Love on the Web

by Neil Plakcy

  He uncapped the water bottle and took a long gulp as I paid for my cream. Then he dropped two tablets into the bottle and shook it.

  “Well, see you at work tomorrow,” I said.

  “I am starving,” he said, raising the bottle to his mouth and taking a long swallow. “Come have breakfast with me.”

  I had only brought a couple of bucks to pay for the cream. “I don’t have any more cash,” I said.

  “Is no problem. I owe you breakfast for all business you bring to me.”

  I let him drag me down Alton Road. As we walked, he drained the rest of his bottled water and belched appreciatively. We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall café, and I was glad when the hostess took us to a booth with padded benches. I slipped in carefully.

  Boris ordered an egg-white omelet and fried potatoes with no onions, and I got the chocolate-chip pancakes. We both had Cuban coffee, and Boris lifted his cup to clink against mine. “To more clients,” he said.

  “Um, about that,” I said.

  “What? You have more to bring?”

  I shook my head. “This is awkward. But Victor... Well, I was kind of seeing him for a while. I think that’s why he was sending us clients.”

  “But no more, huh?”

  “No more. And I don’t know. He might...”

  “No worries,” he said. “You are good worker, Larry. I see you can program. More clients will come because of that.”

  The waitress put our food down in front of us. “You don’t have to do nothing extra for company, Larry. Just do good job.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Boris. This was my mistake.”

  “We all learn,” he said.

  We spent the rest of the breakfast on geek talk—how he had gotten started, how he hoped the business would grow. I was tempted to tell him about Julian’s website, but then I remembered the contract I’d signed that gave him part of the profit for anything I did. Oh, great, another secret I was keeping.

  21 – Sad Geeks

  After I finished breakfast with Boris, I walked back home and slathered my butt with ointment, then went back to sleep on my stomach. When I woke up a few hours later, my cheeks were more pink than red.

  I walked into the kitchen to grab some dry cereal. I stood by the counter eating until Gavin stumbled in looking for coffee. I volunteered to make him a cup. “Cool,” he said. “For once somebody else is the barista.”

  He slumped into one of the wooden kitchen chairs while I poured the beans he had brought home from work into the burr grinder. When the noise was done and I had the cappuccino brewing, I said, “So I have a question.”

  “I knew there was some reason you were making me coffee,” he said. “The answer is that if it burns when you pee, you need to see a doctor.”

  “Yuck. I don’t even want to know how you know that.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  The coffee began dripping into the glass pot. I got the milk from the fridge and poured some into the stainless-steel pot—also, I was sure, brought home from Java Joe’s. “Have you ever been with a guy who wanted to hurt you?”

  He laughed. “Usually they save that for after I break up with them.” Then he looked at me. “What happened?”

  Instead of answering, I stuck the milk into the frother, which filled the room with noise. I poured the coffee into a mug and the milk into the coffee and handed it to him. “No whipped cream?” he asked.

  I got the canister from the refrigerator, shook it, and squirted some on his coffee.

  “I’m guessing from the fact that you’re standing up, and there are weird bulges on your ass behind your shorts, you got spanked last night. True?”

  “True that,” I said. “But there was more.”

  He picked up his mug and tasted the coffee. “Not bad for an amateur. So spill.”

  I told him what I’d told Julian, but Gavin wanted more detail—how tight were the handcuffs, how big was the dildo, how flexible was the flyswatter thing. After the third question, I was ready to cry. “I don’t know, Gavin. I just know it hurt. But I was also kind of turned on.”

  I looked at him. “Am I some kind of freak? Like maybe I can’t have normal sex anymore? The guy will have to tie me up and whip me and beat me?”

  “It’s all right, Larry,” he said, leaning back in his chair and cupping his mug in his hand. “Everybody experiments. And because something turns you on once doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you can ever do. I’ve done some kinky shit myself, and while I’m not sorry I did it, and I might not turn it down if it was offered again, I can be as happy cuddling with a guy I like.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Really.” He went into his room and returned with a blow-up plastic doughnut. “This is made for hemorrhoid relief, but it works for any kind of ass pain,” he said. “Put a couple of those soft pillows from the sofa on top of it.”

  I did what he said and was able to sit down at the table without too much discomfort. I opened my laptop and got to work on the reports tab for Julian’s website, where the author, the translator, and the reviewer would be able to see sales.

  Julian texted me that he was having dinner with a potential investor, and that he’d stop by after he finished. I got into the work, programming like mad for hours. I scarfed a family-sized TV dinner and some Red Bull and kept working until he arrived.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked when I let him into the apartment.

  “Much better. Thank you for last night.”

  “It wasn’t the way I figured I’d first see you naked, but life throws curveballs at us,” Julian said.

  Huh? Julian had been thinking about seeing me naked?

  As we walked into the dining room, he asked, “Were you able to get any work done?”

  Whoa. He’d sent me off on a sexy tangent, then gone right back to business? I gulped. “I was.” I sat carefully on my pile of pillows. “Made a lot of progress on the reports. I think you’ll be pleased.”

  I walked Julian through what I’d been doing, and he was impressed. “You work fast.”

