Nothing Personal (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  Brandon grabbed a taquito from a plate set on the stone surface of the massive coffee table and took a crunchy bite. “You know.” He waved the crispy roll through the air like a cigar. “Teeny-tiny vegetables on a special hand-painted platter. Little round tomatoes and baby carrots. Hummus dip, weird nasty whole-grain chips. Light beer. All that low-calorie shit.”

  “Does Rae look like somebody who has to count her calories?” Alec popped the top on a beer for himself and carried it back out, glanced at the 80-inch screen hung against the white wall opposite. Still just talking heads yapping about strategies and tactics, filling time. “And what do you care anyway? You put the “miss” in “misogynistic,” you know that?”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Brandon said. “That’s very good. Did you think that up in the weight room today, or is that one right off the top of your head?”

  “Damn, you’re cranky. Still upset that I did the presentation at the conference? I thought we were good with that. Or are you just not gettin’ any?”

  Brandon laughed, took a long swallow of beer. “Nah, just messing with you. And I’m getting plenty. No problems there. Haven’t seen you down in Ziggurat lately though, any day but Friday, or anyplace else either. You got somebody stashed away someplace? Getting serious on us?”

  “Not hardly. Busy working, that’s all.”

  “Never stopped you before.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’m getting old. Matching digits now, 33. Maybe I’m starting to feel like one of those old guys driving around in his 911 convertible in one of those stupid English tweed caps that are supposed to make him look like some kind of suave international playboy, when everybody knows it’s covering his bald spot.”

  “Hey,” Joe objected.

  “When your bald spot’s your whole friggin’ head, you aren’t allowed to take offense,” Alec told him.

  He was interrupted by the buzz of his phone, picked up. “Yeah, thanks, Anthony. Send her on up.”

  “She’s here,” he told the others unnecessarily, feeling a little flutter of nerves that had him pretty damn astonished at himself. “So not so much of the ‘chick snacks’ jokes.”

  Brandon lifted his beer and the other palm, ducked his head in subservience. “I live to obey you, O Powerful One.”

  Alec went to the door, opened it and waited a minute or so. Heard the ding of the elevator, saw her step out, look around. Cream-colored leggings under a long, soft, clingy sweater, a cautious fraction more casual than her workday attire. Her hair was still up, though. He was beginning to be obsessed with the idea of seeing it down. He wanted a look at those curls. Well, to be honest, he wanted to wrap his fingers around those curls.

  “Hi.” He stepped into the hallway to meet her, took the paper bag she offered, looked inside to see a bottle of chilled white wine. “Thanks for coming. You didn’t have to bring anything.”

  “If I didn’t want to drink beer,” she said, “I figured I might.”

  He laughed. “Wine, I’ve got. Snacks, even.” Including cut-up vegetables, which he pulled out of the fridge once he’d ushered her inside. He’d been fairly specific with the catering company about providing “some stuff a woman would like.”

  “Just don’t ask me to make a three-course dinner,” he said, setting the platter on the marble-topped breakfast bar together with the—well, the bowl of hummus, “and I’m good.” He got out a stack of plates, too. Women liked plates.

  “Yeah, me too,” she said. “But I’m good as long as you have popcorn. That’s my favorite.”

  “Got that. Buttered, though.”

  “Buttered’s how I like it. The more the better.”

  “A woman after my own heart.” He smiled down at her. Thought about watching her lick the butter off her fingers. Or he could do it. Yeah, that’d be good.

  “Hey, Rae,” Brandon said, not bothering to get up. Joe stood, though, courtesy of Alec’s parents, who’d drilled the same manners into Joe over the years that they’d instilled in Gabe and himself. They were good at that.

  He could see Desiree’s shoulders tensing a little as she greeted the others, though as usual, her face and voice betrayed nothing. She set her bag down on a stool, leaned against the breakfast bar while Alec opened the chilled white wine she’d brought and poured her a glass. She took it from him and wandered over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that covered half of two walls of the living room, coming to a dramatic point. He watched her stop and stand at the apex as everyone did, look out at the piers, the towers and suspension cables of the Bay Bridge, the water beyond, gray against the gray sky on this drab February day.

