and tugged off my headphones. I’d been searching all morning for the fucking bug in my code, but it was hidden better than that hairline crack in my Lamborghini’s cylinder head. Alicia always coded in silence; maybe if I tried that, I could find the damned thing. I scanned through the program again.
A drop of sweat trickled down from my temple into my beard. It was hotter than hell in the office today. Had they turned off the air conditioning? It was fucking October, and it shouldn’t still be in the nineties. The human body wasn’t made to survive six months of heat like this. My body wasn’t.
I glanced over at Alicia, typing primly in her slim black skirt and silk blouse. She sipped her tea. Hot tea in temperatures like this? The now-familiar smell of it wafted over me. Earl Grey. I’d sniffed all the bags in the kitchen one night to figure it out. It smelled bitter, like the time a kid at school had dared me to eat an orange like an apple, rind and all. I couldn’t taste anything else for days.
She held the cup under her nose, letting the steam curl up around her face. It caressed her temples the way I had that first day. The way I’d daydreamed about doing again. She and her hot tea were making me sweat. I scooted my chair half a foot away from her, repositioned my keyboard, and stared again at my screen.
A few minutes later, my stomach growled. Ah. I needed some food in my system to make my brain work right. A few minutes away from the screen would do me good.
I stood, stretching, and pocketed my phone.
Alicia looked up from her perfect code. “You going to lunch?”
“Yeah.” Then I had a brilliant idea. I could talk to Alicia about my code. Maybe it’d be that nudge that’d help me figure out what I’d done wrong. “Want to come with me?”
“Um.” Her eyes drifted off my face. “I don’t think—”
“Come on. You need a break and food, and so do I. Why not go together? Then you can be sure I come back on time.” And I wouldn’t mind some time out of the office with Alicia. Maybe she was less buttoned-up there. Would she grant me a few more guesses about her Tuesday-Thursday commitments?
She cut her gaze to the window behind me, like she could use the weather as an excuse. But it was hot and sunny, exactly like it’d been yesterday and the day before that and all fucking summer.
“I’ll buy. And you choose the restaurant,” I said.
She sighed like it was a huge imposition to be bought lunch. “Okay.” She grabbed her purse from her desk drawer, quickly checked her phone, and then dropped it in. “Let’s go.”
When we emerged into the sunlight, I slid on my sunglasses. “Where do you want to go?”
She glanced to the left. “My favorite taco place is a few blocks that way. Are you up for a walk?”
“You’re the one wearing heels.” I made the mistake of looking down at them. Today, they were beige with an opening at the toe where one shiny, black-painted toenail peeked out. Alicia wore black nail polish? Did she have some sort of goth double-life? Maybe she did sleep in a crypt. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays were the nights she went to—
I almost smacked my forehead right there on the sidewalk. Of course! She had a boyfriend. It didn’t surprise me that Alicia’s dating life was regimented. Tuesdays and Thursdays—and probably Saturdays, but I didn’t have any visibility to that—were date nights. How had I not figured that out over a month of working with her? Next Wednesday or Friday morning, I could confirm it by checking her face for afterglow.
Afterglow? I clenched my teeth.
“Jackson?” She was already a few steps down the sidewalk. “You coming?”
“Yeah.” I jogged a few steps to catch up and then walked beside her, my Converse silent next to the click-click-click of her heels. We passed clumps of students from the nearby university, a couple guys with skateboards, other tech types from the dozens of hardware and software companies that surrounded us, even a few suited politicians who’d wandered far from the capitol complex.
I rubbed the center of my chest, trying to ease the sudden burn. I didn’t have any right to be jealous. Alicia, our consultant, was off limits. We couldn’t date. It was probably a good thing she had a boyfriend. I’d done a lot of selfish things in my life, but I’d never tried to tempt a woman to cheat.
Besides, she’d told Cooper she didn’t even like me. And that had hurt more than it should’ve. It definitely shouldn’t have bothered me that she was seeing someone else. I tried to loosen my jaw.
Fuck, why was I even there, about to eat lunch with her, solo? I shouldn’t see her anywhere but in the office. I stopped walking. I’d claim my gastric distress had come back.
She ran lightly up the steps to Linda’s Taquería, a ramshackle single-story house with a giant wooden deck behind it. She turned at the door, her face flushed from our walk and the skin visible through the vee of her button-up shirt glistening. “Coming?”
Who was I kidding? I’d follow Alicia anywhere.
We walked up the steps and inside, which was blessedly dark and cool and smelled of cumin and chile. My stomach growled.
“Table for two?” the hostess asked.
“Yes, and can we sit on the patio?” Alicia asked.
The patio? My sweat-damp skin cried out for the air-conditioned dining room.
“Sure.” She led us outside to the deck, which was shaded by a pergola. Flowering vines wove between the open wooden slats above, making it marginally cooler than the parking lot, where I could see waves of heat radiating off the gravel.
“Outside?” I flopped into the hot plastic chair.
She buried her nose in the laminated menu. “It’s so nice today. And I figured we could use the fresh air.”
Fresh air, my ass. Humidity clogged my lungs and made my T-shirt limp as a dishrag.
Alicia ordered unsweetened iced tea, and I asked for lemonade. I wished I could’ve ordered a margarita, but I didn’t want to put up with Alicia’s disapproving expression or the headache I’d surely get that afternoon.
After we’d ordered, Alicia folded her hands on her paper placemat and gave me a tight smile. “So, Jackson, are you enjoying Austin?”
“It’s a little warm for my taste.” I pulled the neck of my T-shirt away from my skin and flapped it to try to direct a breeze inside.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t even think— Would you rather eat inside?”
Yes. “No.” I waved her off. “This is fine.” If she was happy, she’d be more willing to help me with my code later.
