by Neil Plakcy
“I’d say, Doesn’t everyone, but I know that isn’t true. I believe in the finer things in life, and a good sports car is one of them.”
I gaped as I slid into the passenger seat. The door closed softly behind me, almost as if it had a mind of its own. “This is the Turbo S,” Victor said. “Almost a shame to have a car that goes this fast in Miami, but every now and then I get to sneak out to the highway and have some fun.”
The seats were butter-soft leather. The steering wheel looked like burnished wood, and he turned on the audio from there, adjusting the sound levels as Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” spilled out.
His hand rested on the gearshift, his arm lightly brushing against my thigh as he shifted into reverse and backed out of the space. “Want to go for a little ride?” he asked. “Boris won’t mind.”
“Sure.” I settled back into the plush seat. Victor took us out to Alton Road and then cruised north. The car rode more smoothly than any I’d ever been in—which wasn’t saying much, because I didn’t think I’d ever been in a car that didn’t have at least fifty thousand miles on it.
Victor kept up a steady patter about the car and its features as he got onto the highway and accelerated, darting past other cars and trucks like they were standing still. It was such a huge rush—I could understand why any guy would want a car like that.
He slowed as we crossed the causeway. “This is my favorite view of Miami,” he said. “The way the water on Biscayne Bay shimmers in the sunlight, the way all the towers of downtown stand there like they’re from the Emerald City.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
He looked over at me and smiled. “So are you.”
I blushed again. He accelerated, then took I-95 south to the MacArthur Causeway, and we headed east again. “I hope this won’t sound too forward, but I’d like to take you to dinner. Nothing about work. I’d like to get to know you better.”
I swallowed hard. A date? What was happening to me? I’d never had so many sexy guys in my life. But if Julian and I weren’t going to do the nasty, then why not go out with Victor?
“Sure,” I said. “What works for you?”
“How about Friday night? I have client things every other night this week.”
I had to clear my throat before I said, “Friday works for me.”
“Excellent,” he said as we exited the causeway onto Fifth Street. He pulled into a parking space in front of the building where I worked. “I’m so pleased to have met you, Larry.” Then he leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips.
I wanted to pull his head closer and kiss him for the rest of the afternoon. But he backed away, a wolfish grin on his face. “Shall I pick you up Friday night? Eight o’clock?”
“Sure.” I gave him my address. “I’ll wait out front.”
I didn’t know what to do. He’d already kissed me. Was I supposed to shake his hand? Thank him for lunch?
“I’d better get to work,” I said. “I’ll really have to make this app special.” Then I pushed the door open and scrambled out to the pavement. “Thanks for lunch.” I tried to shut the door, but it moved slowly, of its own accord. As soon as I could, I turned and hurried into the building.
8 – Sweet Dreams
Mila raised her eyebrows when I walked in, and I realized I’d been away with Victor for over three hours. At least I hadn’t stained my pants after the workout my dick had gone through. I slid into my chair and went back to testing my Mexican-restaurant app. I wanted to get it done so I could move on to Victor’s project.
Like the rest of the guys I work with, I zone out when I get into a project. I get so caught up in what I’m doing that the rest of the world fades away. I wanted to forget about how sexy Victor was and how confusing I found his pursuit. But I couldn’t do it. My brain kept buzzing with images of Victor Kunin and Julian Argento. Why was it that the guy I wanted didn’t want me, and the guy who wanted me scared the shit out of me?
I spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening struggling to break the Mexican-restaurant app. We had a contract with a company that did load testing—upload your app to their server, and they’ll try to swamp it with input. I entered all kinds of weird data—fake e-mails from foreign countries, overlong data streams, and so on. Whenever a problem popped up, I figured it out and fixed it.
I was a very clean coder—no unusual characters, no extra spaces, no feedback loops that can crash the app. Even so, I finished with the last tests as the other programmers were getting ready to play online again. They assumed I’d be playing, and they weren’t happy when I said I had to go home. “Another booty call?” Noah asked.
“Something like that,” I said. I didn’t want to tell them I was working on another project, and not because I was afraid they’d assume something about my relationship with Julian. When I started at AppWorks, I thought it would be cool to use what I was learning to create my own apps. But then I read the contract Boris had us all sign, which said that he got a piece of any app we created while we worked there—even if we did all the work on our own time and our own equipment.
At least Julian’s project was a website, rather than an app, which meant I was in the clear, at least the way I read the contract.
I got home around nine, and Gavin was sitting at the kitchen table sexting someone. I happened to look over his shoulder as I passed and saw the picture he was sending. “TMI, Gavin,” I said.
“Don’t snoop, then.”
He sent his message. “So, what’s up?” he asked. “Besides you, I mean, now that you’ve seen that picture of me.”
“If I’m up, it’s not about you,” I said. “It’s about this client I had lunch with. Who then drove me back to work.” I paused for effect. “In his Porsche Panamera.”
“No way.”
“Way. It was awesome. Leather, walnut, all these buttons and dials.”
“Manual or automatic?”
“Stick shift,” I said. “And the whole time we were driving, he had his right arm resting on my thigh.”