  “Here we go,” Brandon said, picking up the remote and turning up the volume on the speakers discreetly placed in the walls. “National anthem.”

  Alec indicated the matching easy chair sitting at right angles to the two couches, seated himself next to Rae, across from Joe and Brandon. They watched the overly dramatic musical interlude in silence, followed by the flyover, the segue to the inevitable overpriced commercial.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I still watch this thing,” Alec commented as lemurs scampered across the big screen, for some bizarre reason. “Another of those things you do because everybody else does.”

  “Excuse to eat popcorn,” Rae said, taking a handful from the big bowl on the coffee table. She did manage to get through a fair amount of it during the first half, Alec noticed with surprise. And she didn’t ask any stupid questions, either.

  “Holding,” he heard her say quietly once, just as the official blew his whistle, tossed the yellow flag.

  “You know football,” he said. “Dixie a fan?”

  She smiled. “Forty-Niners all the way, win or lose. My grandpa was too. She wears her hat while she watches the games.”

  “Of course she does,” he teased. “Got a big red-and-gold foam finger too, I bet, that she waves every time they get a touchdown.”

  That made her laugh. “Close.”

  “So what do you think of Alec’s place?” Brandon asked her when the game was over and they were waiting for the premiere of the show to begin. “Pretty sweet, huh?”

  She looked around, and Alec could see the hesitation. “Great view,” she said at last.

  “Great view?” Brandon challenged. “That’s it? Know how much it costs to get into this place, or how much a couch like this runs you?”

  “Man, that’s real classy,” Joe said. “Maybe Alec should’ve left the price tags on. Rae could’ve been adding it all up in her head, so she could figure out exactly how impressed to be.”

  She ignored all that, to Alec’s relief. “I’m more of a traditional furnishings kind of girl,” she explained. “My neighbors give me grief about it all the time. They say I have grandma taste.”

  “Well, I can see why,” Alec said. “You’ve got a grandma, after all. And that’s OK. This didn’t really turn out the way I wanted. I mean, it’s what I thought I wanted, but I’m not so sure now. A little hard-edged, I guess.” He laughed. “When you see the show, you’ll get an idea why, at least I’m guessing you will, because I imagine that’s how they’ll spin it. Talk about your cognitive dissonance, coming home from that.”

  “Really,” she said. “What was hard to adjust to, besides the modern furnishings?”

  He shrugged. “Like, I drove back by myself, because Gabe was with Mira.”

  “Spoiler alert,” Joe pointed out. “You just clued Brandon in.”

  “Kind of hard to hide that you’re engaged to your co-star,” Alec said. “At least from your family and friends. You and Rae already knew, because you’ve both met Mira, so what the hell, now Brandon knows too. I’m sure it’s a major plot point, and that they’ll make sure everyone starts getting the idea right from Episode One.”

  “But you drove yourself back,” Rae prompted.

  “Yeah. Decided to go down through Idaho, see more of it, because it’s actually a really beautiful place. Which was fine, except that I kept getting honked at, and then real
izing it was because I was going 50. I even got pulled over once by a cop for a sobriety test, I was driving so slowly. That was all fairly new. I usually have the opposite problem.”

  “Yeah, you’ve had a speeding ticket or two,” Joe agreed, reaching for another potato chip.

  “My insurance agent would tell you so. And I kept stopping to eat at places with neon beer signs and antlers on the wall, guys in John Deere caps, and being just fine with that.”

  “Still not going to tell us whether you won?” Brandon asked. “Not that half a million would have mattered much to you. But you know, a few hundred thousand here, a few there, and before you know it, you’re talking about real money.”

  “Winning mattered, though,” Alec assured him. “It mattered a lot. Wait and see. Because I’m sure that’ll be part of the storyline.”

  “Wow,” Rae said as the credits rolled over the America Alive logo. “That looked like some hard work, unless it was in the editing.”

