Q*pid

by Xavier Mayne

  Fox shrugged. “Yeah. He’s finishing some big seminar paper, so I thought it might be fun. He likes to kayak and bike and stuff. Unlike some fat married people I could name. It’s like a guys’ weekend.”

  Chad, on his end, was silent. Fox endured about ten seconds of his wordless blinking.

  “What is it?” he finally asked.

  “You haven’t….” Chad pursed his lips and kept the remainder of that thought to himself.

  “I haven’t what?” Fox was reaching the limit of his patience.

  “You haven’t done the Weekend since Miyoko.”

  Fox recoiled at the name. They had agreed not to say it after the way she’d left him.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Chad said. “But you need to think about what you’re doing here.”

  “What I’m doing here is spending a weekend with a friend,” Fox growled.

  “You remember what you said about how a friend sometimes needs to be an asshole? Today I get to be your asshole.” He paused for a second. “That came out wrong. But hear me out—”

  “Why should I hear you out? You’re going to tell me a weekend on the coast kayaking with a friend is actually some kind of romantic thing, and I shouldn’t do it. I’m tired of that shit.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. I have no problem at all with you having a weekend away with Drew. I’m saying you should think a little more about why you’re doing it.”

  “I’m doing it so I can get away from annoying things like work and the person who used to be my best friend.” Fox glared into his screen.

  Chad sighed. “Okay, whatever. I’ll stop being your asshole now. Just know that even if things don’t work out, I’m here for you. Like I was the last time you did this.”

  “Don’t you fucking start about Miyoko. I know I rushed things with her. I revised the plan to be sure that never happened again. Now it’s not even on the table until week four.”

  “Which is why you’ve never done the Weekend again. You’ve stuck to your plan. Until now.”

  “What’s happening now, since you seem to have forgotten, is that I’m taking a weekend trip with a friend. This is not on the dating plan because this is not a fucking date.” He was shouting now.

  Chad pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay. Got it. Understood. Drive carefully tomorrow, and I’ll look forward to hearing about all of the amazing kayaking when you get back. Have a great time.” His tone was one of kind insincerity.

  “Thanks, asshole.” Fox said as he reached for the Disconnect Call button.

  “That’s my job,” Chad said resignedly in the second before his image disappeared.

  “YOU WILL the whole weekend be gone?” Mrs. Schwartzmann asked for the third time.

  “Yes, the whole weekend,” Drew answered for the third time.

  “But your studies,” she said gravely, in the manner of a grandmother preparing to disapprove of some newfangled hobby upon which the young are throwing their lives away.

  “My studies are fine,” Drew assured her. “I had a seminar paper due today, and I just turned it in. So I’m free for the weekend, and Fox is coming to pick me up in a few minutes.”

  “Oh,” she said warmly, in the manner of a grandmother preparing to meet the handsome surgeon with whom her grandchild has fallen in love.

  “It’s not like that,” Drew protested.

  “What it is like I did not say,” she said with a gleam in her eye.

  “I brought you these,” he said, handing her the packet of sausages he’d picked up on his way home.

  She seemed surprised by his gesture, but her serene façade of duplicity was quickly restored. “A full refrigerator is not what someone who spends his weekends in the country wants.”

  “You are right, except that we are going to the coast, not the country.”

  “I see,” she said. Her expression conveyed clearly that she was, at that moment, seeing in her mind’s eye the handsome Fox cavorting on the beach. Perhaps she was picturing them together.

  “Well, I’ve got to go,” Drew said brightly. He had to bring this festival of insinuation to an end.

  “A wonderful time you two will have,” she said just as brightly.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Schwartzmann. I’ll stop by when I’m back to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about an old woman,” she scolded him genially. “If I survived the Castro regime, through a weekend I can get.”

  He laughed and shook his head as she closed the door behind him. But as he walked toward the stairs, he heard the door fly open.

  “Drew, dear?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Schwartzmann?”

