“I’m still looking for her.”
That truth lands in my gut like a punch. A few months ago, I’d have said I wasn’t looking. Then Logan brought Emily home and I realized I was looking, just in the wrong places.
After Tyrone inhales three-quarters of the pizza, I offer to replace his phone screen, unless he wants to contact Dakota. Furtively, he does, so I busy myself at my desk, smiling grimly when I see the pirate site has gone down. Another one will popup, I have no doubt. But I’ve got searches combing the Net now for any mention of Emily’s books and Whack-a-Mole always was one of my favorite games as a kid.
Glancing over at Tyrone, who is grinning like a fool into his phone, listening while a soft, high voice tells him she’ll save him a seat on the bus going home, I realize that I’m Uncle Max now. I don’t know how that happened, only that seeing the kid sitting on the stairwell doing his homework night after night when his mother kicked him out so she could get high and screw her latest dealer in their one-bedroom apartment brought back too many bad memories. The only way to silence them was to let the kid into my apartment where he could study in peace without having to shuffle out of the way every time someone went up or down the stairs. That led to him using my spare gaming rig when his homework was done. That led to pizza dinners and a new futon sofa for him to sleep on and a spare toothbrush in my bathroom. Uncle Max had one for me, too.
Uncle Max was also the one who told me a smart man knows what he wants and goes after it. I was ready to repeat his advice, but I haven’t been taking it. I know Pixie isn’t what I want. She’s just a fantasy. Julie wasn’t what I wanted, either, although she was more of a nightmare. I want what Logan has. I want that joy. I want a girl dancing around my kitchen singing the morning after. I want her to still have a warm bottom from my hand while she does it. I want her to be able to make me harder than I’ve ever been just by looking up at me with her dark eyes and calling me daddy.
I know what I want; I need to start going after it. If that means I have to go to this playgroup thing and give it a chance, well, that’s what I’ll do. Uncle Max didn’t raise a dummy.
Hacking the Ohio DMV database, following the lead I have on a Wilson for Logan, is interrupted by class. Yes, class. The Navy offered me a college degree, but when I saw how much bullshit officers had to deal with, I dropped to auditing classes and ducked out of getting a degree.
Since my discharge, I’ve discovered that lots of credits in computer programming on my resume doesn’t impress anyone. So, I’ve enrolled in NYU to finish up my degree. I’m only taking two classes per semester, and I’ll graduate in another twelve months. Ty, the little shit, thinks me being a student at the ripe age of 31 is hilarious and laughs his ass off as I get ready.
Now that he’s calmed down, cleaned up, fed, and back on the right track with his crush, Ty’s eager to go in for the afternoon. I tuck a ten-dollar bill into his backpack when he’s not looking and then swipe a chocolate bar out of my hidden stash and pop it in as well. In case his mother hasn’t remembered to put money on his student card, which would not be the first time, he has enough money for lunch. He can eat the chocolate bar for dessert or use it to entice his girl. Given how long he takes, preening in the bathroom, after he makes the decision to go in for the afternoon, I expect it will be the latter.
I forge a note from his mother, call an Uber, and drop him off at the gates of his school on Third Avenue. There are herds of kids milling around the school’s side yard, presumably on lunch break. I see the brown-eyed brunette drift to the edge of one little herd as Ty climbs out of the Uber. She grins when she sees him; he swaggers into the yard without a backwards glance.
I tell the Uber driver to head to the second stop with a big grin of my own.
I’m not the only “adult learner” in the embedded systems design class, but most of the shiny young things sit at the front and hang on every word out of the professor’s mouth.
Lindren Jolie. He’s a year younger than me but already a multi-millionaire. He came out of MIT the same year I went into the Navy. Orelo, a West Coast company no one had heard of, snapped him up. A few years later, while I was sweating my balls off in Northern Africa, Orelo developed the first successful algorithm to operate self-drive cars. After their little company went public with an IPO that raised six billion, everyone had heard of them.
Last year, everyone heard about Orelo again, but not for the same reasons.
Given his net worth, I should hate Lindy on principal, but I actually like the guy. He’s as socially awkward and uncomfortable being the focus of attention as I am. Today, his light brown hair is standing on end like it’s never met a hairbrush. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the alchemical formula for the Philosopher’s stone on it, and his jeans look like they fought a battle with grass and lost. Why he took a teaching position at a school where he’s under the microscope every day, I haven’t figured out. He can’t possibly need the money. We’ve been out for drinks twice. He gently hit on me. I gently told him no. I think we’re on the way to being friends.
After class, I drop down the steps in the amphitheater-shaped classroom until I stand in front of his desk. I lean back against the half wall which separates the lectern from the seats and watch with a grin while Lindy fends off a very persistent red-head with hair teased up taller than my six-one, who is trying to get extra-credit by shoving her tits under his nose. I keep my chuckle to myself and resist the urge to tell her she’s barking up the wrong sexual orientation.
Lindy finally gives the girl a worksheet and escapes her coffin-nailed clutches. After she pushes through the classroom door, already jabbering on her phone, he rolls his eyes at me.
“Code bunny,” he says.
I snort. “Not a thing.”
“It is when she’s got to keep her GPA above three-two for her scholarship. You got time for something to eat?”
Since Ty ate most of our “breakfast pizza,” I nod. “Just came down to see if you did. I got a call I want to talk with you about.”
His eyes shift left and right. He can guess who called me. “Let me tell my TA.”
I follow him to his office, which is a hole in the wall and probably feels like a rat-warren in comparison to the plush space in Mountain View he left to move east. Other than digital whiteboards, the walls of his office are bare, except for a huge portrait of Lindy himself. It’s on the school website, too. Him sitting at his desk with a whiteboard of code behind him. It’s honestly one of the worst pictures of a human being I’ve ever seen. His hair’s slicked back like he hasn’t washed it in a month. He’s forcing a huge grin; I swear I can count each molar. His eyes are bugging out slightly behind thick black frames. He could be Peter Pettigrew’s long-lost rat-shifter cousin.
The picture’s made worse by contrast with Lindy’s blond, hunky TA who is sitting at a desk under it. The guy’s all smiling blue eyes when Lindy tells him we’re going out and Lindy promises to bring him back a coffee. Probably a half-caf, soy, blonde macchiato. Definitely what that guy drinks.
As we walk off campus toward the taco bar Lindy likes, I ask, “You tapping that?”
Lindy sputters in mid-extol about the taco bar’s vegan queso, which sounds foul. “No, he’s an undergrad.”
“So am I.”
“No, you’re not. You’re, like, an adult learner or whatever they call you. You’re older than I am and you know more about cyber security than I do. They should’ve given you an honorary and offered you a teaching position instead of taking your money for two semesters.”
He checked my age, which makes me grin, since I did the same to him.
“Besides,” he continues. “I just finished being a headline for the wrong reason. I don’t need another expose ‘cause I hopped in bed with Chad.”