Gavin put his phone down and looked at me. “Hold on. Rich and gay? A troll?”
“No. Very hot.” I looked away from him. “And apparently into me. We have a date Friday night.”
“Holy shit,” Gavin said. I was waiting for him to add, What’s he doing with you? but he didn’t. “This could be your ticket, bro. Make sure you display your best skills.”
“He’s not some bar pickup. We may not even get to bed. It’s only like a first date.”
“Yeah, well, don’t hold back,” Gavin said. “If you don’t put out, you’ll get kicked out. Trust me on that one.”
Because I had so few offers, I was usually glad to jump into bed with any guy who asked. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything with Victor Kunin. Sure, he was sexy, but he was scary sexy, whereas Julian was sweet sexy. Did I want to hold out for the possibility I’d get to hook up with Julian? Or just take whatever was offered? It wasn’t like Julian and I were dating or anything. I was just building his website. Right?
I was glad to open up my laptop and get to work. It seemed like the only sane thing I could do was lose myself in computer code. Rajesh and Rajneesh both had e-mailed me questions, which took me a while to figure out, and then I went back to my own routines. The hours went by that night as fast as a storm rushing at me from the Everglades, with a similar sense of panic, exhilaration, and confusion. I uploaded the code for a new interface to Julian’s website, along with the routines I was testing.
I had to force myself to go to bed and get enough sleep to be able to work the next day. Wednesday morning I started work on Victor’s app. I plugged in the information Kaitlyn had collected for me—Victor’s website address, and the login information for the database of models. After lunch, I took a break and checked my e-mail. There was a message from Julian. He had seen the work I had uploaded and was impressed.
You’re the man, he wrote. Can’t wait until this is all finished and we can celebrate.
/> What did he mean by that, I wondered? Celebrate getting the work done? Or something more? I closed my eyes and pulled up Julian’s image before me. But his face kept morphing into Victor’s, and I couldn’t keep them separate.
This was stupid, I thought. I opened my eyes. I was mooning after a guy I hardly knew, one I couldn’t even bring up clearly in my mind. I needed to get a grip.
I left the office around seven and hurried back home. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by Julian’s website, and I knew work was the only cure.
It was close to midnight when Julian called. I grabbed for the phone before the ringing woke one of my roommates. “I had to make a quick trip home,” Julian said. “Just to meet with a couple of my investors.”
“Everything all right?”
“Sure, sure. It’s just, you know how it is. People get nervous when they lend you money. They want to know how soon I’m going to launch, and when they can start earning their money back.”
“I’m working as fast as I can,” I said.
“You’re awesome, Larry. I showed off everything you’ve done, and my dad and the others were very impressed. Things don’t often move so quickly down here. It’s that mañana mentality. Come to think of it, it’s a lot like Miami. Maybe it’s that it’s hot and everybody speaks Spanish.”
I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that Julian’s father was a big mogul, that his family was rich. “So does your family, like, live in a mansion?” I asked.
He laughed. “Nope. A big house, but that’s because I have three sisters and two brothers, and my grandparents live with us.”
And they probably each had their own bedroom and their own bathroom. That was luxury to me. “I have two brothers and two sisters,” I said. “I come right in the middle. How about you?”
“I’m the oldest,” Julian said. “My dad kept my mom busy when they were young. There’s only about a year between each of us, except for my baby brother, the accident. He’s still in high school.”
It was easy to talk to Julian. We compared notes on coming from a big family, and honestly, it sounded like we’d had many of the same experiences. Except for the fact that he’d gone to prep school when he was twelve, leaving his family, his country, and his native language behind.
I leaned back and stretched my legs. “What was that like? You went to school in New Hampshire, right? Isn’t that really cold?”
“My first year was miserable,” Julian said. “I had a heavy accent and I missed my family and I hated the cold and the bland food. But then my brother joined me the next year, and we were a team. My abuela sent us care packages with bottles of hot sauce, and Ricardo and I did these accent-reduction exercises together, and we bitched and moaned to each other. Even now, he’s my best friend. He married a Spanish woman last year and moved to Madrid to work for a big bank, but we still talk and text almost every day.”
I couldn’t imagine having such a close relationship with either of my brothers. Sure, I loved them, but in an abstract way, because I knew I was supposed to.
“How about you?” Julian asked. “You get along with your siblings?”
“Sort of,” I said. I told him about going home on Sunday, how I felt like I didn’t belong with my own family. “We don’t have anything in common. I don’t know anything about mechanics or electric power or hair and makeup. They say I got snobby once I went to college, but really, I’ve been the same way all along. They just never noticed.”
“That’s a shame,” Julian said. “My sisters went to a different boarding school, in Virginia, so Ricardo and I didn’t see them much for a few years, but by the time we were all in college, we were always in touch. They both live here in Mexico City, and I had dinner with them last night.”
I yawned, and Julian said, “I must be keeping you up. I’ll say good night and dulces sueños.”
I wished him sweet dreams too, but didn’t say that my sweetest ones lately had been of him.
