by Kate Myles
“You know me so well,” Doug says. It’s true. Whenever he doesn’t bring something, he usually ends up needing it. At least one woman here is trying to make his life easier. “You’re one of the good ones, Harper.”
Harper offers him an exasperated eye roll and walks past him onto the elevator. His thoughts turn back to sex. Harper would want it private. Sensual. Under the covers. Just the two of them in heated isolation.
“Bye!” shouts Chloe from the other side of the glass. He gives her a wave with the back of his hand. The door closes. Doug looks over Harper’s neck. He tries to picture having sex with her again, but nothing comes. He looks to the ceiling and blinks back his growing anxiety.
“Are you okay?” asks Harper.
A pained moan bursts from him. “Not really.”
“But we’re getting all this advance press,” says Harper.
The elevator lands at the lobby. Doug motions for Harper to go ahead of him into the main hall. He isn’t sure he should talk to her about this. He isn’t in the habit of discussing potential failure. But Harper is a stellar employee. She needs a mentor. He’s neglected his staff over the last two months.
“It’s the first truly portable EEG,” says Harper. She stops at the building exit and looks into his face with a sincere expression. “Doug, you’ve done something incredible.”
He grabs the door handle and leans toward her. “Think about it. We spent a lot of money, more than we should have, to make it small, portable, something people would want to wear. Why?”
Harper cocks her head. “To get the data, right?”
Doug taps a finger to the side of his nose.
“But it’s not going well?” she says.
“Yes. And why do you think it isn’t going well?”
There’s a flash in Harper’s eyes. She’s excited. This kind of talk—insiderish, strategy focused—she loves it. He’ll let her sit in on more meetings.
“Is it not working?”
“The EEG is. The app isn’t. But that’s not the real problem.”
She looks out in front of her, like she’s searching the air for answers. “Are you running out of money?”
“Very good, Harper!” He starts to laugh, but then the dread comes searing across his chest. It’s sharp, and it hurts. He reaches his hand across his collarbones and rubs them.
Harper frowns. “What are you going to do?”
“One thing at a time,” he says. He opens the door for her. “Cross your fingers the field test goes our way.”
The morning is moist and chilly, cold enough to warrant the hoodie Doug thought of bringing. They walk two blocks up Main Street, to a stark art gallery of a clothing boutique. Sanjay, his biomedical engineer with the heavy nerd glasses, is set up at a card table inside the entrance with Erik, who’s buzzed his hair on the sides, leaving a wave on top.
“You got your hair cut,” Doug says.
Erik jerks his hand to his head. “You like it?”
Doug ignores him and motions to a freckled young woman sitting on a folding chair. She’s wearing ripped jeans, and on her head is Doug’s EEG, now a sleek, concentrated semicircle of sensors fastened near the base of her skull. Doug can barely see it. Her hair is almost completely covering it.
Doug smiles at her. “I’m Doug.”
“I’m Becca.”
“You’ve got my baby on your head, Becca. How is it? Are you comfortable?”
“It’s tight, but I’m getting used to it.”
Doug turns to Sanjay. “Is it supposed to be tight?”
“We don’t want it sliding around,” Sanjay says.
“People aren’t going to want to wear something uncomfortable.”
Sanjay shakes his head, annoyed. “I thought we were focusing on the app today.”
Doug puts his hand on Becca’s shoulder. “So you know your brain is full of electric activity, right? That’s what the EEG is going to measure.”
Becca nods. Doug points to the interior of the store. “We have Bluetooth stations set up all around to pinpoint your location—if you’re in front of the jewelry, the jeans, we’ll know. I want you to browse, like you’re really shopping, okay? Try on shirts, check the price on the earrings—can you do that, Becca?”
Sanjay boots up the desktop computer he’s hauled to the store for this test. It’s specialized, medical-grade equipment, registering the signals sent from the EEG. Erik pulls out his iPad and opens the waveform app they’re planning to put on the Dr. Maryn Store. Doug watches Becca as she starts into the store. She stops at a row of dresses and lifts one up. Doug turns to Erik and Sanjay.
