Love on the Web

by Neil Plakcy

  “Do you take after him?”

  “I’m a hustler, like he is. I’m willing to work my ass off to get what I want. I’m not sure I have his insight—you get that growing up the hard way, and I had it pretty easy.”

  “I’m glad you are the way you are.”

  He picked up my hand and kissed the back of it, gently, looking deep into my eyes. I felt myself swooning, and I leaned over and kissed his cheek a couple of times, just little soft kisses. But Julian wanted more. He put his arm around my neck and pulled me close, and we locked lips.

  Once we got started, we couldn’t stop. Julian climbed on top of me, facing me with his legs across mine, and leaned in close.

  Usually when I kissed a guy, I worried the whole time. Was I doing it right? Was I slobbering or smacking my lips? Where should I put my nose? I never knew what to do with my hands, so they hung at my sides like limp noodles. But with Julian, none of that mattered. I was in the moment, living it and loving it.

  He caught my lower lip between his upper and lower ones, and as I leaned toward him, I automatically wrapped my arms around his shoulders. He put one hand on my cheek and used his thumb to sweep across it. Then he reached around and tangled his hands in my hair, gently pulling a few strands.

  He ran his tongue lightly over my lower lip, and then we kissed deeply and inhaled each other’s breath. I felt connected to him in so many ways.

  Julian was a very inventive kisser. We alternated between soft and hard kisses, with and without tongue, him still on my lap, with our arms around each other. He nibbled on my lips, pulled back to stare in my eyes. I took a breath and said, “We should get back to work, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, and then he kissed me again. Then, reluctantly, he scooted back and stood up. My thighs had started to fall asleep, even though my dick was as hard as a rock. He put his hand on my crotch. “We’ll take care of that later.”

  I was embarrassed, but also turned on. It took me a while to get my head back into programming. We worked together until late evening, when both our stomachs were grumbling, and it was time to take a break. “You want to get a burger?” I asked.

  “I could do that.” We walked over to a burger bar in the neighborhood, placed our order, and then looked for someplace to sit while we waited.

  “Oh, look, it’s Eddie, the guy who did the interface design.” He pointed to a thirty-something hipster guy with a neatly trimmed goatee. He wore eyeglasses with clear round frames that made him look like an owl. “Come on, let’s sit with him.”

  He led me over and introduced me. “We’re not bothering you, are we?” Julian asked.

  “Not at all. Just studying some accounting.”

  “Eddie’s got an undergrad degree in computer science, and he’s in an online program, a joint MBA and MS in interface design.” He turned to Eddie. “Larry graduated from FU in May. He’s doing the coding for E-Books Everywhere.”

  “Cool,” Eddie said. “How’s everything working out?”

  We talked until the counter guy called our number, and I got up to get the food. When I returned, Julian and Eddie were deep into business-school talk, about revenue streams and content optimization and customer retention.

  I was way out of my depth, so I sat there and ate while they talked. It was cool to see Julian so engaged, and I got some real insight into the way his brain worked. When we got back to Julian’s apartment, I was feeling dozy, after the day’s work and the rich food, but Julian went back to work, and I followed his lead. I’d never been on such a romantic high before, having a guy appear to feel the same way I did about him, and the chance to spend so much time together, linked not just by sex but by our common project.

  At eleven o’clock, Julian’s watch chimed. “You have someplace to go?” I asked him as he stood.

  “I set it to remind myself that I shouldn’t work you to death. I have other plans for you.” He extended his hand to me, and I stood and took it. His grip was strong and warm as he led me to the bedroom. He turned on a single standing lamp by the window, and its low wattage gave the room a gentle glow.

  The room was painted a pale beige, with a high crown molding below the ceiling. Julian’s king-size bed was neatly topped with a comforter and lots of pillows. “You make your bed every day?” I asked.

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Most of the time I figure I’m going to mess it up anyway.”

  “I believe in creating a mood.” Julian pulled his phone out and hit a couple of keys, then stuck it into a clock at the side of the bed. Immediately the room was filled with a mellow guitar solo. Then he looked up into my eyes and began unbuttoning his shirt, swaying to the music.

  I remembered the striptease I’d done for Gavin, and I followed Julian’s lead, pulling my T-shirt slowly up over my chest. It felt silly, but Julian smiled. He let his shirt hang from his shoulders and put his hands around my waist. “So smooth,” he said.

  I took his right nipple in my hand and pinched, and Julian’s mouth dropped open and his body stiffened. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  We took our time getting naked, then exploring and enjoying each other’s bodies. I was down to a pair of paisley-patterned Andrew Christian briefs when Julian sank to the floor and began licking my stiff dick through the fabric. He snaked his fingers beneath the butt band and gripped my ass. I groaned with pleasure.

  One of his fingers found my hole and began a slow penetration, and my dick felt so hard I was afraid I would burst. I took hold of Julian’s shoulder and tried to lift him. “What?” he asked, backing off my dick for a moment. “Aren’t you having fun?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want the fun to end so soon,” I said.

  “Oh, well, then.” He stood up. He was still wearing his boxer briefs, and there was a big wet spot on the placket. We both shucked our undies and then climbed into his bed.

