demo looming on the other side of the weekend, I went straight to my workstation after the stand-up meeting. Between leaving early on Monday and juggling Noah’s mandatory three-day out-of-school suspension for fighting, I’d fallen behind. I’d allow myself no refills on tea, no trips to the restroom. I wasn’t moving from my chair until after I’d checked in my code. During the meeting, I’d made the same rule for everyone else who wasn’t done. Minus the no-restroom-break rule. I was a tough manager, but I wasn’t a monster. Our demo was going to be flawless. Cooper would have no reason to take us out behind the woodshed this time.
Jackson planted his palm on the desk beside me and leaned over to peer at my screen. The short sleeve of his Queen T-shirt strained around his biceps, and I followed the vein that twisted around his forearm to his wrist. What would that strong arm feel like wrapped around me? I shivered.
“Still working on your code?” he asked. Jackson had already moved all of his assignments to the Done column.
“I am.”
“Let me help. We can get it done faster if we work together. We’ll try pair programming again.”
Tyler and Amit had their heads together, scanning through their code. It had worked great for them. And Jackson was fast. With me checking his code as he flew through it, we’d be done by the end of the day.
“Okay. I’ll try it. In five minutes.” I brisk-walked downstairs and located the IT cave. When I returned to our desk, I handed Jackson a box containing a brand-new keyboard that proclaimed it was whisper-quiet. “I’ll even let you drive.”
Grinning, he plugged in the keyboard, and I rolled my chair closer to him. He opened up the program, and we started to work. He still managed to click the less-than-whisper-quiet keys, but it didn’t pound into my brain the way it had that first day. Or maybe it was his leather-and-piney-woods smell that enveloped me and made me forget everything that used to irritate me.
“Alicia?”
“Hmm?” I yanked my attention to Jackson’s face, turned toward me over his shoulder.
“I asked if you were okay with what I did there. It’s a little unusual, but I think it’ll get us the results we need more efficiently.”
“Oh, ah”—I scanned the code and saw the part he’d asked about—“it looks good to me. Maybe add a comment in case someone questions it later.”
He turned back toward the screen, and I inched my chair away. Friends. That was all either of us could commit to. My traitorous lady bits needed to get on board with that.
A few hours later, Jackson’s stomach growled.
I checked the clock on the wall. It was almost one. “Why don’t you take a lunch break? I’ll keep working.” I’d brought my lunch from home, knowing I couldn’t waste a minute today.
“No lunch.” He flexed his fingers over the keyboard. “Your rule.” His stomach gurgled again.
“Fine. Want half my sandwich?” I pulled the insulated bag out of the drawer. “It’s Esmy’s homemade pimento cheese.”
“Pimento cheese?”
“If I tell you what’s in it, you’ll think it’s disgusting. But it’s spicy and delicious. Want to try?” I set half the sandwich on a napkin and handed the rest to him, still encased in plastic wrap.
“Okay.”
When he took the sandwich from me, it was just low blood sugar that made my skin tingle. I bit into my sandwich, and he did the same. We’d both feel better in a minute.
He swallowed. “That’s really good. Sure you won’t tell me what’s in it?”
“Not a chance. Hey, watch that extra white space.”
At four o’clock, music started downstairs. One Friday a month, Synergy had its own happy hour for employees with beer, snacks, and music. As our team wrapped up their coding and got the green light from the automated testing system, they meandered down, leaving only Jackson and me finishing up our code. After another half hour of work, he tapped the button to send the code to the testing process.
Jackson leaned back in his chair and rubbed his shoulder where it met his neck. He glanced at the board and the dwindling backlog of work. “Another two sprints after this. I think we might even have time for some refactoring.”
I chuckled. “Let’s not get crazy. Four weeks isn’t a lot of time. Anything could happen.”
“Come on. You know you want to make this code sing.”
I rolled my wrists. “Okay, yes, I do. I want it to run so fast it makes Cooper’s head spin.”
“If we finish up the new features in the next sprint, we can spend the last one supercharging it.”
What would it be like to impress Cooper Fallon, tech superstar, with our demo? Pretty damned good. “Okay. If we finish all the features early, we’ll do it.”
He grinned at the progress bar on the screen.
The testing routine finished with a clear report. Jackson checked the code into the repository, and I used my own computer to check that everyone else’s code was where it belonged.
He stood. “Come on.”
“What?” But I stood, too, stretching out my back.
“We need to move.” He walked along the open hallway and turned left toward the sliding glass door that led out to Synergy’s small second-story deck that overlooked the river. With everyone else at the happy hour downstairs, the deck was empty, as were the desks inside that faced it. He strode to the railing and leaned his elbows against it, staring out at the trees and the sparkling water beyond.
I took off my jacket, laid it over the railing, and mirrored his stance.
