by Robin Hale
We’d somewhat expanded the mission since she’d passed.
I breezed through the open doors at the front of the house. Like most buildings in San Francisco, the Lovelace didn’t have air conditioning and airing out the lower rooms was managed via air currents created by opening particular doors and windows. San Francisco usually didn’t want for a breeze. From the foyer, I followed the sound of glassware and a familiar laugh back toward my cousin’s favorite solarium and found her sipping a mimosa as she lounged.
“There you are!” Dahlia smiled up at me from her seat, hazel eyes twinkling with some joke I was sure I would hear in a minute.
“How is it that brunch is the only thing you’re ever early for?” I groused, sinking into the cushioned patio chair across from my cousin and taking up the cup of coffee already waiting for me. It was fresh. So fresh that the swirl of cream an expert hand had dropped into it was still twisting through the dark brew.
“Priorities. Speaking of, how much would it inconvenience you if I tossed Harry Garberson into a woodchipper?” She punctuated the question with a sip of her orange-tinged champagne.
“I’m afraid I didn’t see what happened, Officer, he just fell in,” I deadpanned.
Dahlia’s laugh was the sort of distinctive sound that made people want to get closer to her. It was somewhere between wind chimes on the back porch during summer vacation and an electric guitar hook in the blurry time between ‘I’ve had enough to dance to this song’ and ‘last call’. Nostalgia in a vial. And I wasn’t immune.
“Where’d you run into Garberson? Can’t imagine he was at any of your usual haunts,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee.
“He was at Aunt Rose’s fundraiser. The children’s hospital one,” Dahlia clarified. It was needed — my mother put more work into organized philanthropy than anyone else I’d ever met. Slowly but surely, she was rerouting some of Silicon Valley’s wealth into solving problems beyond computer code. “He was ingratiating himself as usual. Uncle Robert says ‘hi’, by the way.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“You know, if you thought about it you’d remember that you could visit him, too. He doesn’t actually live on the moon.”
“He’s busy. I’m busy.” Old habits died hard and it didn’t make a difference how old I was, I still reverted to a teenager when I spent time with Dahlia. When we talked about family.
The look that passed over Dahlia’s face was incomprehensibly complex. She was taking in information — probably more of it than I had intended to give her — and processing it into something I didn’t understand. And it was all subtle. The tightening around her eyes. The flicker of her gaze across my face. The tension at the corner of her jaw. Then it smoothed out.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Dahlia was brilliant. It was easy to see the glitter not quite washed from her lashes, the edge of a bruise peeking from the boat neck of her blouse — a love bite, knowing her — the constant stream of photos of her with a drink in hand, stumbling out of some exclusive nightclub at an ungodly hour. It was easy to see those things and forget there was anything else.
Whatever she’d learned from my teenaged petulance, I watched her decide not to use it. Instead, the party-girl smirk returned to her mouth and her hazel eyes gleamed.
“I know you’re busy. I saw.” The delight wasn’t fake, but she’d intentionally rerouted herself toward it. “And now you’re going to tell me everything.”
I wanted to.
I’d confided every last one of my plans to Dahlia since we were children. She’d known before I changed my name. Before I dropped out of college. She’d known before I asked Katie St John to homecoming. Before I brought the most recent round of venture capital into SparkSignal to online the new data center.
But I couldn’t tell her this. Not all of it.
I couldn’t risk a leak.
“Her name is Amber Kowalczyk,” I said, watching as my cousin happily settled back into her chair, clutching her sparkling wine with unrestrained glee.
“Whew. That last name. No wonder she uses ‘Amber Kay’ on her microblog.” Dahlia tilted her head and motioned for me to continue. “Well? I already had her name. That’s not exactly the dishing I was hoping for.”
“It’s…new.”
“Oh my god. Iris.” She sat forward. “Was that your first kiss with her? Did some asshole post a picture of your first kiss with your new girlfriend?”
“It’s fine.” I couldn’t tell her it was on purpose. “There isn’t much to tell.” The obfuscation fell from my mouth so easily I couldn’t help but perk up. If I could stick to ‘technically true’ while chatting with Dahlia, I was sure I could pull the whole project off.
And maybe I’d tell her afterward. She’d understand, once we’d managed it and SparkSignal was safely mine again.
“When are you going to see her next?” Dahlia asked.
“Tonight.” I couldn’t keep the ghost of a smile from my mouth. Saying it out loud made the whole thing feel real. Feel true. What if it had been? What if I were sitting there with my cousin, talking about the woman I’d started dating — not as a PR stunt but because she’d bumped into me at my usual coffee house and I’d decided she was more interesting than caffeine? What if I knew what Amber tasted like because she’d wanted me to kiss her, not because we’d needed the photo op?
Even knowing the rest of it. Even knowing that I’d hired Amber and nothing else could come of it, I let myself enjoy basking in Dahlia’s grin.
Who could it hurt?
* * *
THE KNOCK on the door was timid, quiet, and utterly unexpected. I lived in a modern tower of luxury condos. There was a doorman posted around the clock. There were cameras on every entrance, each of which opened only with the correct combination of keycard and visual identification. No one wandered the corridors. No hapless delivery person wandered up and handed you a sack of 3 AM wings.