  When our mouths were together, his dick was against my belly, my dick along his thigh. We rubbed together for a while, his hairy body against my slippery skin. He nipped at my jaw, and I ran my fingers through his hair. Suddenly he gasped, and I felt him ejaculate against me. His body went limp, and I leaned down and kissed him deeply.

  “I want to...” he began.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I whispered. “It’s all good.”

  He wriggled out of my grasp and hunkered down, his mouth over my dick. It only took a couple of slurps before I was shooting off. “I finish everything I start,” Julian said, looking up at me and smiling.

  “We’re not finished yet, buddy.” I pulled him up to me, and we kissed again. We fell asleep, and I woke as Julian nestled into me in the Sunday-morning light that streamed into his bedroom.

  He baked a package of refrigerator cinnamon rolls for us to share, along with big gulps of orange juice. Then we went back to work. I had already fixed all the bugs Julian’s testers had found, and I was obsessively playing with my code, adjusting indents on tables and changing a word or two here and there.

  By midday, E-Books Everywhere was humming. We were able to upload sample documents, log in from different e-mail addresses and download those files, send messages, and all the other things we needed for starters.

  Then I switched focus to epub generation from Word documents. It was a tricky area, because epub was the most common format for vendors outside Amazon, and yet there were certain tags that Word inserted into its files, and certain attributes, that caused hang-ups with the epub format. I had to write a separate routine to search for and strip out each tag and each attribute.

  Julian switched from bug testing to his financial projections and spent most of the day grumbling about Excel and how irritating it was to create and move formulas around. But I could see he enjoyed what he was doing as much as I did.

  Midafternoon I took a break and asked Julian what he was working on.

  “I have to get the customer-service piece figured out,” he said. “Right now I’m going to be the sole employee, so I have to b
e able to handle any problems customers come up with. I had my lawyer research copyright laws in other countries, and I’m putting together an FAQ about protecting authors’ rights. Then I have to work on a mechanism to handle customer complaints about the translations, or anything else.”

  “This is a pretty complicated operation,” I said.

  “It is. I wish I’d had this idea when I was in business school so I could have worked on it without pressure for a while. But that’s life.”

  Later, his phone rang with the theme from the movie Jaws. “It’s my attorney,” he said. “I’d better take this.”

  “You have an attorney who works on Sunday?”

  “Welcome to the high-pressure world of digital start-ups,” he said drily. “I’ll take this in the bedroom so I don’t bother you.”

  I finished dealing with the last problematic tag and shifted to connecting E-Books Everywhere to the places where books were sold. That was the key way Julian could make money, so he wanted the process to be so easy anyone could manage it. With a click of a button, the author could send files direct to Amazon, for example.

  Amazon offered developers a set of code I could incorporate for payment tracking, and I began to work on it while Julian was on the phone. Occasionally I heard him raise his voice, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. When he came out of his bedroom, he was agitated and red-faced.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I have to leave for San Francisco first thing tomorrow morning. I sent my attorney a copy of the code you wrote, and he freaked about how fast we were moving, after the other guy sat on my job for weeks. He’s worried we might be infringing on other patents.”

  “I wrote all the code myself,” I said. “Except for the routines I outsourced, the early stuff your other guy did, and the stuff you wrote for the home page.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We have to be sure no one can accuse us of using patented software. He has an expert reviewing what I sent him, and he wants to meet tomorrow night to go over the results.”

  I was impressed with the speed at which Julian and his team were moving. “Can you get a flight on such short notice?”

  “Already booked.”

  “I’ve never been on a plane,” I said. “The farthest from home I’ve ever been is Gainesville, when a bunch of my frat brothers and I made a road trip there.”

  “Really?” Julian smiled, and my heart gave a little flip-flop. “We’ll have to change that very soon.”

  He needed to spend more time on his financials and get ready to leave the next morning. “We’re almost there,” Julian said when I had my laptop packed up, and I was about to head back to my apartment. “And it’s all thanks to you.”

  “Nope,” I said, leaning down to kiss him. “It’s thanks to both of us. You have the vision; I have the execution. We make a great team.”

  He kissed me back. “We sure do.”

  27 – Bad Karma

  By the time I got back to the apartment Sunday night, my head was spinning from how fast everything was moving around me. Julian and I were almost finished with his website, and I’d worked on at least three different projects at AppWorks in the past weeks. But there was still more work to do.

  I set up my laptop on the table and went back to the payment code, and by the time I crashed around two, I had it all working smoothly. I texted with Julian a few times, both of us ending our messages with lots of xxx and ooo.

  Monday morning was hot and sunny, and the air-conditioning on the bus was broken. People were fanning themselves with newspapers and complaining to the driver. I lucked into a seat by a window and stuck my head out like a dog to catch a slight breeze.

  I was the first programmer in, but as I was waiting for my computer to warm up, Dom came in, all smiles. “I had lunch with Apsara on Saturday,” he said. “Which kind of moved into dinner. And then breakfast on Sunday.”

  “Lots of eating,” I said. “So much for your diet, huh?”