“So what are you doing after?”
I tilted my head toward him. “You mean tonight? Going home. Movie night with Noah.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up, and I wanted to trace it with my finger. “No, I meant after this project. Have you lined up your next gig?”
“Oh. Yeah, a local hospital needs some help with their records system. A former coworker recommended me. Should take me to the end of the year.” It wouldn’t have the cachet of the Synergy project, but it’d be a paycheck. I could leverage Cooper’s recommendation for the gig after that and start moving up the ladder of big-name companies. Maybe I could even swing an assignment out of town next summer. I could finally travel the way I’d always wanted.
“Nice.” He leaned over the railing and scanned the green space below.
“What are you doing after the project?” I asked.
“We’ll have some loose ends to tie up. Let the test team have a whack at it. Then, I don’t know. It all depends on Cooper.”
“You really think he wouldn’t let you go back to headquarters if you wanted?”
“Depends.” He shrugged. “If he’s still mad at me, no.”
“Why do you let him treat you like that?” I thought back on my first day at Synergy, when Cooper hadn’t told Jackson I was coming to work on his project. “You’re partners. Equals.”
He stilled. “He’s better at the business stuff than me. Besides, he always has to fix it when I fuck up.”
“You don’t—” But then I remembered the intern. He’d said Cooper had fixed the situation for him. Still, it didn’t seem all that bad. She’d finished out her internship and gotten a recommendation. “I’m sure Cooper’s made some mistakes, too.”
“Not like mine.” He looked at me, his brown eyes full of something that made my heart go heavy. “The IPO. The night before we met with the bankers, Cooper and I went out. We got sloshed. Usually, he’s the grumpy drunk, and I’m the happy one. But for some reason—the stress of it all, I don’t know—I argued with a cop outside. Ended up in jail. Cooper’d already gone back to the hotel and passed out, and he didn’t get my message until the next day. He sprung me, but I showed up to our meeting in last night’s clothes, smelling like jail.” He wrinkled his nose at the memory. “The bankers said we had to bring on someone else as CEO. Someone they picked.” His face pinched when he said, “Weston.”
I searched his face. Would he have made a good CEO? We’d had a rough start on the project, but in the last few weeks, he’d shown true leadership. He had potential. Too bad he’d put so much effort into trying to prove he didn’t care about a company he clearly loved. I put a hand on his arm. “You haven’t fucked up anything here. You’ve been great with the guys. A leader. You could be so much more.” I wanted to say if you’d stop letting Cooper keep you down, but he might not be happy if I told him what I truly thought of his best friend. I’d have clawed the eyes out of anyone who tried to say a word against Tiannah.
“You’ve made me a better programmer. A better leader.” He faced me, his brown eyes earnest, demanding. “We work well together. Admit it.”
“We do.”
He tilted his head. “I thought you’d disagree with me.”
“No. I don’t lie. I tried it when Melissa—my sister—was sick. I tried to tell her she’d be fine, she’d recover, and we’d go back to doing everything we used to do. It was what I hoped, anyway.” I stared out at the river, flowing sluggishly toward the Gulf. “She told me I was full of shit, and she didn’t have enough time left to waste it listening to me.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Melissa didn’t have a lot of patience for lies—either those we tell others or those we tell ourselves. It’s why I got Noah. She never forgave our mother for staying with our dad so long. Waiting for him to leave us.” I swallowed with difficulty. Where had all that come from? I never talked about Melissa. Certainly not to work colleagues.
“I think she’d be proud of you now. For breaking out. For starting your own business. Don’t you?” He put a hand over mine, still resting on his arm.
“It’s part of the reason I did it. For her. And for Noah. To show him we Webers can do anything we set our minds to.”
He squeezed my hand. “Alicia, I—”
“Hey!” The shout came from below us, and I snatched back my hand. Tyler stood on the grass, a red cup in his hand. “Party’s down here, you two!”
I set a hand over my racing heart. Had he seen me touching Jackson in a not-so-coworkerlike way?
“We’re on our way,” Jackson shouted down. “Just needed the fresh air.”
Tyler held up his cup in a toast and then trudged around the corner of the building toward the music.
“I should head home.” I picked up my jacket and shook it out, willing my cheeks to cool.
“One beer. You can have one beer with me. With the team.”
A beer sounded good on a Friday after writing all that code. After the soul-baring we’d done. “One beer with the team.” I shot him a teasing smile. “You can be there, too.”
“You’ve made me the happiest nerd in Austin.” He crooked his elbow at me. “Shall we?”
No matter how much I wanted to take his arm, I couldn’t. Neither one of us could afford the mistake of being perceived as anything more than friendly colleagues.
“Come on.” I sidestepped him and slid open the glass door. “Let’s go join the rest of the nerds.”