  “Make sure you have the condoms.” She smiled sweetly at him.

  He closed his eyes, trying to picture something serene, like a cool green meadow or a heavy-ordnance artillery range. “Thank you. I’m sure I’ll have what I need.”

  “That’s a good boy.” She beamed at him and then shut her door. He could hear her many locks sliding into place as he walked downstairs to his apartment.

  As he unlocked his front door, he caught sight of Fox’s sleek car pulling into the driveway on its way to the parking lot behind the building. It gave him a little thrill, which he figured was really relief that he had his paper finished.

  Yes, that was the reason for his heart racing. Had to be.

  Chapter TWELVE

  FOX WAS getting out of his car just as Drew came around the corner of the building. “I’m ready, I’m ready,” Drew called. He had hurried out of his apartment with a duffel slung over his shoulder.

  The trunk of the car popped open, and Fox came around the back to help him get his duffel stowed. “Get the paper turned in?” Fox asked as he closed the trunk.

  “Sure did,” Drew replied. “I was probably the first one. Everyone else was planning on spending their weekend writing.”

  Fox stuck out his tongue. “Sounds glamorous. Are you going to be sad you’re not spending your weekend writing your masterpiece?”

  Drew laughed. “I think I’ll take being whisked away to a resort on the coast over rewriting my literature review section for the ninety-seventh time, thanks very much.”

  They settled into the car, and Fox pulled smoothly into the Friday afternoon traffic.

  “Seriously, though, thank you,” Drew said as they headed toward the freeway out of town.

  “For what?”

  “For forcing me to get that fucking paper done,” Drew replied with a laugh.

  “It’s not like I aimed a gun at you or anything.”

  “No, but you offered me something incredible as incentive. There was no way I was going to let procrastination keep me from having what promises to be the best weekend of my life.”

  Fox glanced over from the driver’s seat, an incredulous crook in his eyebrow. “Best weekend of your life?”

  “Well, I’ve never spent a weekend at a fancy resort. I’m sure it’ll be really nice.”

  “It’s a beautiful property,” Fox said with a smile, seeming to take no notice of Drew’s fluster. “It was built in the twenties as a coastal retreat for a robber baron—oil or something. The stock market crash wiped him out, and the place sat and moldered for a few decades. It became a retreat for some kind of hippie meditation thing in the sixties and seventies, until everyone gave up on that, and then a private equity group took it over and restored it.”

  “So the modern robber barons brought back the splendor of the original,” Drew said with a wry chuckle. “Very fitting.”

  “Well, they also built several hundred additional guest rooms with almost the same splendor as the original,” Fox added, his laughter as wry as Drew’s. “But, you know, on a mass scale.”

  “At least they have your company’s systems to make every guest feel like a robber baron too. Except, you know, on a mass scale.”

  “Just you wait. You’re going to love what my company’s systems do.”

  Drew smiled. “I think I’m going to l
ove whatever happens this weekend. This is already the most glamorous thing I’ve ever done.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Fox said after a thoughtful pause, “but it sounds—from some of the things you’ve said—like you grew up without a lot of money.”

  “It was mostly no money at all, actually,” Drew replied. “We always had enough to eat, but we were the kind of family where if the timing belt broke on the car, we were going to be walking to the grocery store for a while. I’m the first person in my family to finish college.”

  Fox frowned, clearly impressed. “And you’re going all the way through to a PhD. Wow.”

  “I want to figure out how income inequality affects the value of citizenship. I think it’s going to be important for us to understand the effect of increasing economic inequality over the long term.”

  “Okay, so maybe a weekend in the robber baron’s retreat was not the best choice.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Drew cried. “I’m considering it a serendipitous research opportunity. If I have to drink champagne while looking out over the ocean three times a day, I’ll do it. That’s how committed I am to my studies.”

  “You are a gentleman and a scholar,” Fox replied with a chivalrous bow of his head.