“How can you tell where she is?” Doug asks.
“It’s all encoded,” says Sanjay. He toggles to a window full of computer script. “See? P3657 means she’s at the perfume counter.”
Doug glances to Becca as she lifts a small card to her nose. He points to Sanjay’s computer. “That looked like a hit there, when she smelled the sample?”
“Could be,” says Sanjay.
He glances at Erik’s iPad. The waveforms are unchanging. It’s supposed to match what’s happening on Sanjay’s computer.
“Becca?” Doug calls across the store. “Can you try another scent?”
Doug looks between Sanjay’s computer and Erik’s iPad. Again, there’s a hit on the computer but not on the app. Doug points to the iPad. “Which layer measures smell?”
Erik’s eyes go wide. He looks at Sanjay, whose eyes are shut tight for the length of about ten blinks. “Smell is processed in multiple places in the brain,” Sanjay says. He motions to Erik. “Erik? Do you remember you were going to combine the different data into categories? One for each of the five senses?”
Erik shakes his head at Sanjay. “You were supposed to send me the code for that last week.”
Sanjay speaks through gritted teeth. “I did.”
Again with the ass covering. Doug balls his hands into fists. He can’t figure out who to believe. He’s late to tech. To all this. He should have majored in computer science. He points into the store. “So you’re telling me that woman there is smelling a perfume. Becca, did you like that scent?”
“Yeah,” Becca calls out. “It’s jasmine.”
“And you’re telling me the app has no way of knowing whether she likes it or not?”
Sanjay lets out a slow exhale. He stares at Erik. Erik clears his throat. “It’s complicated,” says Erik.
Doug suppresses the urge to scream at Erik. He needs Erik. Erik knows too much. He lowers his face to Sanjay’s. “We spent too much time on the design!”
Sanjay stands. “Do you have any idea what I did? We have something that looks amazing. That people actually want to wear. And it’s accurate! I did all that!” He shakes his head in disgust as Erik slumps on the table, head in his hands. “It’s not my fault your boy wonder over here can’t get his act together.”
Doug is out of options. He points to Erik. “Now,” he says and exits the store. Erik follows. It’s sunny, but Doug doesn’t notice the warmth on his arms. “What the fuck, Erik?”
“I’ll get it to work,” Erik says.
Doug studies him. Erik looks back, all wide eyed and sincere and with the complete lack of uncertainty that typically signals incompetence. Doug has managed people his entire adult life. He’s never ceased to marvel at the way certain workers fail to deliver. Maybe Erik is spread too thin. Or lazy. Or out of his league in some malignant mix of Peter principle and Dunning-Kruger effect. The why doesn’t matter. Doug needs to contain the damage. He’ll have to hire someone else. A programmer who understands the minutiae of biofeedback. But he can’t fire Erik. He needs him for the data mining.
Doug rocks back on his heels. He’s going to have to come up with an extra salary on top of what he’s already paying. “Get me something I can show my board,” Doug says. “Do you understand?”
Erik keeps his eyes on him and gives him a slight nod.
“Fake it if you have to,” Doug says. �
�What’s the excitement waveform?”
Erik grimaces. “Beta waves? I think?” Doug glances through the glass doors of the boutique. Both Sanjay and Harper are staring at them.
“Let’s walk,” he says. They start around the block. “I specifically picked board members who don’t know anything about science. No one is going to look too hard at the tech. Do a little research. Say the beta waves, or whatever waves it is, went wild when she smelled the perfume.”
Erik runs his fingers through his hair. “What about Sanjay?”
“Sanjay’s finished,” says Doug. Sanjay is too competent. Self-righteous. He won’t stand for what Doug’s about to do. “We need to talk about next steps. Isn’t that what you want?”
Erik stops. He stares at Doug, thinking. “You’re ready to do that?”
The nuclear option. Doug and Erik plotted it out long ago, as a hedge, after Emily left them that night at Shutters on the Beach. The original plan was for Doug’s app to start siphoning data off the other apps from the store. It was elegant. Almost impossible to detect. But Doug can’t get his EEG to market until the app starts working. And he can’t get it to work without more money.
