by Penny Reid
He was still in his work clothes, his tie loosened and hair rumpled like he’d been dragging his hands through it repeatedly, yet somehow, it managed to make him look even more like a GQ model than usual, which was really unfair. Melody couldn’t help feeling underdressed and slovenly standing next to him in her threadbare hoodie and yoga pants—even though this was her apartment and she was the one doing him a favor in the middle of the night.
“This way.” She led him through the living room and into the spare bedroom she’d set up as an office. “Give me the dead one.”
Without a word, he handed her one of the laptops. The keyboard was good and sticky, smelled faintly of cinnamon, and—yep, nothing happened when she tried the power button.
Jeremy watched her, rubbing his palms on his thighs like a kid in the principal’s office.
“Not to fear,” she said, digging around in her desk for a screwdriver.
She removed the battery, opened the laptop case, and popped out the old hard drive, which fortunately looked to have survived The Great Latte Incident unscathed. It took a few minutes of digging through all the boxes of computer equipment she had stacked in the corner to find the right disk enclosure for Jeremy’s hard drive, but eventually she put her hands on the one she needed.
“You’ve practically got a whole IT department of your own in here,” he said with a raised eyebrow.
“I like to tinker in my free time. Kind of a hobby.” It used to be, anyway. Back in college, she’d made extra money by building computers out of refurbished parts and selling them to her fellow students, but she hadn’t touched any of this stuff since she’d moved.
“Lucky for me, I guess.”
She smiled at him as she slotted the hard drive into the external case and attached the connector pins. “Go ahead and boot up that other laptop.”
By the time it was up and running, she was ready with the external hard drive, which she plugged into the USB. “There you go,” she said when the file list showed up onscreen.
“Is it there?” Leaning over the desk, he reached for the trackpad and double-clicked on a file name. “Oh thank god,” he breathed when a PowerPoint presentation opened up.
“You can just copy all your old files over to the new laptop and you’ll be good as gold.”
Jeremy beamed the full force of his thousand-watt smile at her. “You’re amazing.”
She felt her cheeks warm. “It’s no big deal.”
“I thought for sure I’d lost all of my work. I can’t believe you got it back.”
“It was nothing. Easy as one, ten, eleven.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending.
“It’s a binary joke. See, it’s funny if you know that one, two, three in binary is—” She stopped and shook her head. “You know what? Never mind, it’s not that funny if you have to explain it.”
The way he was gazing at her, with a weird sort-of smile on his face, made her feel self-conscious. Which made her babble reflex kick into a higher gear.
“You know what they say,” she blurted out before she could stop herself, “there are only ten kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don’t.” She laughed nervously. “I’ve got like a whole stable of binary jokes. They really killed in the Comp Sci department. Hexadecimal jokes, too, like—”
“Thank you,” Jeremy interrupted before she could keep going.
And then he hugged her.
“You’re…welcome?” she said into his shoulder. It wasn’t one of those fleeting hugs like their hug in the parking garage had been. This time, Jeremy’s arms tightened around her, and he sort of sagged against her and just…hung out like that for a while.
On the one hand, it felt nice—like, really nice. It was the most action she’d gotten since Kieran—yeah, so not going there. Suffice it to say, it had been a long time since anyone other than her mom had held her like this, and Jeremy was an exceptional hugger…which was a problem.
Standing there in his arms made her think about the last time he’d held her in his arms, three years ago, which was not something she should be thinking about right now. Because—and this was the other thing—he had a girlfriend. A girlfriend Melody was friends with. Hugging your friend’s boyfriend for a weirdly long time when you were alone together in your apartment late at night was a very bad thing.
Just before she worked up the courage to pull away, Jeremy let go and dropped into the chair in front of the computer. “This is great,” he said, reaching for the trackpad again.
“Uh huh.” Melody adjusted her glasses. “So, uh—what’s so all-fired important about this presentation anyway?”
He frowned at the screen as he dragged his files over from the external drive to the laptop. “Geoffrey Horvath, the CFO—he’s giving his quarterly presentation to the board tomorrow morning and asked me to prepare the financial benchmarking analysis. It’s a lot of responsibility because it’s a huge portion of the presentation—which…evidently, I should not have been trusted with.”
“Hey.” She touched his shoulder, and he looked up without meeting her eyes. “You did just fine. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He gave her a half-hearted nod and turned back to the computer screen.
She realized her hand was still on his shoulder and shoved it behind her back. “You’ll see. Mr. Horvath is going to rock that presentation tomorrow because of you.”
Jeremy pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Believe it or not, my career to date has not exactly been marked by success.”
“Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
He shook his head again, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “I’ve been a screw-up for so much of my life, I don’t think I know how to be anything else. I’ve been trying to do better, to do what my father would have wanted, but I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, and it feels like everyone’s just waiting for me to fuck up again.”
“That’s not true,” Melody said. He looked so defeated—and so vulnerable. It wasn’t something she ever would have expected from him.
