Bait

by Mia Carson

  “Hey! Right on time. Come in,” she said, stepping back as she opened the door wide in invitation. “You clean up nice!”

  I smiled as I produced the flowers. “For you.”

  “Flowers? Thank you!” She took the tulips and bussed me on the lips. The sixty bucks I’d spent on the flowers had just become worth it. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I always bring flowers on the first date.”

  “My, aren’t you the charmer, then.”

  “I do my best.”

  “Let me put these in some water.”

  I glanced around. The apartment was small, probably a single bedroom, with a kitchen and dining area sharing space with a living room. The furniture was inexpensive but serviceable, and the place was tidy. It was nothing special, but I’d lived in worse. A lot worse.

  “Nice place.”

  “Thanks,” she said as she pulled a vase from a cabinet. “I like it. It’s simple and inexpensive, but it’s all I need.”

  I watched her as she went about the business of arranging the flowers. She was dressed casually in jeans that hugged her ass to perfection, complemented by tall black leather boots with a low heel and side buckles that stopped just below her knees. Over her jeans she was wearing a long sleeved, white shirt that had some extra material sewn into it that formed an ‘X’ under her breasts and drew the eye to the plunge. The outfit was sexy as hell without being slutty and fit her perfectly. I watched as she fussed with the tulips, almost mesmerized by her.

  “There,” she said as she adjusted the last stem to her liking. “Ready?”

  “Yep.” I said, dragging myself out of my daydream.

  She locked up and I led her down the steps to my car, opening the door for her. She smiled at me as she sat down, and I closed the door as she tucked in her legs. “Nice car,” she said, still looking around and touching things as I slid under the wheel.

  “I like it.”

  “A Volvo isn’t the first thing that comes to people’s mind for a single guy to drive.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not, but it’s safe, has plenty of room, and has a place to stick Bailey’s bike,” I explained as I pointed at the roof.

  “Yeah, but a Volvo?”

  “Does it bother you?” I asked. I’d be disappointed if it did. If a woman was only interested in me for the car I drove, I probably wouldn’t be interested in her.

  “No, but you have to admit, it does go against type. Most single guys like fast cars.”

  “Like your Mustang?”

  “Yeah, something like that. Camaro, BMW, Porsche, maybe a pickup.”

  I grinned. “This thing is quicker than you think.”

  She nodded, humoring me. “Right.” There were no cars around at the moment, and we were just puttering along at thirty-five, the speed limit, so I floored it. The car slammed us back in the seats as it clawed for speed. “Christ! This thing’s a Volvo?” she gasped, her eyes wide, when I lifted at sixty and allowed the car to slow.

  I snickered. “I told you it was quicker than you think.”

  She twittered out a laugh. “That much is sure. I had no idea.”

  “See? First a cappuccino, now a Volvo, and who knows, in an hour, maybe a craft beer.”

  “Touché,” she agreed. “But this is a damn nice car. I always thought of Volvo’s as mom-mobiles, but this thing has everything.”

  “Cars are just rolling computers now.”

  “Bikes are getting to be the same way. The days of some guy wrenching on his Harley in the driveway are almost over. Now they have ECUs and fuel injection just like cars.”

  “You like bikes?”

  Her eyes became distant for a moment. “Yeah. Not as much as I used to, though. I guess I’m getting older. You?”

  I shook my head. “Not really my thing. I like air conditioning, cruise control, comfortable seats, and staying dry in the rain.”

  “Yeah, I can understand that.”

  We talked about her trials of being a woman in the service department of a motorcycle shop the rest of the way to Carolina Ale House, sharing a laugh at some of her stories. When we arrived, I led her in and spoke to the hostess.

  “About thirty minutes,” I said.

  “That’s fine.” She looked at me a moment. “What do you know about PhoneBabel?”

  I grinned down at her. “Someone’s been doing some reading.”

  “That’s you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No kidding? I would have never guessed. I couldn’t find out a lot about it. What does ‘real time, natural language translation’ mean?”

  “Computers have been able to speak with a human voice for years. If you get one of those, ‘Hi, this is Jessica from card member services,’ phone calls, that’s a computer. The thing is, that’s a script.” She nodded again, but I could tell she had no idea where this was going. “There are also translation programs available. Retriever has a good one. You key in a word in one language, and it will give you the same word in another. What I did was combine the two. PhoneBabel did the translation in real time. You would call our server, tell it what language you wanted, and my program would translate the words as you said them into another language.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly.

  “Here’s how it worked. You’d create an account with PhoneBabel and put in the phone number you were calling from and a list of phone numbers you were calling along with the language for each of the numbers. So when you needed to place a call to a customer, a client, whomever, you would dial our number, enter the phone number you wanted, and we would complete the call, but the words that came out on the other side would be in the other language. When the person on the other end of your call spoke, we would translate going the other way. So you would talk in your native language, and they would talk in their native language, and we would handle the translation between the two in real time.”

