“Yeah. We had Chinese food in Leggetville.”
“Okay, let me help you avoid a novice sushi mistake. See that green stuff that looks like putty?”
“Yep.”
“That’s called wasabi. Don’t eat it plain. It’s extremely hot horseradish. What you do is rub some on your roll and then place it at the back of your tongue so it doesn’t burn your mouth. There are less sensitive flavor receptors back there. You get the warmth and flavor without the pain.” He demonstrated as he explained and popped the roll in his mouth.
I picked up a colorful roll with the chopsticks and copied what he’d just done. The flavors burst over my tongue and the horseradish rose into my nose and sunk into my stomach, clearing out my sinuses along the way. My eyes burst open.
“Good?” he asked.
“Yeah. This is amazing. Thanks for showing me.”
I kept eating until my plate was empty and pulled another plate from the belt. Feeling more courageous, I took one of the raw fish looking ones. It was just as delicious as the roll.
“What are you doing in Seattle?” he asked as I shoved my fourth salmon sashimi in my mouth. I chewed, thinking of what to tell him.
“I came here to go to school. Everything kind of turned into a disaster though. Are you from here?” I said changing the subject.
“Yeah. I grew up in Lynnwood. I’m getting a Master’s in computer science at UW. I’ll graduate at the end of the fall semester.”
“Computer science, huh? Are you going to be like Zuckerburg or something?” I said laughing. I plucked another plate from the belt, adding to my growing pile. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry. Billy was easy to be with, and I didn’t mind stuffing my face in front of him.
“You never know,” he said under his breath, taking a sip of green tea. His tone made me wonder. It was like he had a secret or something.
“What?” I asked, wanting to draw it out.
“Nothing.”
“They already invented Facebook, Billy.” I giggled.
“The Internet isn’t like Highlander.”
“Heh?” What the hell was he talking about?
“It’s a stupid sci-fi reference. This show, Highlander, ‘There can be only one,’ Highlander, that is. There can be more than one social network.” He seemed totally flustered, and pink rose in his cheeks. I’d embarrassed him. How adorable.
“That sounds like a great sales pitch.” I didn’t know why I said it when I already had him squirming. He was obviously way smarter than I was. He’d probably seen me naked, and he’d taken me to have sushi, which was my first decent meal in days. I should try to be nicer.
“I have to work on that,” he said as if he had something to actually pitch.
“You’re doing that again. What is it? Are you building a social network or something?” I wanted to know. Mostly because I could tell he felt uncomfortable. I found it intriguing. I knew guys thought I was attractive, but guys in my life generally had all the power.
There had been nonstop gossip about my mom’s suicide, Claire’s pregnancy and Regan’s bipolar, drug addict antics. Regan had been working on the title of “town slut” until she was sent to a rehabilitation facility two months ago.
Needless to say, the local boys might have liked to hang with me, but they didn’t show me a lot of respect. Still, I knew my life belonged to me. Not even my circumstances could dictate my identity. Nothing anyone said determined who I was inside. I’d always known that, even after mom died, and my grades started to plummet, I knew I had control. I knew I could wallow in self-pity as long as I wanted and then pull myself out again. And I did.
When I decided to move to Seattle, it had been my way of exerting the control I knew I possessed. Unfortunately, moving here had not gone according to plan. Not by a long shot.
“It’s nothing,” he said changing the subject. “What are you studying in school?”
“Oh. I’m just taking general ed. so I can transfer to UW to major in dance. I want to be a choreographer someday.”
“What kind of dance do you do?” he asked, looking at me with hungry eyes.
“Hip hop, modern, some ballet. I’m out of practice since my mother… For the last two years. I’ve only been able to work out once in a while when Stacy could get me into the gym. Or at home, which wasn’t a great option. I plan to get on a decent training regimen when school starts. There is a gym at the community college and they give fitness dance classes. It will at least keep me moving.”
“What happened to your mom?”