His tongue skimmed over his bottom lip. “Trust me,” he said, still dragging files over from one hard drive to the other. “Corporate politics is pretty much kill or be killed. Most of the people at Sauer Hewson would be perfectly happy to step over my corpse if they thought it would help them get ahead. Even my mother—” He broke off, shaking his head again, and Melody’s heart constricted at the look on his face. “She says she wants me to succeed, but it feels like all she sees are my mistakes.
“Geoffrey’s the only one—” He hesitated, blowing out a breath. “Sometimes it feels like Geoffrey’s the only one who actually believes in me. He was my dad’s best friend and he’s been great these last few years, looking out for my mom, my sister, and me. He’s sticking his neck out to champion me at the company and I just—I really don’t want to let him down.”
“You won’t.” Melody hated seeing him like this. He’d worked so hard and didn’t deserve to feel like a failure over one dumb accident. “Look, you got the presentation done, and I’ll bet it’s killer. And okay, there was a small incident with a hot beverage, and you and I are going to have a serious talk at some point about backing up your work to the cloud, but you knew exactly who to call to fix it, and now everything’s going to be fine.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said, running a tired hand through his hair.
The urge to smooth his hair down was almost overpowering, but she managed to resist it. Barely. “How about you just knock ’em dead tomorrow?” She pointed a stern finger at him. “Then come see me downstairs, because I am serious about backing up your work, buster. I’m going to set you up with automatic backups so you never have to worry about something like this again.”
He mustered a faint smile for her. “It’s a deal.”
The next afternoon, Jeremy showed up at Melody’s office with a coffee and a laptop. “Nonfat vanilla latte,” he said, setting the coffee cup on her d
esk. “With extra sugar.”
“For me?” she asked, impressed he’d remembered her coffee order.
“For you. To say thank you.”
“Well, anyone who brings me coffee is always very welcome.” She reached for the cup and popped the lid off. “How’d your presentation go?”
“It went okay, I think.” His shrug was modest, but he looked pleased with himself. “Geoffrey didn’t seem to have any complaints, at least.”
“That’s great!”
He beamed at her. “And I owe it all to you.”
“Well, not all of it,” she said, feeling herself flush. “You did the presentation. I just retrieved it for you. So you only owe, like, five percent of it to me.”
His cheek dimpled. “Five percent? That’s really all the credit you want to claim?”
“Maybe seven,” she conceded.
He smiled a little wider, and his eyes did that twinkling thing, like he was a live-action Disney prince or something. “How about we call it an even ten?”
“I’ll take it.”
“You mentioned something about setting me with up with automatic backups?” he said, holding up his laptop. “Do you have time now?”
“Sure. Slide on in here.” Melody scooted over to make room for him.
He shifted a stack of binders off the spare chair in the corner and dragged it over to the desk while she got to work.
When the installation was done, she walked him through the basics: how to get to his backed-up files, how to check to make sure it was running properly, and how to keep it up to date. He listened intently to everything she said, his mouth slightly turned down and forehead creased in concentration.
At one point, he reached for the trackpad and his fingers brushed against hers. She pulled her hand away, but then, a minute later, he leaned in for a better look at the screen and pressed his chest against her arm. He was close enough she could smell his cologne, or aftershave, or whatever it was he wore. It was subtle but heady, and it made her feel dizzy.
Her office was always a chilly sixty-eight degrees because of the servers in the next room, but it felt precariously warm with Jeremy’s excellent-smelling body pressed so close to hers.
“So, that’s pretty much it.” Melody scooched her chair away, putting some distance between them. “Think you’ve got it now?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He got to his feet and collected his laptop. “And if I don’t, I know where to come for help.”
She nodded, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “Your friendly neighborhood IT department: always here to help.”
His hand landed warmly on her shoulder. “Thanks again, Melody.”
She swallowed and nodded again. “Anytime.”
He withdrew his hand. “I guess I’ll see you around?” he said, making it sound like a question.
“I guess you will.”
Chapter 10
The annual Sauer Hewson company picnic was apparently a very big deal. Melody wasn’t a super-fan of picnics, given her aversion to insects, sunburn, group activities, and portable toilets. But her boss had made it clear the fun was mandatory, so here she was in Agoura Hills, sweating through the same lime green Sauer Hewson T-shirt as the other eight hundred employees wandering around in the August heat.
August in LA? Not so temperate. All of California had been hit by a heatwave, and it was a brutal ninety-eight degrees on this particular Saturday afternoon. At least it was a dry heat, and not the dense, muggy heat she’d grown up with in Florida. If you stayed in the shade, it wasn’t that bad—except it was hard to stay in the shade at a stupid picnic.
The event mostly seemed to be geared toward kids, which was probably nice if you had kids—or were one. But since neither of those conditions applied to her, there wasn’t a whole lot to actually do. The petting zoo was fun for about five minutes, until she started to feel weird about being the only adult not accompanied by a child. There was a band playing on a stage set up at one end of the park, but when she wandered over to check it out, they were playing a reggae cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” that was just—no. So much no.