  Her eyes got big when she got it. “That’s amazing!”

  I grinned. “Just computing horsepower and some fancy algorithms. But yeah, it was pretty amazing.”

  “And you developed that?”

  “The translation algorithms, yeah. I could go from and to twenty different languages, and I was working on adding more when Retriever bought me out.”

  “Amazing. How many languages do you speak?”

  “One.”

  “Then how…?”

  “It’s just programming. I even sampled the voices and stored them. The more you used PhoneBabel, and the more samples of your voice I built up, the more like your voice the translations became. Most people, after two hours of speaking, couldn’t tell my computer-generated voice from the voice of the person they were speaking to.”

  “Why’d you sell?”

  “Mr. Gregg?” the hostess called. “This way, please.”

  The hostess led us to our table and we sat down. “Why wouldn’t I?” I continued when we were alone again. “That was more money than I could dream of and I was barely scrimping by.”

  She blinked at me. “I don’t understand. How could—”

  “How often do you need to translate something?” I asked, cutting off her question.

  She paused. “Okay, I understand that. But it seems like the world really needs something like that.”

  “Retriever agreed, and they made the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “So you took the money and ran?”

  “More or less. They didn’t want me, they wanted my algorithms, and I was tired of being poor.”

  “Poor?”

  “As a church mouse.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “How? I mean, you must be some kind of genius.”

  “Not really.”

  We paused as we placed our orders, and I ordered Carolyn the sampler of beer and the Citrus Blonde for both of us.

  “I got Cheryl, my girlfriend, pregnant. I still don’t understand how it happened, but it did. That was tough. We got married. I was still
in college, and we were living hand to mouth. Bailey coming along didn’t help things. I was a senior when she bailed.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Couldn’t take it anymore, I guess. I came home from class one day and her bags were packed. She handed me Bailey, and that was the last I saw of her. She went off to find herself or something. I don’t know. Don’t care. Not anymore.”

  “So you’re still married?” she asked.

  “No. We’re divorced now. I claimed she abandoned us, and she never bothered to show up to dispute it, so it was pretty cut and dry. I got everything, what little there was.”

  “Were you able to finish school?”

  “Yeah. My parents are saints. They took care of Bailey while I finished school. In college, I had this one professors, we called him ‘Professor Pidgeon’ because nobody could understand him. To be fair, he spoke English a lot better than I can speak Japanese, but that’s where the idea of PhoneBabel came from.”

  Our drinks and Carolyn’s taster showed up, six small glasses with about two ounces of beer in each one. I continued my story as she began to sample them.

  “After I graduated, I went to a dozen different banks, looking for backing to get the company off the ground.” I snorted. “The only thing they would give me was an escort to the door. At night I worked on the program, refining it, ironing out the bugs. For two years, I worked on that every spare minute. Bailey and I were living in a dumpy little apartment, and I made ends meet by fixing computers and doing contract programming. I was only sleeping two or three hours a night and living on Ramen Noodles.”

  “This is good,” she said, sitting the first glass back in the holder. “It doesn’t sound like you had much of a life.”

  “I didn’t. When the program was ready, I borrowed ten grand from my folks, moved to Columbia, and rented the cheapest office I could find. I bought a couple of servers and set up shop. I almost went under more times than I could count. Over the next three years, PhoneBabel brought in just enough money to keep the business afloat, but it left nothing to live on. I’d bring Bailey to work with me, and he’d play while I worked. I kept refining the software, making improvements, squashing bugs, and little by little I was growing.”

  She put the next glass back. “Woof. That one has some kick, but it’s good.” She looked at me, her eyes dancing. “You’re not trying to get me drunk, are you?”

  “Me?” I asked in mock shock and surprise as I placed my fingers against my chest. “Never!”

  “So what happened next?”

  “Nothing. I was just starting to get on my feet. For the first time I was making enough to cover expenses and actually live. Then Retriever showed up with a dump truck load of money.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am. That’s why I do what I do. I remember when nobody believed in me, how frustrating and hard that was. If someone had bought into the idea in the beginning, they would be sitting pretty right now, but they didn’t, so their loss was my gain. That ten-thousand-dollar loan my parents gave me? I paid that back with a little interest.”

  As our food showed up she nodded in understanding of my implication. “So, now you’re helping the little guy?”

  “Yeah. And if they hit big, like I did, then I’ll be there for my piece of the pie.”

  “That’s an amazing story. Did you have friends crawling out of the woodwork after you sold?”

  I chuckled. “You have no idea. People seem to think I’m like Scrooge McDuck with a vault full of money I swim around in, but it doesn’t work like that. Most of my”—I made tick marks in the air— “wealth is actually stock in Retriever. The deal was for cash and stock, and the cash I’m investing.”

  “Well, you’re certainly not poor,” she pointed out.

  “No, but I don’t have bags of cash sitting around as footstools either.”