“I guess I’m used to it, especially since it’s cooled off now. It’s not even supposed to hit ninety today. It’ll be comfortable tonight once the sun gets low.”
“Tonight. Thursday night.” I dragged the words out slowly. “I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Figure what out, exactly?”
“What you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“Oh?” She dragged a finger through the condensation on her tea glass.
“You have a date.”
She blinked. “A date.”
“You know, going out to dinner and a movie, or maybe staying in for a little Netflix and chill?”
“Netflix and chill?”
“You know what I mean. You have a boyfriend.” Not a fiancé. She didn’t wear a ring. When she didn’t say anything, I widened my eyes. “Or a girlfriend.”
She laughed, and it was the first time I’d heard it. She showed her teeth—another rare occurrence in my experience—and the sound started high and ended as a low chuckle. “You think my life is so orderly that I have dates every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon?”
I smiled, too, and shrugged. “You’re just so…so organized.” I pictured her, like the gathering-supplies montage in a heist movie, lining up a strip of condoms, a bottle of lube, a candle, perhaps, on her bedside table, and then, businesslike, starting to unbutton her silk blouse—shit! No imagining her doing a striptease. I rubbed a hand over my eyes to delete the image.
“Wow. Okay, sure. Tuesdays we play Bunco at his church, and Thursdays we catch the new release at the movie theater.”
“See?” I pointed at her barely contained smile. “I knew it.”
“Sorry, another bad guess. Though…” She bit her lip.
“What?” A hint had practically slipped out of Alicia’s lockbox. Giddy anticipation made me hold my breath. She’d said her twice-weekly commitment wasn’t a date. I was more relieved than I should’ve been.
“Nothing.”
“A hint. A tiny one.”
She considered for a moment, scanning my face. “Nope.”
“Oh, come on.” I flopped back in my chair.
“How’s your code coming along?”
I hated that she’d changed the subject, but this was why I’d asked her to lunch. “I’ve run into a snag.”
“Oh?” She squeezed another lemon into her tea and used a long teaspoon to stir it, the ice clinking.
“Yeah.” I briefly described the issue to her, then all the things I’d checked and all the methods I’d tried to fix it. “Any idea what could be going on?”
She opened her mouth to speak but then looked over my shoulder and smiled. Our waitress set down a huge platter of enchiladas, beans, and rice in front of me and a paper-lined basket of tacos in front of Alicia.
I picked up my fork and cut off a corner of the leftmost enchilada. Chicken, spinach, and creamy white cheese sauce. Delicious.
Across the table, Alicia sprinkled hot sauce over her tacos before picking one up and biting into it with her straight, white teeth. She set it back in the basket and chewed slowly. I watched her swallow and pat her lips with her napkin. Lunch had been a bad idea. Too much focus on Alicia’s tempting mouth. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a taco.
“Is your food okay?” She nodded at my plate with only one bite gone.
Shaking my head, I cut off a bite of the second enchilada, a cheese one. “Yeah, it’s great.”
“Knew you’d like it.”
The red sauce was spicy. I chugged my lemonade. “Any ideas about my code?”
“Ah.” She carefully wiped her fingers on her napkin. “I may have seen something earlier in the week.”
“Something?”
“A bug.” She explained it to me—God, I had to have scanned over the bad code a dozen times—and then she said, “I—ah—I fixed it in the development sandbox.”
I let my fork clatter to my plate. “You what?”
“It was causing a problem in my code, so I fixed it so my module would run. I—I was going to tell you.”
“When?” She could’ve saved my morning of frustration.
“When you asked, okay?”
That wasn’t teamwork. That was betrayal. She’d never have done that to Tyler or Kevin or anyone else. “Why? Why the fuck would you wait?” My voice had risen too loud, and a few heads turned my way. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked more softly, though anger still tightened my throat.
“This. Exactly this.” She shoved her basket of tacos away. “Men don’t want to hear criticism from their women colleagues. Working with a female programmer, I could tell her about the problem, and she’d thank me and move on. She’d respect me more for helping her. But men are infallible, and there’s no way I, with my weak female brain, could figure out something you can’t. And if I do, it must be because some man helped me.” Her face was red, and a droplet of sweat dripped off her chin. “I thought—I hoped—you were different, but I can see now I was wrong. It’s all about your ego, same as every other man I’ve worked with.” She balled up her napkin and threw it on the table before scraping back her chair.
“Now wait a minute,” I said, holding out a hand to her. “I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, I think you did.” Standing, she towered over me, the short hairs at her temple curling in the humidity and making her look like a flaming sun. “You invited me to lunch not as an equal but as someone who could help you. And then, when I helped you, you criticized me. I—I—” Without finishing her sentence, she turned and walked back through the restaurant, leaving me alone with my giant plate of enchiladas.
I hadn’t fucking criticized her. I’d only asked her why she hadn’t told me. Yeah, maybe I’d gotten a little loud. That was what people did when they—
Blotting the sweat from the back of my neck with a spare napkin, I slumped back in the chair. Fuck, I’d done exactly what she said. At least from her perspective, I’d been an asshole. Maybe I’d been an asshole from any perspective.
The waitress approached and scanned our table of uneaten food. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, just…would you mind boxing this up for us? Please?”
“Sure thing.” She hefted my plate and Alicia’s tacos. “Anything else?”
“An iced tea and a lemonade to go, please.”
When I got back to the office, I set the sweating styrofoam cup of tea at Alicia’s right hand. Leaning down, I said softly, “I put the rest of your lunch in the fridge. Your name is on it.”
Without looking up from her screen, she said, “Thanks.” Her tone was frostier than my cup of lemonade.
That night, after Alicia had left for her Thursday-evening commitment, when I went to grab my leftover enchiladas, I found the styrofoam box marked Alicia in the garbage.