Page 30 of Suddenly Desired
“Neither’s mine.” He laughed. “Not today, anyway. And it wasn’t when it started, either. You know, when I first had the idea for Heartbook I was working in Mum’s restaurant as a dishwasher.”
“I’d like to pretend I didn’t know that,” Ellie said, laughing too. It was contagious. “But I did a lot of research for my interview!”
“You’ll know, then, that there was no place for me to work,” he said, grinning. “So when I had a break I’d take my laptop into the toilet and lock myself in a cubicle.”
“Didn’t know that bit. That’s disgusting.”
“I know, right?” he replied. “But I’d sit there and write code whenever I could. I was in there so often the other staff started calling me Flusher.”
A laugh escaped Ellie, and she clamped a hand over her mouth.
“Flusher! You do realise I’m going to have to call you that from now on.”
“I deserve it,” he said. “You know, after a while, because I was in there so often, Mum started charging me rent. Fiver a week.”
“Harsh,” said Ellie.
“Exactly,” said Blake. “She was a ruthless landlord. I was young, not even twenty, and I didn’t have any money at all. In fact, I couldn’t even pay her that, I was so broke. I had pennies to my name at one point. But what I lacked in finances I made up for in passion. I never gave up, I never stopped believing. You shouldn’t either. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Okay, Flusher,” she said, and he laughed. “But I’m warning you, it’s not much.”
She opened up a folder on her laptop.
“I can’t code. At least not very well. Not well enough for this. But the architecture is all here.”
“LifeWrite,” said Blake, reading from the screen. “Write your own story.That’s good.”
“Thanks.” Ellie pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Like I said to you last night, stories are so powerful, they can unite us in so many ways.”
Like our story, he thought.
He pushed that thought straight out of his head because this moment was about Ellie and what she was passionate about, not about him and his lustful dreams.Besides, her plan for LifeWrite seemed like a really good one.
“Show me more.”
She did — she showed him everything. She gushed about her project, demonstrating how the accounts were called Pages, the groups called Chapters. It was laid out like a high street with nothing but book shops and cafés, libraries and parks, and as she flicked through designs and illustrations it felt almost as if she was showing him around her own private paradise.
“This part is based on my favourite book from childhood,” she said, looking at him with huge pupils and pink cheeks. “The Swiss Family Robinson. Have you read it?”
Blake nodded. He’d taken a copy from his mum’s shelves when he was a kid, intrigued by the premise of being stranded on a desert island. He must have read it a dozen times over the years, partly because of the story, but partly because the novel always reminded him of his mum.
“I had a copy,” she said. “It wasn’t a first edition, but it was old, like one of the first copies in English. I found it in a charity shop, back home, and I couldn’t believe my luck.”
“That’s amazing,” he said. “I’d love to see it.”
“So would I,” she replied with a sigh. “But it’s long gone. Josh borrowed it. Left it on a plane. Didn’t even read it. He bought me a cheap paperback to replace it and couldn’t understand why I was so upset.”
“I understand,” Blake said, feeling as furious now as she must have then.
She smiled at him with gratitude, holding his eye for a beat. “Um, so, anyway, check this out.”
She went on with the tour, showing him around a digitised island. He commented where she let him, telling her how much he loved this design, or that idea. Every time she moved to a different theme — each one based on a famous work of literature — he told her how much he loved the books she’d picked. He’d read almost all of them, and when there was one he hadn’t, she detoured from the presentation to tell him all about it. She showed him how eventually LifeWrite would be able to use your computer camera to assess what kind of mood you were in, helping you out if you felt sad or lonely, reading poems and stories to you to cheer you up.
She was so animated, and so full of passion for her project. Her enthusiasm was contagious, and he found himself thinkingabout how easy it would be to make this a reality, and how popular it could be. The internet was full of negativity, social media drowning under the force of criticism and bile — Heartbook included. LifeWrite was refreshing, and such a good idea that he wondered why nobody had taken it seriously yet.
She reminded him most of all of his own excitement in the early days of Heartbook. Back then he had given everything to the company, but he hadn’t minded because it had been his project. Ever since the company had gone public, and he’d had to answer to a board of directors and an army of shareholders, he’d enjoyed his role less and less. Nothing about Heartbook felt personal to him anymore.
“And that’s kind of it,” she said, sitting back. “That’s my baby.”