Those were passed off to the doorman and one of the staff brought them up.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the door to find Amber Kowalczyk standing in front of me, smiling like an apology.
“Ms. Kowalczyk,” I said in lieu of a sensible greeting.
“You know, I kinda feel like I’m getting sent to the principal’s office when you call me that,” Amber said with a shrug, collapsing further in on herself. “That liplock should upgrade you to Amber, I think.”
“Yes,” I said, jerking back from the door to let her come inside. “Right.”
“Greg said you were expecting me. That I could just come up.” A sudden flash of worry creased Amber’s brow. “Was that not okay?”
The blankness on my face must’ve prompted her to continue.
“Greg. The guy on the door?” She hooked a thumb back down the hall toward where the elevators waited. As though ‘Greg’ were standing next to the button, waiting to send her back downstairs where, presumably, she imagined she belonged.
“Of course.” Well, I was a dazzling font of wit and charm. I cleared my throat and shook my head. Dahlia had made fun of me as a child for liking routine as much as I did. I could get pushed off-kilter when things didn’t go as I expected. A reasonable personality for writing code, less so in the boardroom. Which, naturally, might have led to my current difficulties with my boardroom. “I was about to open a bottle of wine. Can I pour you a glass?”
“Oh, yes please,” Amber said, following me toward the kitchen.
I’d only caught the beginning of her reaction to the condo before I turned away from her, but it had been enough. Cool satisfaction settled beneath my skin. I’d spent the last hour imagining Amber in my space. She’d looked intimidated, briefly, in the office I kept in the city. By the time Carrie had banished me from it to go home and attend to my ‘offsite meeting’ — evidently the reason she was giving for rescheduling some of my regular day — I’d had another hour to imagine how Amber would fit into my residence.
The question had been a nagging, distracting thou
ght. Would she be impressed? Did I want her to be? Would she decide it was evidence of a startup CEO’s conspicuous consumption?
I scowled at myself and reached up to take the bottle opener down from the wine rack. Pointless speculation.
No wonder the board was on the verge of pushing me out if I couldn’t keep my head in the game for more than a minute.
“This place is incredible,” Amber said and I viciously shoved down my surge of pride.
“Hm. Belongs to SparkSignal. Accounting had opinions about the tax implications. Do you have a preference?” I asked, turning to face Amber.
She stood on the far side of the marble-topped island, cheeks strangely flushed, brown eyes wide. “A preference?” She asked. Repeated.
She’d done it at the office, too. Nerves?
“About the wine. I usually drink red — Carrie keeps on top of whatever’s decent — but I thought I’d order poke from my usual place and maybe you’d prefer white with the fish?” That was entirely too much explanation. Too much prevarication. I snapped my teeth together and waited for Amber to respond.
“Is poke like sushi?” Amber asked.
“Similar.” There. Concise.
“Whatever you want to drink is fine,” Amber said. “I don’t really know anything about wine.”
I pulled a bottle of pinot noir from the rack and grabbed two glasses. “I don’t either.” Tilting the glass toward my — guest? Contractor? — was enough of a toast to be getting along with. If I didn’t keep myself in check, I was going to start thinking I’d invited Amber over for a date instead of scheduling her for a meeting. “For the first meeting, I’ve set the agenda at determining a reasonable cover story and a rough course of action moving forward. Given my lack of social media expertise, I need to know what you need from me in terms of support.”
The change in Amber was immediate. Her posture straightened, her soft, almost embarrassed smile faded at once and her eyes took on a crystalline sharpness. “Right. Do you have any constraints we need to include? Anything you’ve already established, or that you think you would do better with or without?”
“In a conversation with my cousin, I mentioned that our association is recent. That’s all.” That was more comfortable. I’d have done better with a whiteboard in front of me: lists to make and plans to talk through like design documents before starting to code. The algorithm of a credible fake relationship. What might it look like?
“I think that’s the best plan,” Amber nodded slowly. “We can’t go back and fake you in for my stuff, so we’re going to have to get a bit whirlwind to make enough waves in three weeks.” She dropped her glance to her wine then looked back at me. “Three?”
“Three.”
Earrings like chandeliers twinkled around her neck as she nodded again. They were enormous and enormously distracting. How did she get anything done with those hanging off her all the time?
“Why do you wear those?” The question slipped out without my permission.
At the confusion in her eyes, I explained, “The earrings.”
Her hands flew to her earlobes like she’d forgotten that she’d been wearing any jewelry at all. How was that possible? They looked heavy. They obviously banged into her neck every time she turned her head. The sound of the beads moving against each other must have been a constant distraction.
“Oh — I usually forget about them now. It’s been so long.” Amber’s mouth curved into a soft smile and she shrugged. “They’re — you know, they’re part of my brand.”
I blinked. “Earrings are part of your brand? Isn’t that — tedious?”
The sound of her laughter resonating in the bowl of her wine glass was unexpected. “I mean, those sweaters are part of your brand. Is that tedious?” There was a tease in her words, a glimmer in her eyes that suggested she’d forgotten that she had been afraid of me not very long ago. Conflict pulled in my gut — being teased by someone other than Carrie or Dahlia was unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable, but the sound of her laughter was something I hadn’t realized my apartment was missing.