“Nothing,” I said, wiping my mouth. He had his secrets, and I had mine. I didn’t feel like talking about it. I’d eaten six plates of sushi and had started to feel like a blimp. I hopped off the chair and started toward the cash register. He followed me and shoved cash at the unsuspecting server. The server took the money and closed our bill.
“I have money,” I said, following him out of the restaurant. He headed up the red stairs, without asking me to pay him back. Fine, if he wanted to pay for my food, good for him. Not like I had an eight hundred dollar check in my wallet.
“Do you want a ride home?” he asked. I thought about it. I didn’t want him to see that I lived in a seedy hotel. Why did I suddenly care what he thought of my living conditions? I knew I liked how he looked at me and how it made me feel. I didn’t want to break the illusion of me as a super glamor girl. If stuffing my face with sushi hadn’t already done that.
“Nah, I’ll take the bus. Look, my bus is here now. I’ve got to go. Thanks for lunch.”
“No problem,” he said behind me as I jogged toward the bus stop.
My line pulled to the curb, and the doors swung open. I glanced back as riders filed out. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, the guitar player still strumming down the street. The lilting notes mixed with the sound of the crowd and the beating of my heart. Billy’s face was filled with longing and sadness. I felt a pull toward him with such force I almost walked back.
Somewhere deep down, I knew he could touch me in ways I’d never felt before. I shook my head to clear the crazy imaginings and gave Billy a goodbye wave before boarding the bus. I paid and walked to the back where I looked out the window. Billy still stood on the sidewalk, holding his helmet, staring at the bus.
His gaze rose to the window, and our eyes locked. I put my palm on the cool glass and watched him as we drove away. Turning around in my chair, I felt lost and dazed. Why did I care what he thought of me? Why did I feel so connected to this nerdy dude I’d just met?
I sighed and crossed my arms. I had money in my pocket and a belly full of sushi. Even if I didn’t understand my infatuation with Billy Black, it had been a good day.
I made it back to the hotel in the late afternoon and sat at the end of my bed watching television. Agitation itched my brain. I couldn’t sit still. We needed to get the hell out of this hotel. School started on Monday, and I really wanted to move into a new apartment, like now.
Stacy came home as dusk fell and walked into the hotel room, bringing the harsh scent of car exhaust into the room with her. She collapsed into the chair by the window and frowned.
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
“You must be reading my mind.”
Chapter Three: William
“Have you found an investor yet?” asked David as he looked at the website over my shoulder.
“I just finished the code last night.”
“The site is ugly as dick though, Billy. You need to seriously do something about that. But don’t wait to patent this and find investors. What you have is remarkable.”
“I just sent the patent in this morning, and I’m looking into investors today. I know it’s ugly. With work and everything, I haven’t had time to work out the design, besides that, I met a girl.”
“A girl, huh?” he said raising his eyebrow. “Billy, I’ve known you for three years and you have never once been interested in a girl.”
“Well, she’s different.
I took her to lunch yesterday, and then came home and wrote the algorithm for my webcrawler. It’s as if the code jumped out of my brain onto the computer screen. I’ve never been so clearly focused before, and I’ve been working on this problem for months. She helps me think somehow. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“She’s your muse,” Daniel said clicking on tabs.
I thought about the ancient mythological immortals that imbued men with great ideas in the arts and philosophy. That’s exactly what Zoe was for me— a muse. The excitement of cracking the algorithm hadn’t even sunk in until I’d shown Daniel. It had all come so easily. Now I knew, Zoe had to be mine. I needed her as I needed to breathe air.
“Could be,” I said. “I have no idea what to do with a woman. They don’t respond with ones and zeroes.” We both chuckled.
The front door to our house swung open. Alex burst through with a laptop in hand. Several nights a week, we had a guild raid in the MMORPG Netherworld. Alex plopped his laptop down on our massive dining room table. Daniel called up the stairs for Maddie, and she came running down with her computer in hand. Evan got up from the living room, and Daniel found a seat.
