by Robin Hale
It was my favorite method of follower engagement.
Given they’d already seen me at my video game worst and were fully supportive of my emerging best, there was no reason at all for me to feel my heart thrumming in my throat the way it was. At least, no reason that had to do with my followers, who were already filling the chat room on my stream with friendly hellos and affectionate snarking about my gameplay.
No, the shaking in my hands had nothing to do with them and everything to do with the woman currently in my shower.
The conversation over our interactions in view of the public had been business-like. Professional. We’d outlined where and how and when we might touch, laid boundaries over the maps in our minds and negotiated traffic across them like uneasily-allied countries. I knew what to expect, mostly. And it wasn’t like the blonde planned to come out of the bathroom and jump me.
Shoulders and up. Hand-holding. An arm around the waist. A hand on the back or hip.
Kisses as the situation might demand.
Easy.
So easy that I could practically taste my anxiety over it.
Every other heartbeat was interrupted by the reminder that Iris Spark was currently naked in my shower. Using my shampoo. Possibly judging my preference for bar soap over shower gel. At any moment on the cusp of drying herself with one of my towels. Or possibly one of my roommates’ towels if I hadn’t managed to be as clear as I’d intended.
My followers had definitely noticed.
I’d failed the same platform sequence a dozen times and I was getting some gentle ribbing in the chat.
“Yeah, yeah, sometimes I have an off night, okay?” I grinned, winked at the camera trained on my face, and glanced down at the stream of messages scrolling by. “‘What’s wrong’? Why does something have to be wrong?”
If I’d been paying attention, the chat would’ve acted as a perimeter alarm for what was about to happen.
‘OMG’
‘IS THAT’
‘!!!!’
As it was, my digital avatar plummeted once again to its pixelated death as a firm grip settled on my shoulder and I smelled the wafting scent of my own shampoo — super unfair that it smelled so much better on her than it did on me — and felt the delicate brush of lips against the side of my neck.
Oh, fuck.
My gut tightened, heat pooled in the bowl of my hips and I let out a surprised gasp I tried to play off as a startle reflex rather than a jolt of lust. Tried and failed, I was sure.
Tendrils of damp hair stroked over my shoulder when Iris pulled back, leaving the whisper of a kiss on my neck that I would feel for days.
“Hey,” I murmured softly, kicking myself for not having something prepared, something pithy or interesting. Anything other than the weak greeting I’d come up with.
“Come find me when you’re done,” Iris said, breath ghosting against my skin.
She slipped away and I caught sight of her in the small video window on my laptop’s screen: wet hair hanging down her back, wrapped — oh God — wrapped in one of my towels, padding barefoot back toward my bedroom. The resolution wasn’t quite high enough to see droplets of water sliding down her skin, disappearing into that towel, but my imagination was having zero trouble filling in the gaps.
The chat window exploded.
‘DID ANYONE ELSE KNOW ABOUT THIS???’
‘Do u guyz not pay attention? There was a whole kiss thing’
‘Power coupllllleeeeeee’
‘Omg can we get her to race u???’
‘Whyyyy are you still streaming when THAT IS IN THE NEXT ROOM’
“It’s streaming night, guys. You know I’d never bail on you.” I winked at the camera and pretended that I cared about what was happening on my screen. “Now stop it, you’ll make me blush.”
I let a satisfied grin settle on my face while the exclamations continued in the viewer chat.
Definitely a success.
7
IRIS
“I think we can call that a success.”
I looked up from my laptop, the stream of inane emails that could’ve been answered with a reference to the filed quarterly plans already forgotten, and caught sight of Amber standing in the doorway to her bedroom. I’d commandeered her bed after I’d dressed and had been working from the confines of her surprisingly tidy bedroom while she handled the rest of our little stunt in the living room.
“They reacted as you expected?” It was obviously a ‘yes’, but Carrie had reminded me more than once that people became uncomfortable if I didn’t pick up their conversational salvos and return the favor. Why we were meant to state things we both already knew, I couldn’t guess, but it did set most people at ease.
“Even better.” Amber slid into the room and shut the door behind her, sealing the pair of us in soft, warm light from vintage-looking lamps while the stars started to rise outside the window. Instantly, it made the space separate from the rest of my life. I wasn’t quite myself there.
“I think we’ve hit a large slice of my total reach — folks who didn’t catch the general tech gossip but who are still plugged in enough to care about SparkSignal if they aren’t already users.”
She looked cautiously satisfied, with only a faint trace of expectation that something would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Curious.
“Dinner, then.” If Carrie had been there she would’ve had an expression for me.
‘It’s an invitation, not a summons. Maybe try making it sound like that?’
Amber’s eyes widened, her lips parted, but she didn’t immediately speak.
“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “Sure.”
I slid from her bed and retrieved my shoes from the floor, keenly aware her room was small enough that I could probably reach Amber from where I stood. Could wrap my fingers in the front of that strangely asymmetrical blouse and tug her backward until we both tumbled into her sheets. Until we ruined the orderly set of her bed.
My fingers itched with the desire to do just that, but I restrained myself. Even if the rest of the evening had made it harder to remember why I should.
