Page 36 of Work with Me

Noah. And Weber Technology Consulting.Focus on that, not your smart coworker and his nimble fingers.

“You’ve got this. You’ll show everyone how smart and capable you are, and then you’ll have to start turning down offers.”

Turning down offers. I wished. For now, I had to finish the work I’d said I could do. And, as usual, I had to produce twice as much to get the same recognition.

“Anything I can do to help?”

Oh, you know, help me debug this code, figure out what’s up with Noah and language arts, and talk some sense into me so I don’t jump every time I get a text.“No, I’m good. Thanks for checking in. Love you.”

“Love you, too. See you Thursday?”

“Yeah.”

With a sigh, I turned back to Jackson’s code, which, sadly, hadn’t debugged itself.

15

JACKSON

I pausedthe music and tugged off my headphones. I’d been searching all morning for the fucking bug in my code, but it was hidden better than that hairline crack in my Lamborghini’s cylinder head. Alicia always coded in silence; maybe if I tried that, I could find the damned thing. I scanned through the program again.

A drop of sweat trickled down from my temple into my beard. It was hotter than hell in the office today. Had they turned off the air conditioning? It was fucking October, and it shouldn’t still be in the nineties. The human body wasn’t made to survive six months of heat like this. My body wasn’t.

I glanced over at Alicia, typing primly in her slim black skirt and silk blouse. She sipped her tea. Hot tea in temperatures like this? The now-familiar smell of it wafted over me. Earl Grey. I’d sniffed all the bags in the kitchen one night to figure it out. It smelled bitter, like the time a kid at school had dared me to eat an orange like an apple, rind and all. I couldn’t taste anything else for days.

She held the cup under her nose, letting the steam curl up around her face. It caressed her temples the way I had that first day. The way I’d daydreamed about doing again. She and her hot tea were making me sweat. I scooted my chair half a foot away from her, repositioned my keyboard, and stared again at my screen.

A few minutes later, my stomach growled. Ah. I needed some food in my system to make my brain work right. A few minutes away from the screen would do me good.

I stood, stretching, and pocketed my phone.

Alicia looked up from her perfect code. “You going to lunch?”

“Yeah.” Then I had a brilliant idea. I could talk to Alicia about my code. Maybe it’d be that nudge that’d help me figure out what I’d done wrong. “Want to come with me?”

“Um.” Her eyes drifted off my face. “I don’t think—”

“Come on. You need a break and food, and so do I. Why not go together? Then you can be sure I come back on time.” And I wouldn’t mind some time out of the office with Alicia. Maybe she was less buttoned-up there. Would she grant me a few more guesses about her Tuesday-Thursday commitments?

She cut her gaze to the window behind me, like she could use the weather as an excuse. But it was hot and sunny, exactly like it’d been yesterday and the day before that and all fucking summer.

“I’ll buy. And you choose the restaurant,” I said.

She sighed like it was a huge imposition to be bought lunch. “Okay.” She grabbed her purse from her desk drawer, quickly checked her phone, and then dropped it in. “Let’s go.”

When we emerged into the sunlight, I slid on my sunglasses. “Where do you want to go?”

She glanced to the left. “My favorite taco place is a few blocks that way. Are you up for a walk?”

“You’re the one wearing heels.” I made the mistake of looking down at them. Today, they were beige with an opening at the toe where one shiny, black-painted toenail peeked out. Alicia wore black nail polish? Did she have some sort of goth double-life? Maybe she did sleep in a crypt. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays were the nights she went to—

I almost smacked my forehead right there on the sidewalk. Of course! She had a boyfriend. It didn’t surprise me that Alicia’s dating life was regimented. Tuesdays and Thursdays—and probably Saturdays, but I didn’t have any visibility to that—were date nights. How had I not figured that out over a month of working with her? Next Wednesday or Friday morning, I could confirm it by checking her face for afterglow.

Afterglow? I clenched my teeth.

“Jackson?” She was already a few steps down the sidewalk. “You coming?”

“Yeah.” I jogged a few steps to catch up and then walked beside her, my Converse silent next to the click-click-click of her heels. We passed clumps of students from the nearby university, a couple guys with skateboards, other tech types from the dozens of hardware and software companies that surrounded us, even a few suited politicians who’d wandered far from the capitol complex.

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