Allie got out of the shuttle van and waved at her teammates as they dispersed, some heading to the parking garage, some calling for rides. None of them had slept much; more than a few were still drunk. It had been an amazing weekend. She had spent the entire night at the craps table and left seventy-five bucks up. She didn’t care about the win, but she loved craps. There was camaraderie in screaming at dice together.
She looked up at the SOS building and sighed. It’d feel good to go home, but she really wanted to run a couple of database queries before Derek picked her up after his softball game. She looked at her watch. 3:20. Yeah, she could sneak in an hour of work.
She paused indecisively for a moment and looked again at the concrete building. It was shaped a bit like an early game controller, two rounded towers connected by a lower flat building. It was mostly glass, a giant ’80s style post-modernist monument. It had held Sega at one point, and then had been broken into smaller offices when they moved to cheaper property. Shiny Object Syndrome, or SOS as it was known to all, had started in a single office on the third floor, now owned the first through the third floor on the left hand of the controller, and was negotiating to own the entire building. She started to trudge toward the front door when she recognized the man standing outside of it.
“Derek!”
Her husband walked toward her, swift yet unhurried, and swept her up in his arms. “Darling, you smell like an ashtray!”
“Flatterer! You could have waited until I got home and showered.” He looked fresh as a daisy. “Shouldn’t you be at your game?”
“I didn’t dare let you go upstairs. I knew if I didn’t collect you, I’d be eating another pizza alone.”
“Not after a weekend away!”
“Maybe.” He put an arm around her. “Anyhow, here I am.”
“Here you are.” Her arm fit nicely around his waist, and she squeezed him. He was a solidly built blond, a blend of the British Isles and something that let him tan rather than burn in the sun. He didn’t approve of the team trips to Vegas, either personally or professionally. SOS frowned on bringing spouses—said it interfered with team bonding, though Allie suspected it was cheapness. And while he trusted her to stay out of trouble, he found it questionable that they’d go on a business trip to a place committed to a variety of sins. He’d put on his HR hat to complain that it was unfair to addicts or put on his husband hat to complain it was yet more time he didn’t get to spend with her.
“You know, I’d like to go lie by the pool with a daiquiri and catch a show.” His husband hat was jealous in a variety of ways.
Allie decided to defuse the issue. “Why don’t we just go sometime? It’s a short flight.”
“My birthday is next month.” He looked down at her and fluttered his eyelashes.
“Be a good boy until then and we’ll see.”
“Hmmp.”
Thirty minutes into the drive, they’d finished catching up and he started fiddling around with his phone to get music playing.
“Stop that, it’s dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as your taste.”
“No, dearest, it isn’t. Drive.” She grabbed the device away from him and put on one of his playlists.
After a few moments, he spoke up again. “I really don’t like it, you know.”
Allie turned the music down. “I know. You know it’s good for team morale.”
“Abusive spouses always separate their victims from friends and family.”
“It’s one weekend a month when we are the top-earning team! Hardly a plot.”
“Maybe. But when you have your own company, you won’t take them to Vegas, will you?”
“No. I’ll take them to Disneyland.”
“And you’ll take me?”
“Every time.” She gave his knee a light squeeze. When she had her own company. If was more like it. She grew up in East Palo Alto, on the wrong side of this very highway they were driving on. On her left, her family. On the right, Stanford and all the startups it fathered. Instead of attending Stanford, she had taken over her half-brother’s Nintendo when he’d grown bored with it, and his computer when he moved to New York, and then used the Internet to teach herself what she needed to get a customer service job at Hurricane, the best game company in the country (in her opinion).
Then she just worked harder than everyone else and look at her now. No degree, but hey, enough stock options to be a millionaire if the IPO went well. She just needed to keep hustling and eventually, she’d get promoted to general manager. Then she’d know enough to finally found her own start-up. She was living the Silicon Valley dream.