Page 35 of Pressure

As he mulled over the events of the night, he heard the door open.

“Hey friend. It looked like you might be having a rough night.”

He turned his head to see Austin closing the door behind her. “Hey there sweetie. How’s it going?”

She smiled. “That’s what I came to ask you.”

He dragged a hand through his hair and patted an empty spot on the railing. She stood next to him and leaned on the wooden rail. “Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I walked into that conference room on Thursday and saw her for the first time in almost five years.”

“That had to be a shocking surprise. I’m going to assume it wasn’t an amicable breakup.”

He laughed. “That’s putting it mildly. I called the cops on her. I thought she was stealing code from me and feeding it to my competitors.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I take it you were wrong?”

“Oh, was I ever. But by then it was too late to save the relationship and some of the damage I had done to her reputation in the tech community couldn’t be reversed. I very quietly worked to undo as much damage as possible, but there’s really only so much I could do. Actions and consequences, you know?”

Austin smiled. “I do know. I see it every day at the firm. Does she know about the things you’ve done to help repair her reputation?”

He shrugged. “She asked me not to contact her. I respected that. I don’t know how she got on Russell’s radar.”

“Oh, I know that. She put in a bunch of volunteer hours teaching teen and young adult girls how to code through an online program. Russell has a baby sister.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Really? How did I not know that?”

Austin laughed. “I only know because Patrick and I had him stay at our house for a week when he was in New York on business recently.”

Lance shook his head. “I apparently need to get out more.”

Austin gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I’m always here if you need to talk. You knocked sense into me when I was on the verge of fucking things up with Patrick, so you’ll always be special to me.”

He draped an arm around her and kissed her temple. “Thanks. I should get back inside.”

“Me too.”

That night, Lance tossed and turned in his bed in one of the cabins behind Solitaire as he thought about Marissa sleeping in his bed inside the club.

The next morning, a banging noise woke him.

As the fog of sleep cleared, he realized someone was knocking on the door.

He rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweats.

“I’m coming,” he yelled when the banging started again.

Pulling the door open, he found Marissa standing, or rather, running in place, on the cabin porch.

“Jesus, Marissa, what time is it?”

She glanced at her watch. “Just after eight. I was finishing my run. I thought I would see if we had a breakfast plan before we got to work.”

He rolled his eyes. “Weren’t you up until three just like the rest of us?”

---