9 – Charitable Giving
I stayed up a couple more hours and got a lot accomplished, and then slept in Thursday morning until it was time to head to work. By noon I was familiar with Victor’s database program and had sketched out a plan for how it would work with my app. I got caught up in a detour thinking about the push notifications for new models that I had suggested. The process was more complicated than I’d originally thought, because there was nothing in Victor’s database that alerted when a new model was entered.
When would Victor want the notifications to go out? When he added a model to his roster? Or when the model completed his or her entry? I decided to add a routine to the Submit button on the model’s profile screen that would alert the notification routine. I made a note to ask Victor if that was okay. What if the model didn’t complete the profile? How often did he sign up new models, and how often would he want the notifications to go out? If he signed up a couple every day, his clients could easily get swamped with notifications.
That afternoon I met with Boris to go over my progress. His office was a cramped room stuffed with old monitors, printers, and assorted cables, manuals in English and Russian, and half-eaten bags of trail mix. He constantly popped raisins, nuts, and sunflower seeds as he talked. “How you doing with model agency?”
I told him what I’d done, and how I had a bunch of questions about how the notifications I had suggested to Victor were going to work.
“You cannot keep adding work to project,” he said over a mouthful of fruit. “Client pays us fixed fee. I lose money when you work too much.”
“I’m pretty sure Kaitlyn put the push notifications into her quote,” I said. “Right now I’m fine-tuning the process.”
Boris grabbed a piece of blank paper and began sketching a rough schedule. “Here is how you must finish. Two more days for coding, then one day to add and test graphics. Then one more day for bug and stress testing.”
I gulped. It was an aggressive schedule, but I was determined to show Boris that I could meet it, even though I was still hip deep in Julian’s website. Well, I’d have to push Julian aside for a while. I needed to keep this job.
I jumped back into work, falling completely into the zone, until Dylan bumped me close to eight o’clock. “Going to play?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Gotta work. But I’ll have pizza if you’re getting.”
Their game broke up at ten, and I was still jamming on my code. Since I didn’t have a key to the front door, I had to leave when Dominic did. “What crawled up your butt?” he asked as we walked out. “You’ve been working like a maniac all day.”
“Boris gave me a schedule. Two days to finish coding.”
“Simple app?”
I explained to him what I was doing.
“That’s bogus,” he said. “You should have at least a week for that. You’ve got to stand up to Boris, or he’ll crack the whip on you.”
“S’okay,” I said. “Not like I have much of a life anyway.”
“Not what Dylan says,” he said. “He says you’re getting laid right and left.”
“Nah. He and I only did it once.”
Dominic’s eyes opened wide, and I elbowed him. “Kidding.”
“You gay guys get all the sex,” he grumbled. “I could get laid every day from Tuesday if I liked to suck dick.”
Not without a bath, a shave, and a haircut, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “It’s not that easy. I hardly ever get laid. There are tons of guys handsomer than I am on South Beach, and better at small talk. So don’t envy me too much.”
It was drizzling when we walked outside, and I scampered for the bus shelter. I realized as I waited that Dom knew I was gay, and it hadn’t bothered him—or me. I suppose that was progress.
By the time the bus came, the rain had stopped—only to start up again as I got off a block from the apartment. As I hurried home, my cell phone rang.
“Julian? Can I call you back when I get out of the rain?”
“Sure,” he s
aid.
I rushed into the lobby of our building and shook myself like a dog, raindrops splattering around me. I pressed the Redial button for Julian’s number.
“Sorry, didn’t realize you were out in this downpour,” he said. “I got back to Miami an hour ago, and I wanted to check in with you.”
“Just getting home from my day job. I’m going back to your stuff as soon as I get upstairs.”
“I’d love to sit down with you and go over everything,” he said. “Could I come over tomorrow night? Maybe take you to dinner?”
“I actually have a date tomorrow night,” I said. “But how about Saturday?”
Was it my imagination, or did he hesitate when I said I had a date? “Saturday’s great. I’ll text you to set a time.”
I said that worked, and hung up, then rode up in the elevator. I’d felt a sexual vibe with Julian, but he hadn’t responded when I made my faux pas about blowjobs, and I figured he wanted to keep things professional. So why shouldn’t I have a date? Or was he angry that I wasn’t sacrificing my entire life to finish his lousy website?
I was beat from working all day, and mildly irritated at Julian, so I only worked for a couple of hours on Julian’s project and then went to bed. Friday morning the skies were still gray, and the humidity was near 100 percent. It could have poured all day and I wouldn’t have known, because I was glued to my computer, finishing all the basic routines on Victor’s app. Then I had to make sure my code matched up with the cool buttons Lilah had designed, mapping them to the right actions and testing that they worked.
I was pleased with the way it was coming out, and even happier that I was learning lots of cool tricks I could use in the future. Lilah had a degree in computer animation, and she knew all kinds of different ways to make the text and the graphics interact.
By six o’clock I had tested the model-agency app thoroughly, trying to do every stupid thing I thought a customer might—dropping my session, viewing a dozen models in a row, clicking randomly around the screen. I kept my eye on the clock, though, so I could be sure to get home, showered, and changed before Victor arrived to pick me up.