  “Not in the editing,” Alec said. “There’s no way to show how hard it really is, physically, not to mention every other way. The hardest thing I’ve ever done, bar none.”

  “Harder than DataQuest?” Joe asked, referring to his and Alec’s first venture, begun when they were still at Stanford. When they’d subsisted on Red Bull and tortilla chips for what had felt like weeks at a time, and sleep had been a precious luxury.

  “No contest,” Alec assured him. “You want to know how easy our lives are now? Go back to 1885 for a few days, never mind a couple months. That whole training period, I’d wake up and my entire body would be one giant ache.”

  “The blonde chicks were hot, though,” Brandon put in. One too many beers, Alec judged, because that wasn’t his first comment on the subject, and Brandon usually had a little more class than that in mixed company. A very little. “That must’ve been some consolation. You put some moves on there? Sure looks like they were up for it.”

  Alec frowned at him, gave him a quick, sharp shake of the head. He hoped they weren’t going to include that in the storyline, but he had a bad feeling that they would. At least they hadn’t shown it today. But when they did . . . Why hadn’t he thought more at the time about what he’d be showing the world, six months down the road? What he’d be showing his parents? What he’d be showing somebody like Rae?

  “Time for me to go,” she said, getting up from her chair. “But thanks. That was some entertaining viewing. The show, I mean, not so much the Super Bowl. I prefer a little closer game, but maybe that’s what we’ll get with the show, Alec. Some real competition?”

  “Yes,” he said, standing up himself. “I’m allowed to say that, at least. And that I think you’ll be surprised.”

  “I’ll look forward to it. Thanks for having me over.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  She laughed. “That’d take a while. I didn’t bring it.”

  “I’d be glad to give you a ride home,” Joe put in, surprising Alec. “Or to BART, or whatever.”

  “No, I’m good.” She waved a hand in the guys’ direction, and Alec walked her to the door.

  “Sure you’re OK?” he asked when he’d opened it for her. “Because it’s dark, and it’d be no trouble to drive you.” Not that he knew where she lived. He could have accessed her employment file, of course, but he hadn’t. Because he’d wanted to know badly enough that it had felt too much like stalking to check it out.

  “I’m fine on my own,” she insisted. “I’m used to it.”

  The elevator doors opened, and she stepped inside. He raised a hand in farewell and watched the doors close, then headed back into the apartment.

  “You sticking around?” he asked Joe. “I’d like to run through a few things with you. Rae was right, I guess, about the game being boring, because I got an idea in there about how we can punch through that roadblock with the error-handling subroutine.”

  “Sure,” Joe said.

  “And that’s my cue,” Brandon said, getting up himself. “I think I hear my mother calling. Anyway, you wouldn’t want me to watch you guys logging in. That’d probably violate three or four of Rae’s rules right there, and she’d have to give me a spanking.” He laughed, bent over, and gave himself a slap. “Owww, baby. Maybe that’s enough reason to do it, what do you think?”

  “I think,” Joe said without looking up from where he was bent over, pulling his laptop case from behind the couch, “that you should shut up.”

  “Or I might guess your super-duper special passwords,” Brandon went on, ignoring him, “even without my Secret Decoder Ring. Come to think of it, Rae should probably crack down on the two of you, do a brain wipe after you work together. I thought nobody was supposed to have all the pieces, and yet what do you know, somebody has to. Wonder if she’s thought of that, that there you both are, all clued-in and cozy? I’d call that a serious security breach.”

  “Got to trust somebody,” Alec said. “For my part, I’ll stick with Joe. Take some snacks if you want, before you go.” He was grateful that Brandon lived close, in another of the towering condo complexes that had sprung up south of Market, and had walked over, because he wasn’t in any shape to drive home. “There are some sandwiches left. And, you know, your favorites. Baby vegetables and hummus.”

  “Taquitos,” Brandon decided, heading into the kitchen and opening drawers. “Where are your ziplock bags?”

  “Uh . . . not sure,” Alec said, willing himself to relax. Just Brandon and his mouth, giving it a little extra today because he was a little drunk. “Imee rearranged things, I think.”

