Page 27 of Work with Me

Alicia Weber wasn’t perfect.

I mean, no one’s perfect. Even Cooper had that temper thing. But Alicia swanned into the office every day, perfectly put together, not a hair out of place in that infernal bun, never late. She always knew what to say, what to do to motivate the team. Tyler found a reason to ask her advice almost daily.

Except.

She’d committed us to pair programming again the next sprint and said lots of words about collaboration, about teamwork, about asking for help and not going it alone.

That’d lasted a day and a half.

She and I’d partnered up again—just like in gym class, no one else had picked me—and she’d put up with my navigation for a full day and right up until lunch the next. Then, when everyone else had drifted off to the food truck that’d pulled up outside, she’d told me to go on, and she’d work a little longer on her own. Then, when I’d come back, she’d said why didn’t I pull something else off the board to work on.

In front of the rest of the team, she pretended we were working together. But we weren’t. Unless you considered working side-by-side, headphones on, on different parts of the program, working together.

It was fine. If what she wanted from me was to leave her alone, I could do it.

Except.

I’d found a bug in her code.

Tonight, I’d kept working after everyone else went home. I couldn’t face going back to that lonely apartment, full of other temporary misfits and downtown divorcés. I was on good terms with my upstairs neighbors, and I’d met a workout buddy, Rick, in the gym, but I had no one I called a friend.

Even worse was going out on nearby Sixth Street. There, I found plenty of women. But Austin was a college town, and after last spring’s intern scare, they all looked like college girls to me. And I was never, ever going to touch one of those again. Even the ones I was sure were older, who had a gray strand or two or traces of smile lines on their cheeks, didn’t light my fire.

Maybe once you started, celibacy was addictive, like smoking. Or—I admitted late at night, my hand in my shorts—maybe I couldn’t get Alicia out of my brain. No one else measured up. Not since my shriveled heart had fluttered to life when I’d laid a finger on her soft skin, when I’d brushed her hair over that ridiculous Lightning McQueen bandage.

So, with no after-work social outlets, I’d worked late again. And after I’d finished my code, I’d checked Alicia’s, which she’d, of course, loaded into the repository like a good little coder. Since we were supposed to be working together, it only made sense for me to check it.

And I found a bug. It wasn’t one that’d stop the compile like that gnarly one in Tyler’s code on Monday, but it’d screw things up enough that we had to get rid of it.

But even I wasn’t brave enough to muck around in Alicia’s code.

So I texted her.

Me: Found a bug in your code.

Alicia: I’m sorry, who is this?

Me: It’s Jackson Jones.

Alicia: How did you get my number?

Me: Your business card?

Me: Fine. I’m the company founder. I have God-level access to our HR system.

The typing bubbles appeared and disappeared until I got tired of waiting.

Me: Anyway, there’s a bug in your code. Thought you should know.

Alicia: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Me: Maybe. But there’s a price.

Alicia: A price?

I hadn’t meant to get flirty with her. I’d meant to call her out and then leave her to stew until she could fix it the next morning with no one but me the wiser. But something happened to my thumbs.

Me: I think an exchange of information is in order. I’ll tell you what the bug is, you tell me where you go on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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