Technically Faking

by Robin Hale

  Lots. The answer was lots.

  So it wasn’t too surprising that getting to the venue for the charity event took forty-five minutes from my apartment, which wasn’t too far from anywhere else map-wise.

  “Ms. Spark has indicated she will summon me after the gala to take the pair of you home,” Mr. Stevens said, opening the sidewalk-facing door. “Have a pleasant evening, miss.”

  I murmured my thanks as I stared up at the building where Mr. Stevens had dropped me — some staggeringly stylish edifice transported directly from the art deco period — and tried to keep my heartbeat from getting out of hand.

  “You look incredible.”

  I jerked my eyes away from the building to see Iris standing in front of me, blue eyes wide and dark, pupils blown, dressed in the sort of well-tailored, modern tuxedo I’d never imagined I might see on someone other than Cate Blanchett. Fuck, she was gorgeous. And she was looking at me like she was hungry to carry me back to her apartment and pin me to her bed.

  “So do you,” I said weakly.

  It was unfair. Her hair was loose, still unkempt but artfully instead of the product of her hands through her hair while she thought or argued with insubordinate subordinates. A subtle smokey blur in golden tones highlighted her eye color and blush brought out the angle of her cheekbones. Other than that, her face was untouched. A pocket square peeked from the breast of her jacket, hung open and loose, disarmingly casual, and matched the iridescent fabric my dress was made of.

  It was stupid to be so enamored that our outfits were purposefully coordinated, but I couldn’t help it. If nothing else, Iris had made sure that we looked like we belonged together.

  My heart thumped painfully. I wished that we belonged together.

  “Ready to face the sharks?” Iris asked dryly, offering me her arm.

  “Someone described you as a ‘lion’, earlier today,” I remarked and followed the gentle pressure of her arm into the building. “Who do you think wins in a fight: a shark or a lion?”

  A sharp, wicked grin spread across Iris’s slightly asymmetrical face. “It’s my club, my turf. My money’s on the lion.”

  Confidence and a rush of tingling warmth settled beneath my skin as we prepared to take the elevator to the penthouse floor where the event was being held.

  I’d bet on the lion, too.

  * * *

  I’D BEEN to parties in Silicon Valley. There were house parties with a mishmash of beer and orphaned bottles of wine. Music pouring out of a decent stereo system piping someone’s favorite playlist through the awkwardly-shaped Victorian apartments. There’d also been faux speakeasy cocktail parties, drag shows, and drunken, costumed bar crawls the whole city joined in for. But as we stepped out of the elevator into the Fallon building’s penthouse ballroom, I realized I had been completely mistaken.

  I’d been to parties in San Francisco. But that was the first time I’d ever been to a party in Silicon Valley.

  The room was full of people I recognized. Faces I’d seen attached to news stories about record-breaking profits, new technology, PR scandals. Between the cumulative net worth of the people in that room, the gleam of the obviously-imported marble floor, and the glittering of expensive champagne in crystal flutes — no one was drinking Korbel, I knew that much — my mind shorted out and went blank except for the distant thought of guillotines.

  “We don’t have to stay.” Iris’s hand was a cool weight on my waist, settling my scattered thoughts even more than her voice did. “We can leave. God knows I wouldn’t mind.”

  It was tempting. It was super tempting. I was used to charming strangers — but that was online. That was over the internet. That was sitting in my pajamas at three in the morning while I came up with a cute joke to riff on the latest meme. Why had I ever thought I could do the same thing in a room full of tech elites?

  “Oh, for the love of — game face, Kowalczyk.” Iris’s voice cut through the haze just in time for my brain to process that we’d been approached by someone. He was older, hair gone distinguished salt and pepper, skin far more tanned than I’d have expected in San Francisco.

  “Iris!” The newcomer said warmly. Too warmly. He sounded like Iris was his granddaughter.

  “Hello, Hank,” Iris returned. There wasn’t even a hint of a smile on her face.

  “Are you going to introduce me to your, ah, friend?” Hank asked, clapping a hand down on Iris’s jacketed shoulder and turning a broad grin in my direction. He had clearly been indulging in some of the champagne before we arrived.