  “I bet your wife was sorry.”

  “Yeah. After I sold, she came after me, wanting half. She didn’t get one cent.”

  Carolyn grinned at me. “I can tell that bothers you.” She pointed at her plate with her knife. “You were right. The food here is really good.”

  “Yeah, totally broken up about it, and I’m glad you like it.” The conversation lulled for a moment as we ate. “So, now you know my life story. What about you?”

  She shook her head. “You already know everything.” I watched her, waiting for her to continue. “Seriously,” she insisted. “I grew up, finished high school, went to work at the Harley dealer, and I’m still there.”

  “Oh, come on, there has to be more to you than that.”

  Her lips twitched with some unspoken memory and she looked at her plate. “No, not really.”

  She was being very cagey, and I wondered why. “Never married?”

  “Nope.”

  “Friends?”

  “Not really.”

  “So you go to work and go home?”

  “Exciting isn’t it?” she said with a smile.

  I spent the rest of the evening trying to pry information out of her. I found out she grew up lower-middle class; her dad owned a small plumbing company and her mom worked as a cashier at a local grocery store. She claimed to have no friends and no interests, and had dated one guy for the past several years, but after a fight, they were done. I had the feeling she was hiding something. Not lying, exactly, more like an omission.

  We talked a little about my family, how, like her, I’d grown up in a working class family. She seemed fascinated that I didn’t date much. I didn’t know why she had such a hard time believing it. First, I was married, then there was Bailey and I was so poor I couldn’t rub two nickels together, plus I worked all the time just trying to survive. Only in the last three or four years had things gotten better.

  We finished our meals. “Ooof,” she grunted. “It was good, but I’m stuffed.”

  “What did you think of the beers?”

  “I liked them. I liked the Citrus Blonde and the Chocolate Witch Stout the best. The Good Chit was pretty good too.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I said as I signed the bill and tucked away my credit card. “Ready for a latte?”

  She groaned. “Too full.”

  I walked her to the car. It was only nine o’clock, but it was starting to feel like the date was over. I’d wanted to spend more time with her, but instead I drove her home in a companionable silence.

  “I had a really good time,” she said as we slowly made our way up the steps to her apartment.

  “So did I. I’d like to take you out again.”

  She smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “Great. Next Saturday, my place? I’ll cook.”

  “Really? You’ll cook for me?”

  “I’m not a bad cook!” I exclaimed as if I was insulted and she twittered. “Sure, why not? We can go out if you’d rather. Is there someplace you’d like to try?”

  “Yeah, your place.”

  “It’s set then. I’ll send you my address later.”

  “Look forward to it.”

  We paused at her door. My heart was thudding in my chest, but I desperately wanted to kiss her. She seemed to be waiting for something, so I leaned in, pausing with my lips a hair’s breadth from hers. She didn’t pull back, so I closed the remaining distance and kissed her softly. The kiss was innocent, and I drew back after only a moment.

  “Nice,” she whispered.

  “Very,” I agreed.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Please.”

  I debated trying to kiss her again, but I didn’t want to come on too strong. I softly caressed her face as I stepped back, turned, and trotted down the steps, my feet barely touching the ground.

  Carolyn

  I drove slowly, looking at house numbers. Thom lived in an unassuming neighborhood of modest homes. The houses weren’t small, but they weren’t something I’d imagine someone as rich as him living in either. I wondered if his neighbors realized they had a billionair
e living among them. I suspected they didn’t.

  I found his house and turned into the drive. Like its neighbors, the house was faced with brick, in this case a ruddy red, with a tidy, well-maintained lawn. It wouldn’t surprise me if Thom did the yard work himself. I sat for a moment, gathering myself.

  Thom was unlike any man I’d ever been with. He called me a couple of times over the past week, just to talk, and I got at least a good night text from him every day. It made me feel all warm and squishy inside that he was thinking about me. No man had ever been so considerate, and I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. His attention made me realize how I’d been treated like property my whole life, and that left me evaluating my life choices. Where had someone like Thom been my entire life?

  I shook it off and walked to the front door, listening for the rolling thunder of a hog. Now that I knew the Ravens were keeping tabs on me, I sometimes noticed them hanging around my apartment. They hadn’t bothered me, but just having them there was upsetting. They used to be my friends, but now they were treating me like an outsider. I rang the bell.

  “She’s here!” I heard Bailey call from inside, then the thumping of running feet. “Hi! Come in,” he said as he opened the door. “Dad and Bláithín are in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stepped into a typical new construction house, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and neutral walls. I glanced around. The house wasn’t huge, but it was far larger than my apartment. It was decorated with saddle brown leather furniture arranged on a deep red and brown area rug, with several large prints on the wall. It was tasteful and masculine, without being a cave.

  “Hey! Glad you could make it,” Thom said as he appeared, wiping his hands on a towel. He gave me a quick kiss. “Come on into the kitchen.”