Showering somewhere other than my apartment, other than the office gym’s facilities, other than the club — there was something intimate about it.
My lips held the feeling of Amber’s skin like an echo in a cave, carrying the memory across the front of my mind so I couldn’t leave it behind.
“Dumplings. There’s a good spot nearby.” The laces of my shoes obeyed my fingers, completely incognizant of how badly those fingers wanted to be touching something else. “What are your thoughts on bok choy?”
“Pro,” Amber said with a lift at the corner of her soft mouth. “Pro bok choy.”
“We’re decided.” I stepped around Amber, caught the scent of her on the slight breeze the movement caused, and pulled the door open.
Hazel eyes twinkled and her soft smile shifted into a grin as she let me lead. “I guess so.”
* * *
THE DANGER in taking a ‘social media influencer’ — and I still cringed to think of Amber that way — to my favorite dumpling spot was the risk that it would rapidly become everyone else’s favorite dumpling spot and I would no longer be able to walk in off the street and find a table. However, unless I wanted to actively thwart the activity that had made Amber useful to me or I wanted to resign myself to carry-out for the remainder of our three-week contract, I didn’t have many options.
Sauteed bok choy and steamer baskets of dumplings covered the surface of the table practically before we’d sat down. I was a creature of habit and it didn’t take long before I was a ‘regular’ with a ‘usual’ at any particular restaurant.
“Nouanesengsy,” Amber said, gesturing toward one of the newspaper clippings on the wall, declaring the best soup dumplings in San Francisco. “I bet people butcher that one even worse than Kowalczyk.” Sympathy dripped from the statement.
I cocked my head, considered the name on
the clipping. Given that it was misspelled in the headline, Amber might’ve had a point.
“You could change it.”
Amber’s gaze snapped back to my face in a flare of defiance she quickly smoothed away. “I’ll keep that in mind.” The words were dry, but she’d obviously taken offense.
Strange.
“It’s an inconvenient process,” I allowed. “But manageable.”
I waited for the spark to return to her eyes, the irritation or defensiveness I’d seen a second ago. But it didn’t come.
“I use Amber Kay for most things,” she said. “It only comes up in doctor’s offices and client meetings.”
Client meetings like the one I’d foisted on her, she meant. Best to let it go.
“How did you get started with it?” I asked. It seemed safe enough. Most people I met liked to talk about their careers. “The social media…consulting.” I gestured vaguely, trying to encompass everything from her freelance work to the video game streaming we’d just come from.
Amber’s eyes narrowed like she’d heard the question before and it was a prelude to something unpleasant rather than standard Silicon Valley small talk.
“Are you asking why I didn’t go to college?”
I blinked. “No.”
Sheepishness swept over Amber’s face and the set of her shoulders softened. “Sorry. I just — get that sometimes. Usually in the ‘when are you going to get a real job’ sense. Like what I do isn’t work.” There was real bitterness behind the way she bit her lip and chuckled, pretending it didn’t matter to her. Who the hell had told her what she did wasn’t work?
“I was always kind of…socially flexible, I guess?” Amber shrugged. “Knew everyone in school, generally welcome pretty much anywhere. When social media started kicking off, I was on it for the same reasons everyone else was. Turned out I had a knack for it. People liked my humor, liked the way I saw things. Wasn’t too big a leap to see how I could monetize that.”
There was a casual dismissiveness to her shrug, as though any high school senior to earn the ‘Friendliest’ superlative could parlay that into an independent consulting business.
“I didn’t go to college,” I offered. “Well, I didn’t graduate.” Hadn’t made it through a full semester. Quarter? What system had they used?
Interest gleamed in those dark eyes. “Why not? Thought that was the path for programmers. CS degree from some big name. Figured you’d have gone to MIT or Stanford or something. Top of your class.”
The snort that followed wasn’t the most attractive sound I’d ever made, but it was unavoidable.
“No. Not in the slightest.” I took a swig of the pale lager that accompanied my dumplings. “I got far enough in the coursework to suss out what the rest of it would look like and decided there were better uses of my time.”
“Like SparkSignal,” Amber said.
“Like SparkSignal,” I agreed.
“So you built that without a formal degree?” There was no judgment in her voice. If anything, she sounded impressed.
I fought the desire to sit up straighter, push my shoulders back. “If something works, investors don’t usually care if it came from someone with a degree.” I caught her eye over the lip of my glass. “A degree is useful if you grew up without access to computers or you need to get past the gatekeepers. I’ve never had any reason not to scale the walls.”
Amber’s laughter filled our corner of the dumpling shop with thick, intoxicating promise. That addictive first hit of infatuation, the sort of emotional drug that led to increasingly stupid stunts to get another taste of attention. It felt like the best kind of first date, the sort of date that would lead to a night together and another date the next morning if you could swing it.
Or it would if I weren’t paying her to be there.
My arms and legs went cold with the foreign feeling of personal disgust. I’d have to have Carrie prepare a press release. A large number of people would be shocked to learn I could feel anything resembling shame.