  “I’ve been coding the complex routines first. Wait until I get to the simple HTML. Then you’ll see me move.” I pushed back my chair. “Want a beer?”

  Julian agreed, and I got us both bottles from the fridge. Fortunately my brother didn’t like microbrews, or he’d have drunk everything we had.

  Julian and I played around with the site for a while, and then he asked, “So this guy you were with. Boyfriend?”

  “Not at all. Just a guy I met through work. And I’m not going to be seeing him again.” I hesitated for a moment and then took the plunge. “How about you?” I asked. “You dating anyone?”

  He shook his head. “Not for a while. I’ve been too busy getting this business going.” He looked at me. “I appreciate how much you’re helping me, Larry. This is my dream, and thanks to you, I can finally see it starting to come true.”

  I felt a flush of pride. “It’s only programming, Julian.”

  “It’s still great,” he said. There was something in the air between us. But after my disaster with Victor, I was reluctant to mix business with pleasure. Once I had Julian’s project finished, then maybe, if he really was interested.

  He left a short while later, and I went back to work, humming along until well after midnight. Monday morning my ass was still pink, but it felt a lot better. I put a sofa pillow in my knapsack to use at work and stood in the aisle on the bus instead of sitting.

  Lilah was already at work when I arrived, and I told her the graphics I needed for the bank app. While she began, I started framing the sandwich-shop project, and when Dom came in, he worked with me. He really knew his shit, and it was interesting to see the way he laid everything out like a timeline. Boris was right; this was a much bigger project than anything I’d worked on before.

  There were so many different inputs. Four different types of bread and a dozen or more choices for filling, from turkey breast to tuna salad to hand-slic
ed pastrami. Extras, like lettuce, pickles, and banana peppers. Condiments. Six-inch or foot-long. Sliced in half? Chips, sodas, cookies? Plus it had to be easy for the staff to subtract things from the menu. If they were temporarily out of teriyaki sauce, they didn’t want customers ordering it.

  Then all the back-end work—collecting delivery information, credit card data, storing it all behind a password. The complications were mind-boggling. After Dom and I laid it all out, I worked most of the afternoon on my own, until I found a database problem I had to ask him for help with.

  As he leaned beside me to focus on my computer screen, I realized that he smelled like orange-scented soap, rather than sweat and funk. Looking closely, I saw that his beard had been trimmed neatly too. So he had listened to me when I talked to him.

  My God. I was a style guru for sad geeks. What was this world coming to?

  Dom pointed at the screen. “There’s the problem. You’ve got one call to the database nested inside another.” He pulled the keyboard and the mouse close and fiddled with the code for a minute, then sat back. “That should fix things.”

  “Thanks, Dom. You’re looking good, by the way.”

  He pushed his chair backward, toward his own cube. “Yeah, your advice totally worked. When I got my Wii, the sports package came with it, but it was still in the box. Over the weekend I got out the stuff and started with bowling. Then I switched over to tennis and then boxing. Wore myself out, but I did it again this morning and already feel like I’m breathing better.”

  It was hard to imagine Dom as an athlete.

  “I figure I can lose at least fifty pounds from being more active and eating better,” he said. “I want to slim down before I make a move on Apsara.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, that’s the second part. Yesterday afternoon I went to that fancy barbershop on Collins Avenue and told them I wanted a makeover.”

  I could imagine Dom walking into the upscale barbershop with his rat’s nest of hair and beard. But someone there had worked some magic.

  “First time I ever got a manicure,” he said, holding out his neatly trimmed nails to me. “The girl who did it was really cool. That’s Apsara. She’s from Thailand. We got to talking, and I told her how I was trying to turn over a new leaf, you know. That stuff you told me about valuing myself and all. She was totally into it and even offered to help.” He grinned. “We have a lunch date on Saturday.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Wow, Dom, that’s great. Good for you.”

  I kept my head down at work, focusing on the sandwich-shop app, thinking about Victor Kunin. I was glad that I’d had the chance to talk to Boris on Sunday morning and give him my side of the story, because he was in meetings almost all day, and I didn’t know what kind of e-mail or voice mail Victor might be leaving him if he was pissed about what had happened Saturday night.

  Boris left at five, and I followed soon after. I couldn’t hang around the office any longer because my ass bothered me, so I took my time walking home.

  By the time I got there, I was hot and sweaty, and I took another shower and rubbed more antibiotic ointment on my ass. It didn’t hurt nearly as much, so I set up the plastic doughnut and the pillows at the dining room table and went back to Julian’s project.

  I found an error in a routine that Rajesh had written, and rather than e-mail him and wait for him to fix it, I jumped into the code myself. My roommates came and went, and somewhere in there I must have eaten dinner. But when I finally looked at the clock, it was two in the morning. I put more ointment on my ass and went to bed.

  I tossed and turned for a while, because thoughts of Julian and Victor kept swirling around in my head. Both of them were using me for their own purposes, but I couldn’t help being attracted to Julian’s intelligence and determination, and Victor’s self-confident swagger and obvious success.

  I wasn’t going back to Victor. I had played a role with him, the young, naïve guy, and I was done with that. But Julian? I’d gotten signals that he was interested, but was he trying to manipulate me to do his work? It was all too complicated.