Erik and Doug have an agreement, a contingency plan. Erik will simply steal the data from Dr. Maryn’s store. Doug knows where to sell it and who will pay. The newspapers describe it as a “shadowy world” of illegal data brokers, but really, it’s some of the same people who deal in legit information.
All he’ll need is one, maybe two data dumps. That’ll give him enough cash to keep going.
“I’ll be in touch,” says Doug. They separate. Doug starts down the street.
“Hey!” Harper yells. She’s chasing after him, struggling with the two computer bags.
“Let me carry them,” he says, struck by a surge of chivalry. His decision to steal Dr. Maryn’s medical data makes him feel strangely virtuous. It’s not that he wants to do anything illegal. He takes the bags from her. “Harper, I need you to go through all the emails between me and Erik. If you see anything talking about or even joking about something like ‘the nuclear option’ or ‘medical data’—I think at one point I said something like ‘I know a guy’—if anything sounds even remotely shady, I need it deleted. Not just off your computer but off the backups, the archives, everything. Talk to Jeremiah in IT about how to do that.”
Harper stops. Doug starts forward but turns back when she doesn’t follow.
She lifts her chin. “Why?”
“You really want to know?”
She shakes her head. “Doug, people can tell when emails go missing.”
“Who?” He steps toward her and peers into her face. “Who can tell?”
“It’s a red flag,” she says.
“I have a right to organize things the way I want, Harper,” he says. “I’m asking you, as my assistant, to do that for me.”
He hands her computer bag back to her. She lets him walk ahead. He breathes out hard. He wants to circle back to Harper. He wants to tell her he’s not a bad guy. Whatever she’s thinking right now. She has the wrong idea.
He continues walking. His muscles twitch. Itch. An impulse appears. A visceral set of memories: Doug in a crowded dive bar, pressing himself against an anonymous female body. Doug at a seedy kitchen table, burying himself in a big fat fucking pile of drugs.
Cocaine.
It’s incredible, how fast the urge comes on. It’s been, what? Five years? Seven years since his last relapse?
Emily.
He pulls out his phone and hovers his thumb over his wife’s name at the top of his favorites list. He needs her to talk him through this, through the deal with Erik. But she asked to be kept out of it. Doug expels a single breathy laugh. As if plausible deniability would protect Emily if he got caught.
He texts Chloe:
Meet me in the garage.
Tell Jo-Ann you’ll be gone for the rest of the day.
She’s already there when he arrives, leaning against the walls of the elevator vestibule with her arms crossed over her chest. She’s pouting.
“Jo-Ann’s getting fed up with me,” she says.
Right. Things are getting sloppy. He scans the empty garage for his employees.
“Actually, go back upstairs,” Doug says. “Come to my place after work.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHLOE
It’s dark by the time Chloe pulls to the shoulder of PCH across from Doug’s house. A truck rumbles close, just as she’s about to open her door. He told her not to park near his driveway. She waits until she sees no headlights. Then she stands at the white line, waiting for another break in the fifty-mile-an-hour traffic, and makes a panicked dash across the road.
Doug greets her with an extended kiss in the front hall. His breath smells like brown liquor. She follows him down an unlit hall, down the stairs to the living room. She walks the perimeter of the shag rug and considers the glinting silver sofa in the center of the room. It looks like a museum piece, not something anyone would actually sit on. There’s a screen door leading to a balcony. Chloe can hear the sound of the waves tumbling just outside.
“Where’s your wife?” she asks, even though she knows from Emily’s Instagram that his wife is in Atlanta, with dozens of other hyperpolished ladies at some women-and-media conference.
“Away,” Doug says. He hands Chloe a glass of wine and points her toward the outside. She walks out to the railing. Holy crap. The house is on top of the water. She inhales deeply. She imagines swimming out toward the full moon and letting the dark sea swallow her. It’s almost painful, her capacity to appreciate such beauty. It’s raw. She wants Doug on the balcony with her right now. She wants him to see her seeing all this.