“I don’t have a brand,” I insisted. SparkSignal had a brand. An annoying one, as it turned out. One that managed to be nothing like what it was built to be. But it was the brand that sold.
“You absolutely have a brand.” The base of her glass clinked against the marble countertop. Amber padded around the edge of the island, removing the barrier I had placed between our bodies, and sent those glimmering hazel eyes on a take-no-prisoners offensive up and down my body.
Heat prickled up from beneath my skin and the ghost of sense memory — what it felt like to have a hand stroke along my skin where those eyes were critically examining my clothes — rushed over all of my active processes.
“Everything someone says about you,” Amber murmured, her voice going softer as she drew closer, still assessing, still learning, still ignoring all of my careful shields. “Is your brand. Your brand is the dragon CEO. The Silicon Valley wunderkind coding your way to the top of every venture capitalist’s list in less than a year. You wear the same sweater, the same jeans, the same shoes in every public appearance you have.”
“They fit. They’re comfortable. Picking is wasted effort.” Logically, I knew that her assessment wasn’t a criticism. Even the way she called me a dragon didn’t grate on my nerves.
The curve of her lips went fond. “And that pragmatism is part of your brand. You’re beautiful, but not vain. I bet you have a cartoon character closet — hanger after hanger of that sweater and those jeans.”
I did. She was right. There were other things, of course. I did own other clothes. But they were mostly gifts or items for occasions when a sweater and jeans wouldn’t do. Occasions that were rare in Silicon Valley, in my life, but not unheard of.
“The sweaters are on shelves.” The words were quiet and idiotic but my mouth made them anyway. “Hangers ruin the shoulders.”
“Right,” Amber said. Another of those smiles, another glimmer of her eyes. “Well,” and at once she took a step back and I clenched my fist to keep my arm from reaching out to stop her from pulling away. “That’s your brand. And we’re adding to it. We’re adding ‘kisses women in elevators’ and ‘looks great in running gear’. We’re going to add ‘falls hard and fast and you get to live it, too’. People like to fall in love. And with three weeks I think we’ll get to hit the sweet spot without too much worry about backlash.”
‘Falls hard and fast’. I’d never fallen at all. Not really, though my relationships did tend to be brief. They ignited quickly, ended just as fast. But as I watched Amber’s face while she talked through her preliminary thoughts for the plan, the first stirrings of desire kindled somewhere deep inside me. She knew what she was doing when she forgot to worry that she didn’t. Those hazel eyes were disarming and insightful and every inch of her promised the kind of intense focus I hadn’t known since I’d bailed from my degree program. I’d spent sixteen hour stretches writing code in a fugue state, emerging only when the need for food or water broke through the haze.
Sixteen hours with Amber Kowalczyk — naked and whimpering and writhing in the gray sheets waiting on my bed right that moment — wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface.
* * *
HOURS LATER — more wine gone than was strictly prudent, and empty biodegradable carry-out containers from my usual poke place strewn across the coffee table — Amber sagged back against the front of my couch. Her lips were raspberry-kissed, touched by the lingering hint of wine and they curved into a satisfied smile. A notebook lay by her feet, discarded but visibly covered in fluid scrawl that surely only Amber could read.
I’d never be able to.
“It’s a good plan,” she said after a second of letting her eyelids lift and fall with the grace of a housecat settling in a sunbeam.
A vaguely concurring noise hummed past my lips and I followed the sound with a stretch, calves reaching and pushing past the usual resistance. Bare feet slid under th
e coffee-table and the sudden stroke of someone else’s skin sent Amber’s eyes going wide again.
I didn’t pull away. I’d lost the instinct for it somewhere between my father and my professional rivals.
Heat flared through my wine-slowed blood. Amber hadn’t pulled away either.
“We’ll just need to make sure it’s paced correctly,” Amber said through the pink rising on her cheeks.
Was that a rebuke?
“Say more?” I prompted, feeling my voice rumble out of my throat. Wine did that to me. Wine and slow smiles and easy conversation with beautiful women who sat on my living room floor and helped me plot a way forward. Not to get too specific about it.
“People like to feel like they’re picking up on something hidden. They want real life to be like movies, where everything that happens gets set up. Gets foreshadowed.” Painted fingernails traced over the shining black screen of Amber’s phone. “They want to feel like they’re confirming something they always knew.”
“No U-Haul photos before day three. Got it.” An ache rose in my cheek, fighting my jaw as I struggled to keep my expression impassive.
“Exactly. I expect to be wooed.” Amber’s voice was painted in hints of her laughter, watercolor washes of sound that shot jolts of lightning up my spine and gave me hits of whatever chemical my brain was parsing as victory — the only drug I’d ever been addicted to.
The slow slide of her feet away from mine as she pulled her knees toward her chest was a tragedy and I already needed another dose of her laughter.
“Do you think Lyft does U-Hauls?” She asked, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Because it’s going to be at least three days before I’m cool to drive one. Drinking with you is dangerous, Ms. Spark.”