  “Hank, this is Amber Kowalczyk.” Iris turned toward me and there was a wry apology in her bright blue eyes. ‘See?’ She didn’t quite say. ‘This man is an idiot. Why are we here?’ “Amber, this is Hank. Hank is a senior vice president at Mirror. Isn’t that it, Hank?”

  Hank nodded and his big hand squeezed down on Iris’s shoulder hard enough that it would’ve made me wince. Iris looked vaguely disgusted. “Yes, yes. For years now! What can I say? A man my age, he gets comfortable. Speaking of which, I was surprised to see that gal of yours — Cassie? — out here with Harry Garberson. What happened there?”

  Oh good.

  The smile on my face froze. Iris’s ex was there. And her rival for SparkSignal. And at least Hank had expected Iris and The Ex would still be together. Did everyone else think that too?

  How exactly was I supposed to go about getting some champagne?

  “Sandra,” Iris said with some emphasis. “Has never been anywhere she didn’t want to be. May we all be so lucky.”

  “Ha!” Hank laughed, shaking Iris’s shoulder again. “I’ll drink to that. And you? Miss Kowalczyk? What d’you do?”

  Hank’s aggressively good humor was turned back to me like a firehose and I braced under it. “Oh! I’m,” I coughed. “I’m in social media consulting.” A small smile, a dismissive shrug and the conversation would wander back away from me. In my estimation, that was more than half the battle when it came to being broadly liked. People liked to talk about themselves. And they loved anyone who gave them a reason to do it.

  A squint. A stare. The penny dropped. “Ah! Amber — Kay, is it?” Hank barely waited for me to nod before he was barreling ahead. “My grandson watches your — your,” a vague, swirling gesture filled the space between us, sloshing champagne up the sides of Hank’s glass. “Video game thing. He loves it. Won’t shut up about it.”

  A flush of unexpected warmth rose in my chest. “Oh, well that’s so kind —”

  “I always thought ‘Amber Kay’ must be a high school student.” Hank squinted again. “Couldn’t imagine an adult wasting their time on video games like that. Ah well, a different world, I guess!”

  And there it was. The shock of the insult was ridiculous, honestly. It wasn’t like I’d never heard it. But there was something especially awful about hearing it in front of Iris. God, she must’ve thought I was an idiot.

  “Yes,” Iris said dryly. “I can see how having the ear of next election’s eighteen to thirty-four voting bloc would be useless. How are Mirror’s defense contracts looking?”

  The older man’s brows drew together in a mask of confusion, and I bit down viciously on the inside of my lip to stifle a laugh.

  “Oh look, Hank,” Iris continued. “Your wife is looking for you.”

  Hank looked back over his shoulder and blanched. “Yes. Well. It was good to meet you, Miss Kay.”

  Iris stared down the back of Hank’s tuxedo jacket until it had vanished into the crowd of affluent party-goers. “Don’t let him get to you.” The command came out in a low murmur that broke through the hum of the room anyway. “He’s an idiot. He wouldn’t know an innovative idea if it crashed that blood and sand empire out from under him.”

  Blue eyes cut to mine and swept over my face like a hyper-efficient CAT scan, looking for something wrong hiding beneath the surface. Whatever she saw, it must have satisfied her, because she nodded and took my hand in hers without hesitation. “Champagne. We both nee
d it.”

  Yes, we did.

  15

  IRIS

  If I hadn’t endured hours of listening to Dahlia tell me how much money the gala brought in for the Lovelace’s outreach projects, I would have been certain that the event was designed specifically to torment me. I couldn’t think of a more perfect match for my own personal hell: endless hours of small talk and idle, polite conversation with friends of my parents and people starstruck by the family name. Hours of overfamiliar, undeserved pride-by-proxy for my accomplishments like a favorite niece. The guests at these things had a vested financial interest in the work the Lovelace promoted, but they didn’t have any practical interest in the subject itself.