“College was never in the cards for me,” Amber said with a shrug. “My brother was always the whiz kid, you know? Top of our class. Got a full ride for undergrad — something about his SATs? Or maybe one of the practice tests.” Her shoulders curled forward, wrapping her upper body in a defensive posture distinctly out of place in a half-empty dumpling shop on a not-date. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got an email announcing where he’s going for medical school.”
“You haven’t read it.” Interesting. I had enough pieces to begin forming a picture of Amber’s background. ‘Our class’ — the brother was a twin or had skipped a grade to share a graduation year with her. Their parents had probably tagged and sorted them early. The smart one. The popular one. Clearly preferred particular measures of success. Medical school was obvious, uncomplicated. Blazing her own path on the west coast was a flighty risk.
If pressed, I might’ve made it fifteen minutes in her parents’ presence without succumbing to rudeness.
“I’ve been busy.” ‘Defensive’ wasn’t a strong enough word for her tone. ‘Fortified’ was closer.
“Sure.” I nodded. “After all, you’ve only got — what? Two and a half weeks? — to convince the general public that I’ve got you on your back three times a day. And that it makes me interesting.”
Amber’s body tried to rip itself in two directions. Her pupils went wide, pink rising in her cheeks while her shoulders closed around her chest, spine rigid.
“Three times?” Amber’s voice was wry, her tone playful and — tinged with promise.
That wasn’t what I had expected her to say. In any other circumstance, I would’ve interpreted it as a challenge to deliver. The corner of my mouth quirked disobediently, and I covered the movement by taking another swig of my lager. “I have a full schedule. If you want more than that, we’ll have to outsource.”
The sight of those wide, dark eyes, that smile sent my toes curling in my brogues while I tried to hide that I was having a reaction at all.
* * *
DINNER PASSED EASILY. Shockingly easily. Despite every warning I’d ever been given by a self-appointed mentor, my abrasiveness wasn’t a problem. If anything, my abrasiveness settled Amber. Polite conversation got her back up. Something scathing or on the ragged edge of propriety unwound the spring in her spine, made her settle into her soup dumplings, her bok choy, and her weak beer and smile at me.
Meanwhile, I was like a kid with a sore tooth. I had a general idea of how life had been for Amber growing up, but I didn’t have the full picture. I liked full pictures. I liked having something solved and settled and filed away for future consideration. All I wanted to do was worry at it with my tongue.
It just wasn’t all I wanted to worry with my tongue.
It was easy to touch Amber. Easy, with the excuse of the relationship we didn’t have, to put a hand on her back and let her pass me on the way out the door. Easy to slip an arm around her waist and pretend an intimate goodbye while we planned to go our separate ways outside. It was easy to lean in, to breathe in her scent and let the lingering touch of beer try to tempt me into kissing her again.
She’d asked me to, once. And she’d let me press another kiss into her neck earlier that night.
I could imagine it: tugging her close, pushing up onto the balls of my feet to suck her lower lip into my mouth and find out if a nip there would make her whimper. Pulling back soon enough that she wouldn’t question it. Wouldn’t worry.
Fuck, I was a bastard.
Instead, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into a rough hug. “I’ll walk you home,” I said, surprising myself.
“Oh, I’m okay.” Amber’s cheeks were warm, her arms soft, and the scent of her was another layer of warmth around me. More than my jacket. More than her scarf.
“It wasn’t a question,” I said and finally pulled back.
I turned away from her, heading down the street back toward her apartment — it wasn’t a rough neighborh
ood, but San Francisco was San Francisco and you were always safer with another person.
I stopped as realization hit. Unless she hadn’t been trying to be polite. “Unless you’re saying you’d rather be alone, of course,” I said, beginning to turn back.
Fingers tangled with mine, dragging my eyes to Amber’s face where the red on her cheeks wasn’t makeup or beer, but her lips remained sealed. I adjusted my grip on her hand, settled our palms together as if we’d held hands every day for the past ten years, and continued down the street with my heart thrumming in my throat.
* * *
“YOU’VE GOT a design review at 10:30 and a lunch appointment with Christianson starting at noon.” Carrie glanced down at the tablet in her arms, refreshing herself needlessly on a schedule she’d have memorized the night before. Memorized and made available to three separate calendars in the central system, all of which would have their own notifications reaching the appropriate people.
She was avoiding looking at me.
Interesting.
“How’s the other project coming along?” She asked.
Ah, there it was.
“Fine.” I dutifully slurped the pond sludge and left my satchel leaning against my desk. “Which you know. What are you actually asking?” Carrie definitely had all of the data required to keep track of the success rate of the Kowalczyk Experiment, which meant she was looking for something she didn’t have data on. She wasn’t usually coy about asking what she meant.
“You’ve also got a phone call this afternoon. Maureen Cortez wants to confirm a few facts before the new piece goes live.” Carrie moved around to the chairs in front of my desk and settled like a small bird.
I didn’t bother trying to keep the grimace from my face. Maureen Cortez was, by profession, a tech journalist. A sometimes blogger, sometimes print media writer who focused on Silicon Valley. She’d also decided, at some point, that no one earning over $200k per year could be trusted. Not that I faulted the conclusion, but the fallout was…inconvenient. She also had a particular bone to pick with my family.