  Tuesday morning I had a lot of trouble getting up. I was still so tired, and I couldn’t motivate myself to get moving. By the time I got to work, Dom and Kevin were already there, which meant I was way late. “You okay?” Dom asked. “You look sick.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “You need to take vitamins,” Kevin said. “B12. You take a multivitamin, don’t you?”

  “Not since they came in fruit flavors and funny shapes.”

  “You need to make sure your body has the right balance of vitamins and minerals.”

  Lilah nodded along with him.

  Everyone was looking at me. “I’ll get some on the way home. Okay?”

  I didn’t want to give them any details of my ass-kicking on Saturday night, or say that I’d been up late working on an outside project. I slugged a couple of Red Bulls during the day, and though I made progress on the sandwich-store app, by five o’clock I could barely keep my eyes open.

  Dom pushed against my chair, and I realized I’d dozed off at my desk. “Get some rest, dude.”

  I nodded. “Going to.” I sleepwalked to the bus stop and then back home, and when I got to my bed, I collapsed into a deep slumber. I had this dream about being at Victor’s apartment and needing to use the bathroom, but he wouldn’t let me. When I opened my eyes, it was about three in the morning, and I had to take a wicked piss.

  I stumbled to the bathroom, and by the time I was finished, I remembered I hadn’t had dinner the night before. I walked out to the kitchen and foraged through the fridge and the freezer. Fortunately there were some TV dinners left over from my shopping spree with Leroy on Saturday.

  While I waited, I checked my phone for messages. There was a text from Julian that had come in a few hours before—all in caps. SOS MAJOR SCREWUP CALL ASAP.

  It was too late to call him, but I was wide-awake, so I figured I might as well get some work done. I got my laptop from my room and ate a trough of macaroni and cheese while I looked over the code. Then I let my fingers start dancing over the keyboard.

  Before I knew it, I heard Manny get in the shower and realized it was close to six a.m. Gavin would be awake soon to head for his shift at Java Joe’s. If I waited another hour, I’d have the apartment to myself, and I could deal with whatever screw-up Julian had encountered.

  Between family troubles, dating problems, and software struggles, I’d sure become a drama magnet.

  22 – Playing in the Sandbox

  I brewed cappuccinos for the three of us, which I handed off to Gavin and Manny as they left for work. Then I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and my cell phone. I texted Julian that I was awake, and he should call when he could, and looked at my e-mails.

  The interface guy had sent me the rest of the graphics I needed, so I began to incorporate them, doing rudimentary testing as I went. Around eight my phone trilled. “Hey, Julian, sorry I didn’t call last night. I was zonked.”

  “It’s okay. I needed time to calm down anyway. A friend of mine from California told me that he heard Amazon is getting closer to launching their version of a translation marketplace.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “When is it going to be ready?”

  “My friend couldn’t tell me, but he’s going to nose around more. How fast do you think you can finish?”

  I had been screwing around with Julian, shoving aside his work for my AppWorks projects and my family dramas. I figured it was going to take me at least twelve hours or more to finish. Since the guys at work all thought I looked sick, I could get away with calling out. I’d spend the day at home and grind out the rest of Julian’s project.

  “I can get you something by tonight.” I told him my plan.

  “Is there anything I can do to help? You know I can code HTML.”

  “Come over whenever you want. You can work on some of that basic coding I haven’t gotten around to yet.”r />
  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  After I hung up with him, I called AppWorks and spoke to Mila. “I think I might have a cold coming on, and I don’t want to give it to everybody else.”

  “Drink lots of tea with honey,” she said. “I’ll tell Boris.”

  I went into the shower and got dressed, and I was back at my computer when the concierge called to announce Julian. While I waited for him to come up, I did a quick cleanup of the living and dining room areas. Really, why were my roomies such slobs? Couldn’t Gavin take his undies back to his room after shucking them?

  I picked them up with thumb and forefinger and carried them back to his room, where I displayed them on his pillow. Didn’t have the right effect, though. I knew he had a dildo somewhere, so I searched through his drawers until I found it, and I positioned it inside the shorts, with the tip sticking up over the waistband. Perfect.

  By then Julian was at the door. He looked like he’d had a sleepless night; those dark circles were back under his eyes. But he was still handsome.

  “This is so great of you,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Wait until I’m finished to thank me.” I led him to the dining room, and he set up his laptop next to mine. “The layout for the home page is straightforward HTML. If you could implement what your guy sent, then we can make sure it looks okay.”

  “I’m on it,” he said. “I’ve already got a copy of the files he sent.”

  We worked side by side until our stomachs grumbled. Julian got takeout Mexican, and we ate on the balcony, overlooking Biscayne Bay. A pair of sailboats moved by in the light breeze, and traffic swarmed across the causeways to the mainland. “I love Miami,” Julian said between bites of his burrito. “How about you?”

  “Always lived here, so it’s hard to say,” I said. “They say you have to leave a place to appreciate it.”

  “Not true. I was very happy to leave New Hampshire behind. Silly Valley too.” He sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m hunting for the Mexico City where I grew up. Sunshine and lazy days.”