  “How about you?” Drew asked.

  “I am neither a gentleman nor a scholar,” Fox said with a laugh.

  “You are the epitome of a gentleman, and you strike me as pretty damn sharp. Plus you’re improbably handsome, so you have that going for you.”

  Fox shot him a scowly glance.

  “But what I meant,” Drew continued, “was what was your childhood like?”

  Fox’s smile took a grim turn. “It was… fine.”

  Drew could see how much effort it took him to finish that sentence. “Okay….”

  Fox shrugged, then the words started to come. “Pretty standard for where I grew up. Distant father who worked too much and withheld his approval, unfulfilled mother who wanted me to succeed but not be anything like my dad. I spent a shit-ton of their money getting an undergrad and MBA at their precious alma mater, and now we see each other maybe once a year, depending on whether my sister is going to be there for a particular holiday. We have to tag-team my parents, or they’ll turn on each other and then on us.”

  Drew’s mouth dropped open. He would never have imagined Fox had come from such dysfunction. His own parents had had some rough times, but he had never doubted their love for each other, and for him. “I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

  Fox shook off the empathy. “What it’s like is that I had a lot of advantages growing up, even though they were mostly economic and not at all emotional.” He shrugged again. “No big deal.”

  “That explains the spreadsheets,” Drew said quietly.

  “You think so, do you?” Fox asked. There was mostly good-natured challenge in his voice, but it was challenge nonetheless. “What’s wrong with spreadsheets?”

  Drew held up his hands to show he meant no offense. “Not a thing. I love the spreadsheets, actually, because they landed me here.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “When the computer matched us up, I had a bit of an emotional crisis. I thought it was telling me I was gay, which I would probably be fine with, given some time to adjust. It was kind of a shock, though, especially when I’ve always thought I had a pretty good grasp on my emotions. But I thought about it, and talked to a friend about it, and I started to think that maybe moving a little out of my comfort zone would be a good thing. You don’t know what life has to offer if you don’t put yourself out there, right?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Fox replied. He was clearly waiting for Drew to come back around to spreadsheets.

  “You, though. Well, I can imagine you staring at my stupid face in your match queue, wondering what the hell happened. But you probably took a look at the compatibility scatter plots and dug into the discovery metrics, and you decided that numbers hadn’t lied to you before, and maybe they weren’t now. So when I sent you a message, the numbers helped tip the balance in my favor. You accepted the match because you couldn’t argue with the quantitative realities. And here we are.”

  Fox seemed slightly unnerved by Drew’s description, but he said nothing.

  “So I’m really glad you’re all about the numbers. Because without them, we wouldn’t be here.”

  Fox pondered this for a moment, then the smile returned to his face. “It’s a little creepy how accurately you described my thought process, but—” He turned to meet Drew’s eye. “—I’m glad we got here too.”

  For the rest of the drive toward the coast, they spoke of far less heavy topics and enjoyed the views as the land dropped steadily toward the ocean.

  “Wow, it really is beautiful here,” Drew said as their first full vista of the ocean filled the windshield. “I had no idea this even existed a couple of hours from the city. When you don’t have a car, something two hours away might as well be in another country.”

  “Wait until you see the view from the resort,” Fox replied. “There’s a seawall protecting part of the frontage, and it makes an amazing place to kayak. You can get out past the waves to explore these rock formations—tons of caves and sea stars and birds.”

  “Do you come here a lot?” Drew asked.

  “I used to, but I haven’t been in… well, over a year, anyway.”

  “How come?”

  Fox sighed. “The last time I was here, I brought someone with me who, it turns out, wasn’t a great fit. This was where it all kind of fell apart.” Fox’s expression was one of fresh pain, as if this falling-out had happened yesterday, not more than a year ago.

  Drew socked him on the shoulder. “Well it’s a good thing you brought me, then. I’m algorithmically guaranteed to be a good fit.”