  Amber may have called me a lion, but Dahlia’s estimation — that I was a damp cat when forced into polite company — was more appropriate.

  But Amber? Amber was in her element.

  Holding my tongue, making noncommittal noises into the rim of my champagne flute — all of that became half of a perfectly functional social dance when I had Amber to hold up the other end. I wasn’t misanthropic or ill-suited to public life. I was merely charmed by my lovely date.

  And so was everyone else.

  Once Hank had skulked off to another corner of the party — likely avoiding his wife, the idiot bastard — Amber had recovered from his shortsighted stupidity as if it hadn’t happened. On anyone else, I would’ve said the ease was a mask. A front. But the truth of the matter was that it obviously wasn’t.

  Amber’s laughter invited everyone around us to laugh. Her dark eyes gleamed with genuine interest, the same interest in the fifteenth story about start-up acquisitions that they’d held in the first, and she leaned forward into the open posture of perfect strangers. Hell, she already knew more of their names than I did.

  She welcomed people into her space and invited them to talk to her. And even though none of the conversation mattered, none of it was anything other than the same four jokes that were told at every charity event in the bay, she managed to make it feel more like the late hours of a code jam. More like the strange, liquid good humor that came from having been awake for eighteen hours writing code with people you’d only met that morning.

  Amber made speculation about the next wave of self-driving cars sound like the eleventh-hour hack that patched a sticky problem. The sort of thing that was so ugly you loved it, even if it should’ve been refactored into something less hideous. She made the people in that room sound interesting.

  If I’d had to meet one more person at her roommates’ karaoke night, I would’ve been a hissing mess. But Amber kept that diamond-bright smile on her face no matter who came close and expected her attention.

  Damn, she was beautiful.

  It was strange to realize I was proud of her for it. Possessive pleasure licked its way down my spine with every admiring glance thrown her way.

  “I thought Dahlia said you would be coming,” a pleased alto dragged my eyes from the long column of Amber’s throat, tickled with those absurd earrings, to my mother’s face. “Hello, dear.”

  “Mom,” I murmured as I brushed a kiss against her powdered cheek. She squeezed my shoulder and pulled back, casting an automatic glance to make sure that Dad was there with her.

  “Good to see you out of the office, kiddo,” Dad said. His voice was rough, evoking the smell of cigars that lingered in his study despite dropping the habit a decade ago. “Although,” one bushy brow quirked. “If the rumors are true, you might have a lot of time to yourself soon.”

  And there it was. The muscle in my jaw went so tight so fast I heard my teeth creak.

  “What is it, again? Some sort of video conferencing app?” Dad frowned at Mom, looking for a reminder about the company that had been my sole focus for years.

  “Oh, no, it’s more than that.”

  Jesus. I’d forgotten that Amber was standing there.

  Dad’s expression twisted into obvious confusion over why this stranger was speaking to him.

  “Mom, Dad, this is Amber Kowalczyk,” I said with a hand on Amber’s back and a vague gesture that didn’t at all convey the minefield that had sprung up between my father and me. “Amber, this is my mother, Rose, and my father, Robert.”

  Interest sparked in Mom’s eyes and the back of my neck pricked when she opened her mouth to speak. “You were saying, Ms. Kowalczyk?”

  “Amber, please,” Amber said with a sunny smile. “I was just saying that SparkSignal — the app that Iris built — it’s more than video conferencing. There was an article last week about the psychological impact it’s had for at-risk youth. The way it’s expanded their ability to find community without the risk of local exposure. In areas where registration has increased, reports of self-harm have gone down.”

  Huh. I’d have to go back through my email and see if Carrie had sent that one to me.

  Regardless, the story was doing the trick. The look on Dad’s face was ‘grudging respect’, and I could feel ‘approval’ pouring off of my mother in waves. Disorienting as hell.

  “I don’t want to claim that she’s single-handedly solving depression in teens, or anything.” And there was that laugh again. Even Dad was smiling back at her. “Correlation and causation being what they are, of course, but all the numbers point to SparkSignal making a difference.”