I’d been our raid leader for the last three years, a duty that I both enjoyed and sometimes resented. When we were all in undergrad, my guildies had family that helped them financially. Now, most of them either had regular jobs or only had to go to grad school. As a freelance computer technician, my hours were never consistent. Plus, I made squat compared to what Daniel made at Microsoft. Maddie’s parents were loaded, and I suspected that Alex was a pot dealer. Evan had a job at the school library archives, which wasn’t exactly demanding. Still, everyone wanted me to be raid leader.
We met at the entrance of Northfall Cave, which was the raid we planned to complete tonight. I set Northfall Cave on expert mode making it the most difficult raid in the current patch. That meant it also had the best loot drops. We’d been working for weeks to gear up enough to get inside.
We zoned in and were greeted by a horde of diseased goblins. Our healer Alex would have to cleanse us every fifteen seconds to keep the disease from stacking and wiping us out in under a minute. It would be a hard fight, but we had the knowhow and the gear to win.
I pulled the first goblin, and it scuttled toward me, making a noise that sent chills down my spine. A mass of diseased goblins surged toward us.
“You pulled too many!” Evan shouted.
“Keep calm and cleanse dumb ass,” said Maddie, our rogue, through clenched teeth.
Daniel’s fire elementalist’s area-of-effect spell rained fireballs down on the group of goblins, while Maddie’s rogue sliced and diced each goblin individually.
After the first pull, we took a deep breath and regrouped. The rest of the trash mobs took the same level of intense focus before we even made it to the first boss, Gormesh the Goblin King. Gormesh had three phases that included a disease area of effect debuff that was impossible to cleanse. That meant that we had to damage per second down all his adds, and Gormesh, before the debuff killed us all. It would be a real test of our gear and strategy, not to mention my leadership ability.
I pulled the boss, hopeful that we could make it happen on one attempt. The debuff fried us before we even made it to the adds phase. We tried two more times before everyone felt irritated, and we agreed we needed to increase our gear level before trying again in a few days. That was an epic fail. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. Everyone pulled their laptops off the table and skulked away.
For the next three hours, I made a list of venture capitalists in the Seattle Metro area that funded technology startups. There were twenty names on my list, but the one I wanted to work with most was Joshua Steinman. He had funded the last five multimillion dollar tech startups in Seattle in the last two years. His funding and guidance were almost a ticket to success.
Once I had my list, I wrote introductory emails to each, asking for a meeting.
Chapter Four: Zoe
The landlord showed us around a freshly painted second floor apartment in an old building that overlooked a busy street in Capital Hill. It had plenty of room for our things. The best part was it would be all ours.
We filled out the paperwork on the laminate kitchen counter and handed the landlord a check for the deposit and first month’s rent. He handed us the keys and walked out of the building.
We got our stuff from the hotel and checked out. Then we made multiple trips from the storage unit with Stacy’s pickup so we didn’t have to rent yet another U-Haul.
With everything moved upstairs, we settled into our new place and ordered a pizza as our reward for a hard day’s work.
We didn’t have a couch or a table because we’d moved to Seattle thinking we’d be living in a shared house, so we threw a bunch of pillows on the living room floor and camped out in front of Stacy’s little TV, watching movies on Netflix. For the first time since leaving California, I felt like I had a home.
Monday morning, I woke in my new apartment feeling confident and finally ready to start my new life. I dressed in a pair of dark denim jeans, a violet colored blouse, and black flats. I took the long bus ride from my new apartment to my school and stepped off the bus and onto campus, feeling exhilarated that I’d taken the chance and made the move away from home. It was the first step on my journey toward my dreams, and I wouldn’t let anything get in my way.
The crush and hum of the other students surrounding me made me feel alive with possibility. At the same time, I felt awkward and alone. So many of the students already seemed to know each other. From the groups of foreign exchange students to the groups of locals. I felt a bit like the odd girl out.