  “Never mind. I found them.” Brandon dumped a few of the little rolls into a bag. “I guess it’d be way too much to expect you to have any little plastic containers for guacamole and bean dip.”

  “Just take them. I won’t be eating them.”

  Brandon did, added a couple rolled sandwiches to his bag. “Bachelor dinner. I need to find a woman who can cook.”

  “They have to stick around to cook for you,” Alec pointed out. “You get that when you actually, you know, date them, and they invite you over for dinner. You never get that far.”

  “Because he’s too busy running away in the morning,” Joe said. “Afraid he’ll have accidentally married somebody, or promised her a second date.”

  “Me?” Brandon protested. “I’m not the only one here who specializes in casual. Can’t help it if I’m better at it than Alec.”

  “Yeah, right,” Joe snorted. “He might be casual, but they cook for him. He gets a little tickle in his throat, some girl’s over here with her homemade chicken soup. You’ve got a ways to go, grasshopper.”

  “Well, if we don’t get started,” Alec told Joe, “we’re going to be here till morning. Stick what you don’t take back in the fridge, Brandon, so Joe and I don’t die of food poisoning. ‘Mysterious loss of startup brain trust: foul play suspected.’ Little would they know it was because Brandon left the potato salad out.”

  “More likely to think we killed ourselves in despair over being beat to market because we’re too damn slow,” Joe growled.

  “OK, I’m going.” Brandon shoved the fridge door shut. “Don’t have to tell me more than seven or eight times. See you guys tomorrow.”

  And then Alec and Joe were alone, opening their laptops together, as they’d done so many thousands of times, over so many years. Alec logged into the cloud-based server, then hesitated.

  “Does Brandon seem like kind of an . . .” he began.

  “Asshole?” Joe asked, not looking up. “Yeah.”

  The startled a laugh out of Alec. “But is he worse?”

  “Not sure,” Joe said, and this time he did look up. “Maybe it’s just that you’ve changed, so he looks worse.”

  “Ouch. I was that bad?”

  “No. But close, sometimes. Let’s go.” Joe opened the file, and they lost themselves in solving the mysteries of code. Again, as always.

  “All right,” Alec said, sitting back and stret
ching a couple hours later. “That’s a fairly good start. I’ll be able to give it some more time tomorrow.”

  “Hope so,” Joe said, going to the fridge to refill his water glass. “Seeing as how you canned my best programmer.”

  “Hey, I told you. No choice.”

  “He was that far over the line?”

  “Yes. He was. If you’d been there to hear it, you’d have done the same thing. How’s Michael been since then? I almost fired him too, in the heat of the moment. We going to need to?”

  “No. Not that bad,” Joe said. “At least, yeah, he was pissed. You know how tight he and Simon were. But he wants the job, and let’s face it, with Simon gone, he’s in the Number One spot, got access to the best stuff, building that resume. He’s not going to walk away from that, or to risk it.”

  He took a seat again, started packing up, and spoke without looking at Alec. “But you and Rae are getting pretty . . . corporate, aren’t you?”

  That one took Alec by surprise. “Corporate? Not the word I was expecting.”

  “That too. But doesn’t it all feel a little stifling, all these rules, doing it by the book, having it get so big? Don’t you miss the gunslinger days?”

  Alec got up himself, took a restless turn around the room. He’d been sitting too long, needed another workout before bed. This was the downside of always meeting at his place.

  “No,” he said, grateful for the opportunity to put words to the feelings he’d been having for a while now. “I want to do bigger things. And bigger things mean bigger companies. Not even sure I want to keep starting up and selling out, tell you the truth. Maybe I’d like to actually run something, you know, grow it, expand the product line. As long as I had somebody to do the boring parts, of course,” he added with a grin for his partner.

  “Like Rae, you mean.” Joe’s eyes were watchful, and he wasn’t smiling back.

  “But I’m not planning on leaving you out,” Alec said, realizing where this was going. “Hell, the more I get wrapped up in running the show, doing the whole visionary-founder deal, the more I need you on the tech side.”