  “You’re a joker,” Dom said. “I was speaking in metaphors. She came over to my apartment after lunch, and after that we stayed in bed and ordered in. How was your weekend?”

  “Pretty much like yours, only with coding and penises,” I said.

  The next ones in were Kevin and Lilah, holding hands. I figured that meant they’d had a good weekend too. Dylan followed soon after, bubbling over his newfound ability to pick up girls while barhopping. “I had no idea it would be this easy,” he said.

  We were all a happy crowd, though when I looked around, I realized Noah hadn’t come in yet. I asked, and nobody had heard from him, so I scooted over to look at his cube. It was still a pigsty—but all his personal stuff was gone. “Uh-oh, looks like Noah’s done a runner,” I said.

  Dom joined me at Noah’s cube. “It was probably the birthday thing,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember.

  “Really? You think he was that mad?”

  Dom shrugged.

  “I’ll bet that’s why he wouldn’t come out to drink with us on Friday,” I said, making the connection. “He wanted to stay here and pack up.”

  “I’ve got to tell Boris,” Dom said. “I hope Noah left his key somewhere. Boris is going to be royally pissed if he has to change all the locks.”

  Kaitlyn came over to my cube while I was waiting for Dom to return. “Have you gotten any more feedback from the modeling-agency guy?” she asked.

  “What kind of feedback?”

  “Well, he hasn’t paid his final invoice yet. I was worried that he had some outstanding issues.”

  Victor Kunin had issues, all right.

  “Can you call him and make sure everything is okay?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I’d rather not. I saw him at a party on Friday night, and he was kind of creepy. Can’t you?”

  “I suppose. But if it’s anything technical, I’ll have to get you on the call.”

  “As long as you stay on with us.”

  She looked at me curiously but agreed and left. A few minutes later she was back. “I have Mr. Kunin on a call in Boris’s office. Can you join us, please?”

  She looked stressed. Shit. What was Victor up to? Why was he jerking us all around?

  I passed Dom in the hallway as Kaitlyn and I walked to Boris’s office. “Here’s our programmer now,” Boris said into the speakerphone. “Why don’t you explain to him what your problems are?”

  “It’s not what I expected,” Victor said. “It doesn’t seem very professional. Doesn’t reflect my agency in the way I want.”

  Boris raised an eyebrow at me.

  “I’m sorry that we haven’t met your expectations,” I said toward the phone. “Is there anything specific I can do to make you happy?”

  “I’ll think about it,” Victor said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another call.”

  He hung up, and Boris stared at the phone, which buzzed with a dial tone. “Is bullshit!” he said. “I look at this app. Is as good as anything we do.”

  Kaitlyn and I stood awkwardly across from his desk. “Kaitlyn, I will handle.” He nodded toward the door. “Larry, you sit, please.”

  I sat, and Kaitlyn closed the door behind her. “Is always problem, mixing sex with business,” Boris said.

  I remembered the conversation we’d had over Sunday breakfast the previous week.

  “You and this Victor, you break up?” Boris asked.

  I squirmed in my chair and felt a phantom pain in my ass—a memory of my experience with Victor. “It wasn’t like that. Not like we were dating or anything. Just sex a couple of times.”

  “And now he screws with you. And me.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll make this right; I promise.”

  “I am not pimp,” Boris said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Boris. “I’ll work it all out.”

  “Good. Because you know we have other problem now.”

  “Noah?”

  “I find e-mail in my box. He q
uit. So rest of you must pick up what he was working on, until I can find someone new. Dominic will give you all assignments.”

  “Whatever I can do to help,” I said.

  I wanted to call Victor Kunin as soon as I got back to my desk. Actually I wanted to walk over to his office and demand to see him. But I knew he’d want to make the move. So I sat down and stewed.

  Dom announced to the room that Noah had quit. “Fortunately the little shit left his key to the front door in an envelope in the mail slot. The bad news is that I have to go through what Noah was working on, and I’ll have to reassign stuff to each of you.”

  Kevin and Dylan groaned and protested they had enough of their own work. “Noah never finished anything,” Kevin said. “I’ll bet he has a ton of loose ends that need fixing.”

  “Then we’ll be working late,” Dom said.

  The sandwich-shop app needed serious bug testing, but my heart wasn’t in it. How had I been so stupid as to have sex with Victor in the first place? I had been seduced by his good looks and his take-charge attitude, by the idea that this cool older guy could be interested in me.

  Was it naïveté? I was only twenty-two, and though I’d had sex at FU, I wasn’t far from being a virgin. Plus the only agenda the guys my own age had was getting laid.

  Or was my problem insecurity? Did I think so little of myself and my attractiveness that I’d go with any guy who asked?

  Well, duh, I thought. Until Julian, I had always felt like that Jolly Gay Giant I’d been called in high school, an oversize geek who got tongue-tied with cute guys. Because of Julian, I’d begun to feel better about myself. What if Victor’s plans for me required me to break up with Julian? I wouldn’t do it. Fuck him, fuck the job, fuck everything except my relationship with Julian Argento.

  By the time Victor called, late in the day, I was frustrated with bugs in my code and the stress from Victor’s tantrum, and my anger had reached fever pitch.