Which left the interdepartmental softball, volleyball, and flag football games going on over at the playing fields. Melody hadn’t signed up for any of the IT department teams because she wasn’t a team sports kind of girl, but she figured she’d go and spectate for a while—not that she was particularly interested in watching the accounting department play sand volleyball against the facilities department, but at least it was somewhere to sit.
It was strange to think this was her life now. That she was actually a person who attended mandatory company picnics and wore logo-ed company event T-shirts. A faceless cog in the capitalist machine, chained to her desk forty hours a week, worrying about her 360 review and 401k.
God, what would Kieran think of her now? Nothing good, that was for sure.
Kieran had been a crusader: a molecular biology major convinced he’d been put on the earth to make it a better place by curing cancer, saving the whales, going to pro-choice rallies, or whatever else happened to be his cause du jour.
Not that he wasn’t sincere about it. He just didn’t have much of an attention span. He’d get passionate about a cause and put all his energy into it for a while, only to lose interest a few months later and move on to something else that inspired him.
When he was up, he had this infectious enthusiasm for life that drew people to him like a tractor beam. He loved everything and everyone around him with a fierceness that made you want to love them, too. For a born-and-bred pessimist like Melody, it was a whole new way of experiencing the world. He’d opened her eyes to so much joy—from little things like wildflowers growing up through the cracks in asphalt to big things like a grassroots political movement happening halfway around the world—and she’d worshipped him for it. Even if she’d maybe secretly believed, deep down, his idealism was a little naive. A lifetime of cynicism didn’t go away overnight, after all—not even when you were in love.
Kieran would have hated that she’d gone to work for Sauer Hewson. He would have told her she was wasting her intellect, selling out her talent for money. He would have hated this stupid company picnic, and he really would have hated this ugly T-shirt that had probably been made by oppressed children in some sweatshop somewhere.
“Melody!”
She spun around at the sound of her name, narrowly avoiding a collision with a roaming pack of sticky children, and spied Lacey running toward her. She was wearing a floral tank top and cut-off denim shorts that showed off her perfectly toned legs—the only person there who’d eschewed the vile green T-shirt.
“Oh thank god.” Lacey thew her arms around her like an old friend. “Finally, someone I know.”
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Melody said, relieved to have found a friendly face.
“I came with Jeremy. But of course he’s gone off to schmooze with work people and left me on my own. So I’ve just been wandering around, bored out of my mind.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Well, now we’ve got each other, so we can be bored together.” Lacey hooked her arm through Melody’s. “Let’s go get us some drinks!”
Lacey dragged her over to a concession stand and ordered two large iced lemonades.
“The problem with family-friendly events is there’s never any alcohol,” she said, thrusting the cups at Melody to hold. “Which is why I always bring my own.” She pulled a flask out of her patchwork bag and tipped a generous quantity of clear liquid into each of their cups.
Melody took an experimental sip. It tasted like vodka. A lot of vodka. And it was delicious.
“I’m so glad I ran into you,” she told Lacey happily.
Lacey sucked on her straw and smirked. “Stick me with me, kid. I’ll look out for you.”
It was possible Melody was slightly drunk. Possibly more than slightly. On the other hand, she was finally enjoying herself at this stupid picnic.
She was on her second cup of vodka lemonade. So far, she and Lacey had had their palms read, gotten their faces painted—butterfly wings for Lacey and a glittery pink unicorn for Melody—and bribed an attendant to let them jump in the bouncy house with the kids. Melody had vetoed the rock climbing wall, but agreed to go on the bumper cars, the giant slide, and something called Sally the Sea Serpent, which turned out to be an enormous inflatable maze that took them twenty minutes to stumble their way out of.
Then there was an announcement about the start of the executive games, and Lacey dragged her off toward the playing fields. “Believe me, you do not want to miss this,” Lacey said. “They make the company officers play all these stupid field day games.”
It sounded pretty entertaining, so Melody followed as she pushed her way to the front of the gathering crowd.
“Look, there’s Jeremy,” Lacey said, pointing.
Sure enough, Jeremy was in the middle of the field with a bunch of other executives, getting ready to play tug-of-war. Melody didn’t know enough of the faces to understand how the teams were divided up, but she recognized the CIO on the team opposite Jeremy.
Once the contest started, the crowd got into it, shouting and cheering on the competitors, and Lacey and Melody joined in, both rooting for Jeremy’s team. It was back-and-forth for a while, but Jeremy’s side finally managed to drag the flag across the marker, and the spectators went crazy as the opposing team was pulled into the dirt. Melody whooped and hollered, both because she was a little—maybe a lot—drunk, and because it was pretty damn satisfying to see her boss’s boss fall flat on his face.
After that, there was a sack race, where she got to see the CIO fall face-first in the dirt yet again, then they started setting up for the three-legged race.
“Who’s Jeremy partnered with?” Melody asked when she saw him teaming up with a pretty teenage girl.
“That’s his sister, Hannah. Oh, wow, their mother’s actually going to join in.”
Angelica Sauer had a reputation around the office for being humorless and terrifying. Today, she was smiling and laughing as she crouched beside a man Melody recognized as the CFO, Geoffrey Horvath, tying their legs together for the race.