Doug opens the screen door. “You like?” he asks. He moves up close behind her.
“Look.” She points to the moon. It’s full and hovering just over the horizon, shining a rippling half cylinder of light onto the black Pacific. “That must be what they mean when they say ‘moonbeam.’”
He takes her waist in his hands. She turns to face him, expecting him to pounce, to gobble her up. But his kiss is supple. Chloe leans in, trying to increase the pressure.
“Ah, ah.” He pulls back with a kindly expression. His voice is tender. “We have all night.”
This is odd, this softness. They’re normally hard on each other, with slamming, laughing, devilish sex. He strokes her arm lightly. “Come upstairs,” he says. Chloe studies him. “Come on, silly.”
She follows him up to a lived-in-looking master with an unmade platform bed. On the dresser is the same wedding picture from Instagram, with Doug and his wife on the beach. Next to it is an eight-by-ten framed photo of a Doberman pinscher. It looks like a yearbook photo.
“This is your room?” Chloe asks.
“Yep.”
“Are you sure we should do it here?”
He brings his lips to her ear in a seductive rumble. “I can’t remake the bed in the guest room the way my housekeeper does.”
He closes the drapes. It’s slow and deliberate, the way he does it, like it’s part of some plan. Chloe tilts her head and wonders, briefly, if he’s going to kill her. There’s no fear to the thought. It’s just one of many things that cross her mind in any given period.
He guides her to the bed and pulls the covers over them for an episode of intimate, claustrophobic sex. He keeps his face close. She keeps breathing in his carbon dioxide. She turns her head to the side and pushes the covers away. He starts to gather the duvet back over them.
“I’m a little hot,” she says.
He puts his hand to her cheek and smiles. “Okay,” he says. She tries to squirm out from under him, for a change from missionary position, but he resists. She takes his hand and closes his fingers around her hair. He doesn’t grab. He doesn’t pull. He just stays on top of her. He forces the eye contact the whole time. It feels like they’re in a sensory-deprivation tank.
She doesn’t come. He offers to go down o
n her.
“It’s okay,” she says and sits up.
He lies back and brings his hands under his head with splayed elbows. He looks vulnerable, feminine even. “Did you like that?” he asks.
Chloe notices an unshaven strip of hair on her shin and runs her finger up it. “It was cool,” she says.
It’s so sudden then, the way his face goes dark. His eyes flicker to the closed curtains. She’s lost him. She can feel it. It was a test, the quiet sex. He was trying to be real. He gets out of bed and opens the drapes.
Chloe swallows. If it were another day, at her place or at a hotel, he’d be dressing, readying himself to leave. But he’s already home. And his wife is away. They have all night. She can get him back. If he wants to be close, she can do that.
“Doug, can I tell you something?”
It’s terrible, the way she’s always on guard. Stopping up all the bitty fragments of her story that keep threatening to skitter from her lips. She won’t tell him everything, of course. She’ll say nothing about how lucky she felt when she was hired at Beyond the Brand, how she could answer honestly on the background check that she’d never been arrested. The judge had expunged what happened with Fefu Fornes. And the other incident, she was a minor then.
He lies back down. “What is it?”
She knows she can’t share that it made her feel special, the fact that she was the only woman in her anger-management class.
“I had a pretty rough childhood,” she says.
The sound drops out of the room then. Chloe can’t hear anything, not the ocean outside, not Doug laughing. He’s laughing now. He’s laughing at her.
“Oh, honey,” he says. He sits and puts a hand on her back. “Of course you had an awful childhood. Why else would you be here?”
The room comes into focus. Chloe tunes into its edges. The walls, the pillows, the sharp lines and shadows. Doug’s not making fun of her. He understands. Everyone has problems. Maybe that’s what Chloe can be, just a regular person with problems.
“So then, why are you here?” she asks.
He pauses a moment before deadpanning, “My father was a serial philanderer. He left our family when I was five. He left us six times.”