with the largest construction company in the UK, and they had been very enthusiastic about the back and forth.
"I'm not usually this full of nerves before the big pitches," he assured her.
"Awe, it's like this is your baby as much as ours," she cooed and then gave him a kiss. "I know this meeting is important, but even if it falls through, we've got more units in production and the last major sale should hold us until the next one," she assured him.
"But I didn't get brought on as a consultant so the company could stay afloat, I was brought on to help you get merged with a corporation that would help you grow and expand your radius and really put your units in the minds of retrofitters and the like. Today could be that point!"
She stood in front of him and adjusted his collar. "Then I guess it's wrong of me to hope you'll need to stay around a bit longer."
He hugged her close, "the sooner my consulting services are no longer needed, the sooner we can let everyone know we're together."
"Fair point. Okay, go and kill it out there, Tiger." She gave him a kiss and then a pat on his bum as she went back to the nightstand to grab her phone. "Either way this meeting turns out, are you okay if I stay here again tonight? We can either celebrate with a drink and sex or commiserate with a drink and sex and brainstorming the next big attempt."
Harry grinned.
And that night they celebrated.
()()()
AN- I tried not to get too far into the details about ecological energy resources and whatnot but I fell a little bit into the rabbit hole on that one. I've had enough power outages around my place to wish we had equipment like this that my fridge could run off of.
I don't know how these systems work and am standing by artistic license on this.
And now I keep getting ads on my browsers for kitchen top composters…
Big Brother is indeed watching.