  Fox laughed. “She and I fit together pretty damn well. And a lot. We were fitting several times a day, actually, until things blew up.”

  “I think we’re working with different definitions of ‘fit,’” Drew said slowly.

  “I think you’re probably right,” Fox said with a nearly maniacal chuckle. “Anyway, I’m glad to have you along when I make my triumphant return.”

  “Happy to serve,” Drew assured him grandly.

  They twisted through a series of hairpin curves until the last one revealed the gates of the resort, huge piles of stacked stone and wrought iron.

  “Holy old money, Batman,” Drew said under his breath.

  “You’d never guess all of it is made from molded foam and painted aluminum, would you?”

  “No way.”

  “Yep. The developer told me the original gate was on some old logging road, and when they tried to move it here, it all crumbled. They think some master stonemason had fit it all together so perfectly that it shattered when they disturbed it. They couldn’t find anyone who knew how to work with stone to that level of precision, so they turned the pieces into decorative planters and patios and had this thing molded out of polystyrene and cheap tubing salvaged from a refrigerator factory.”

  “Brilliant,” Drew replied, leaning against the car window for a closer look. “Fraudulent, of course, but brilliant too. Isn’t it kind of chancy to fake the first impression? This is the first part of the property guests see. Aren’t they risking making the whole place seem fake?”

  “Well, first, the whole place is fake. The original building was so far from meeting current building codes that it’s now used for storage. And second, everyone who drives through those gates is so excited to see the actual buildings that this is only an appetizer they drive right past without looking too closely. If they spent a ton of money making it authentic and perfect, it wouldn’t change anyone’s experience—no one’s going to pull over and look at it, much less run their hands along its Styrofoam surface. There’s no compelling benefit to justify the cost.”

  “You are ruthlessly rational,” Drew said, with more than a little admiration. “I d
on’t know whether to envy or pity people who can put a dollar figure to human experience.”

  “You know me and spreadsheets,” Fox said.

  Having passed through the gate, they rounded the next curve and saw the resort buildings arrayed grandly on the bluff overlooking the sea. Drew had to admit that the fakery had been accomplished masterfully; it gave the impression of Gilded Age grandeur on a scale that was truly staggering. The impression continued as they pulled up into the porte cochere, surrendered the car to the valet, and proceeded through to the reception desk.

  “Fox!” cried the clerk behind the counter. He ran around the imposing oak behemoth and then pulled Fox into an enthusiastic hug. “It’s been too long.”

  “It’s good to see you, Corey,” Fox said over the shoulder of the clerk’s formal blazer as it crushed into his cheek.

  Corey finally released his grip. “You’re not going to believe how excited everyone was to see your reservation show up.”

  “It’s great to be back.” Fox stepped back and held out his hand to Drew. “And this is my guest for the weekend, Drew.”

  Corey glanced in a flash from Fox to Drew and back again, and nearly recovered his composure before turning his brilliant smile on Drew. “Pleased to meet you,” he said warmly and shook Drew’s hand. Then he turned back to Fox. “Let’s get you checked in, okay?” He walked back around behind the desk and began typing rapidly. “So, you reserved a double king room.”

  “That sounds right,” Fox replied with a smile.

  “Okay, so, because we were all excited to see you again, we kind of bumped you up to a suite.”

  “Wow, thanks.”

  “One little wrinkle,” Corey said gently. “We put you in the Founder’s Cottage.”

  “The one with the terrace overlooking the ocean?” Fox asked.

  “Yes. However….” Corey leaned closer to Fox and whispered, though Drew could still hear him in the moneyed hush of the resort lobby. “It’s a one-bed suite.” He glanced in Drew’s direction, asking the obvious question: had they planned on sleeping together?

  “Ah,” Fox said. He turned and gave a thoughtful glance at Drew before nodding and turning back to Corey. “The Founder’s Cottage would be amazing. Thank you for doing that for us.”