Invincible Summer by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online

competition than companionship. The year since she’d arrived in London had been busy but tinged with a sort of loneliness, and she felt a quiet sense of shame that in a city where any night of the week the streets were lined with crowds of people clearly having the time of their lives, she had struggled to properly connect with anyone. If only her old friends had been around, but Sylvie and Lucien were still travelling in India and sending only sporadic and barely legible missives ( Hi, we are in Kerala something something sorry this letter is written on Rizla papers stuck together, it’s all we had something something beach party blah blah… ), and a strange gulf had opened up between her and Benedict in the time since the holiday in Corfu. The intimacy of the trip, the one-on-one time without the others, the kiss that almost-but-didn’t-quite happen, the intense conversations, had raised the unanswerable question of what they really were to one another then left it hanging, palpable in the air between them.
    The silly thing was that she really missed him; she looked forward to his calls with a surprising intensity but whenever she put the phone down she always seemed to be left feeling despondent, like they each wanted something from the other that they weren’t quite getting. There was nothing to be done about it, of course. She wasn’t an idiot; she wasn’t in the market for a long-distance relationship with one of her best friends. But she couldn’t help wishing that things would just go back to normal.
      
    ‘I reckon the best place to start is for someone to talk you through the pricing models,’ Big Paul was saying. ‘Stefan can do that. He’s your predecessor and he’s just moved onto the Swaps desk. That’s him, Swiss guy, over there by the yucca plant.’ He gestured towards a man who appeared to be sitting at a desk wearing a wetsuit and flippers.
    ‘Um. The guy in the wetsuit?’
    Big Paul blinked. ‘Yeah.’ He turned back to his bank of screens.
    Eva took a couple of steps away and then stopped. ‘Er, Paul? Why is he wearing a wetsuit?’
    He didn’t even look up. ‘What do I look like, the Grand Poobah in Charge of Wetsuits? Who knows? Who cares?’
      
    Eva made her way over to Stefan’s desk and cleared her throat. ‘Hi, I’m Eva.’
    He swivelled around and half-stood to take her outstretched hand but was impeded by his flippers, causing him to abruptly slump backwards into his chair.
    ‘I’m the new junior on the Interest Rates Derivatives desk,’ she explained. ‘Big Paul said you’d show me the pricing models?’
    ‘Oh, right. You’re the new me. Best of luck with that fat bastard.’ He raised his voice loud enough for Big Paul to hear him, but although his target raised his head an inch or two, he maintained the air of a grizzled old lion unwilling to make the effort of swatting a fly. ‘Sit down. Are you good with spreadsheets? Can you program VBA?’
    ‘I’m not bad. I did some Visual Basic on my Physics degree,’ she told him, and then unable to resist any longer, ‘Can I just ask, why are you wearing a wetsuit?’
    Stefan scowled at her. ‘The Swaps desk traders paid me two grand to come into work like this today. They want to film me on the way home on the tube. They think it’s funny. So what? They get their laughs, I get two grand. Who’s laughing now?’
    ‘You came in to work like that on the tube?’
    ‘Yeah. You think I’m an idiot?’
    Eva grinned. ‘For two grand? I’d have done it for five hundred.’
    Stefan’s frown finally reassembled itself into a smile. ‘You, I like. Sit down. I’m going to show you all the tricks. And then, because you’re a physicist, as a special treat I’m going to tell you about my thesis on Black-Scholes and how volatility in markets is predictably random, like the movement of particles.’
    Now she had his measure; Stefan was a geek, her favourite type of person and by far the most useful in the building