My first class was English Composition, which was incredibly dull. I sat at the back of the room watching the other students take notes while the professor lectured about primary sources and whatnot. I had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t care. Most of the time I was too distracted by his ugly, nappy beard to hear his words.
Then I had an equally dull History of Western Civilization class. The book cost me seventy-five dollars and was basically full of a catalog of wars caused by a bunch of old, rich white guys. Wow. That was going to help me, the girl who had to nude model to pay the rent.
These were the classes I needed to take to get into the university, so I could study what I really wanted. It didn’t make a lot of sense that I had to learn all this boring nonsense.
Unfortunately, any and all dance classes I would take in community college would be nothing but phys-ed. electives. Apparently, this is what it looked like to follow your dreams. Feeling disappointed and broke, I made my way back to the bus stop.
Half way across the quad, I heard a familiar voice calling my name. I turned in the direction of the voice and saw Billy Black trotting toward me, his backpack bouncing on his back. I smiled, relieved to see someone I knew in the sea of strange faces.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I asked as he drew near.
“I tutor here as part of my Master’s program. Do you go here?”
“Yep, first day.”
“Awesome. Do you need a ride or anything?”
“Maybe. I just moved into a new apartment. It’s all the way across town. I should go to Central now, but I’d already registered here before I got the new place. The bus ride all the way to Capitol Hill takes like an hour,” I babbled, looking up into his shining hazel eyes that were partially concealed behind his shaggy, black hair.
My heart fluttered. I didn’t know why I found myself so attracted to him. He was tall with an adorably cute face, full lips and high cheekbones, but he was skinny and dressed like a geek in khaki pants and a black polo shirt. Maybe it was the after effects of dealing with a psycho jock like Chris, but everything about Billy made me want to get closer to him.
“Come with me,” he said in a friendly but commanding tone. It took me by surprise, but I followed as he marched toward the parking lot. We made it to his Vespa, and he handed
me the helmet to wear. He straddled the scooter, and I hopped on behind him, clinging to his tall frame.
He took off, and we rode through the neighborhood and onto the main road headed south toward Capitol Hill. I thought we’d keep going, but he swerved into a parking lot of a city park, overlooking Puget Sound. I wondered why he’d stopped here. He hadn’t said anything since telling me to follow him. We got off, and he grabbed my hand and led me toward an overflowing flower garden. My mind whirled with questions. The warmth of his hand wrapped around mine sent tingles up my arms and down my legs.
The smell of roses wafted through the air, intoxicating my senses. We wound through the garden, hand in hand, past corn stalks the rippled in the soft breeze, ripe, round tomatoes, bushy heads of light green lettuce, delicate multi-colored wildflowers, and a manicured rose garden, all in the full bloom of late summer. Billy led me to a bench tucked behind a towering grove of bamboo, looking out on the Sound.
We sat silently, holding hands, my head spinning. The magnetic connection I felt growing between us drew me toward him. It made it almost impossible to pull away. He wasn’t my type at all. I never went out with a science club geek before and they never even approached me. Most of the time I thought that type wasn’t even interested in girls. The strength of Billy’s grip on my hand told me he was interested in me, very interested.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, breaking the silence. “Thanks for bringing me here.” A seagull called as if flew overhead and a cool breeze blew in off the water. I shivered slightly as it hit the bare skin of my arms. Billy leaned closer, wrapping his arm around me to keep me warm.
I looked at him and fell into his bottomless hazel eyes. I felt transfixed and dazed by it all, desperate to gain some sense of power back. I leaned in and pressed my lips to his. Energy vibrated between us in waves that surged down my body through my nipples and between my legs.
He made a surprised groan and cupped my face in his hand, pulling me tighter into him. Our tongues flicked against each other, electricity building with each contact. Frantically, we clung to each other, our mouths and tongues tasting like starved animals.
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