  “And here I thought SparkSignal was for streaming videos from karaoke bars.” Dad’s voice was so dry he should have torn his throat on it.

  “What can I say, Dad? Those voice lessons had to be good for something.” The corner of my mouth lifted into a slantwise smirk.

  “They were supposed to be good for running a board room,” he groused.

  “And I’m certain they have been.” With the deftness of nearly thirty years of practice, Mom cut through the tension running between Dad and me. She turned her focus away from our bickering back toward Amber’s still-open expression. “Amber, I’m sure I remember hearing your name come up in this last election cycle. How do you find working with non-profit campaigns?”

  Someday, I would stop being surprised when my mother knew everything about everyone before I’d had the opportunity to introduce her. I was thankful they didn’t need me to participate in the conversation. They were off, talking about state-level politics versus the complications of national efforts, how small a target audience could be before it was impossible to find, and how interested parties might look for a political social media consultant in the current market.

  Meanwhile, Dad and I watched them. Watched them and carefully avoided anything that might be construed as an opening to continuing our own conversation. And that was an unpleasant realization: that as much as I was enjoying having Amber there to be the heavy gun in this ‘charm offensive’ as she’d put it, I was also slipping into the patterns my parents had played out my whole life. Dad was always there, never shirked industry events, but Mom was the one everyone was dazzled by.

  Dahlia would’ve been thrilled by my sudden insight into my father’s inner life.

  “Oh good! You’ve found each other.” Dahlia’s voice followed my thoughts as if she’d heard them. “Now I can break you all up. Aunt Rose, Uncle Robert, I hate to tear you away, but Mrs. Singh was asking after you and I promised I’d send you along.”

  Mrs. Singh, draped in classic lines and shades of eggplant — something in my time with Sandra had rubbed off, after all — was holding court on the opposite side of the ballroom. Her warm smile had her looking like someone’s well-dressed grandmother rather than the CEO of the market leader in network security contractors. I paused a moment, tried to remember if Dahlia or my mother had updated me on the state of Singh’s children and their marriages, and allowed that she was probably both.

  I could only imagine how much fun she had playing off those expectations in meetings. Humor played at the corners of my eyes. Something to look forward to.

  “Oh, has Anjali arrived? Wonderful.” My mother turned to peer in the direction of Mrs. Singh before making
her goodbyes. “Amber, it was a pleasure to meet you. Have Iris pass along your contact information. I have some friends who could use your expertise,” she said while Amber blinked.

  Mom continued to me, pressing a kiss to my cheek. “Don’t be such a stranger, dear. Rob?”

  “Nice to meet you, Amber,” Dad said gruffly and offered a handshake. That same hand made a short pass over my shoulder and squeezed before he followed Mom into the crowds mingling on the ballroom floor.

  I murmured something appropriate and watched them go. As soon as both my parents’ backs were turned, Dahlia whirled on Amber like she’d spotted her favorite prey.

  “Amber Kowalczyk,” Dahlia purred, taking Amber’s hands. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Oh, hell. I rolled my eyes and gestured with my champagne flute toward my insane cousin. “Amber, this is Dahlia, my cousin.”

  “Cousin and oldest friend. Dearest confidant. Favorite family member? I’m going to say yes. Favorite family member.” Dahlia’s smile widened as she leaned in toward her brunette victim. “I’ve been dying to meet you. I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen Iris so wrapped up in someone.”

  If I were the sort of person who still blushed at the things my cousin said, I’d have been the shade of a fire truck. Thankfully, it was hard to keep up that kind of vascular distress for more than a few years. I buried the desire to scoff in another sip of champagne. It was either hide in my drink or throw Dahlia out a window, and I didn’t think they opened.

  “Iris has told me a lot about you,” Amber said warmly, and I tried to remember if that was true.

  Might’ve been. I didn’t see all that many people socially, so the same names came up frequently. And then I was treated to a charismatic fencing bout: Amber’s desire to make the world comfortable by chatting about themselves pitted against Dahlia’s need for people to do exactly what she wanted at all times. Or at least as long as she was curious about them.