by Neil Plakcy
“Why don’t you move back there?”
“Thomas Wolfe said it. You can’t go home again.”
“Friend of yours?” I asked as I picked up my extra-large soda.
“American author. Had to read him in prep school. The thing is, the Mexico City I remember is an idealized place, sunny courtyards shaded by ventanas and overhung with tropical flowers. My brothers and sisters and I were little princes and princesses, spoiled by our parents, waited on by maids. I thought the whole world revolved around me.”
“When did you figure out it doesn’t?”
He laughed. “I guess I still haven’t. I’m an incurable optimist. I believe in a future where I’m in love with a great guy, successful in my career, giving back to my community. I’ve already got a head start on the first two. The third will come, in time.”
It must be nice to have that kind of optimism, I thought, but I didn’t say so. To be handsome and wealthy, smart and well educated, with the sense that the world was going to go your way.
Hold on, I thought. He’d said he had a head start on the first two—love with a great guy and business success. And yet he’d told me the other day that he’d been too busy to date anyone. So there must be some guy he was crushing on, maybe back in Silicon Valley. Someone who was a good fit for him. Not me; he was Google—the big time. I was AppWorks—a first-generation college graduate, with a technical degree from a state university, one whose initials, FU, were a source of ridicule. Eff you? No, eff me, for even daydreaming about kissing Julian Argento.
I stood up, careful not to bang my head on one of the low-hanging plants out on the balcony. “Time to get back to work.”
We snacked on blue corn chips and organic salsa, drank coffee and Red Bull, and worked. Late in the afternoon I switched laptops with Julian so he could test some pages that were heavy on images. I had my head down, working, when I heard Julian say, “What the fuck?”
My head popped up. “What’s the matter? You found something wrong?”
“Why do you have these pictures on your laptop?” he asked. He shifted the screen so I could see a photo of Julian, naked and hard. “Where did you get these?”
“Oh, those,” I said, and I felt myself blushing. “They were, um, on your website.”
“No, they weren’t,” he said. “I destroyed all of them. Have you been in touch with Paul?”
“Let me show you,” I said. I opened a Google Chrome browser on his laptop and went to his personal website, the one that had been created while he was a student at Stanford. I opened the developer tools and then searched for *.jpg. It popped up a list of all the images on the site.
I shifted Julian’s laptop so he could see and showed him the list. “See this directory?” I said, pointing at the X. “All your pictures are under there.”
He took the laptop from me and clicked on the first picture in the list, the one of Julian naked, lying on his side on his dorm bed. “Fuck me,” he said.
“You sure look like that’s what you’re saying in that picture.”
“This isn’t funny. How do I get those taken down?”
“Do you know the password for your FTP access?” I asked.
He looked down at the tabletop. “Paul set it up when we were at Stanford,” he said. “I don’t remember what password he used.”
“Do you know the e-mail address you used back then?”
He nodded. “Same one I’m using today.”
“Good. I’ll figure out how to reset your password for you. For now the pictures should be safe unless someone’s really looking for them.”
He nodded. “Which doesn’t answer why you have them on your laptop.”
I was blushing again. “Don’t make me say it, Julian.”
“Make you say what?” He looked at me. “Have you been jerking off to these pictures of me?”
“I’m sorry, Julian. I stumbled on them, you know, and you’re such a hot guy...”
Julian took a deep breath. “This is too weird. I need some time to think.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Why don’t I go to Publix and get some food.”
He was out the door before I could say anything. I quickly deleted the files from my laptop, then went to the home page for the web-hosting company, one of those that offered free sites. I put in a request to reset his password and entered his e-mail address.
Then I sat back. How could I have been so stupid to keep those pictures on my laptop? Because I’d been thinking with the little head instead of the big one. And now that Julian knew I had been beating my meat over his nudie shots, I’d probably screwed any chance that something romantic would happen between us.
By the time Julian returned from Publix with sub sandwiches, I was ready to upload my files to the FU server so we could start testing. Neither of us mentioned the photos while we ate, and I felt an uncomfortable gnawing at the base of my stomach as I waited for Julian to say something.
We finished eating and began testing. Right away I spotted a problem—the box where you entered the description of your project spilled across the screen. Julian had written the HTML code for the home page, based on what his guy had suggested. I pulled up the code in Dreamweaver and began to read through it.
Obviously nobody had taught Julian how to lay out code, and it was a bear to read. It took me ten minutes of close inspection to find the missing table tag.
“See how I use indents on my tables?” I asked Julian, shifting my screen around so he could see. “Every time you start a row, you indent. Then you indent each column below that. It makes it easier to find the missing tags.”
He leaned in close to me, and I felt a shiver of sexual tension.
“Cool,” he said. “I saw some guys write like that, but I didn’t understand why.”
He went back to his laptop, and we kept testing. We changed the ASCII codes for the colors one by one until Julian was satisfied. His friend had designed a mascot for the site, a talking pencil who switched hats depending on the language you were using—a sombrero for Spanish, a beret for French, and so on. It took a lot of tweaking until the mascot was an acceptable size for each page.
Julian had decided to launch the site with only three languages: French, Spanish, and German. A translator had taken all the English-language copy the site would display—the welcome message, the instructions, even the contract documents—and I had to incorporate code that looked at the cookie the site created, and displayed the appropriate language. Julian checked all the Spanish, and every now and then he’d complain about a spelling mistake or a typo.
“I knew I should have hired someone to proofread these translations,” he said. “My French isn’t good enough to catch errors, and I know zero German.”
“The secretary at AppWorks majored in French in college,” I said. “Mila. I could see if she could proof for you. She told me that she speaks German too, though I’m not sure how good she is.”
“Can you ask her tomorrow?”
I agreed, though I knew I’d have to tell her to keep quiet to her cousin Boris about my doing work on the side.
It was closing in on midnight when I said, “I think we’re ready to move everything to the live server and start beta testing.”
“Really? You don’t need more time in the sandbox?”
The sandbox was what we called the development server at FU. It was the equivalent of playing with your code until you were ready for prime time. “What’s the worst that can happen?” I asked. “It’ll crash? So I’ll fix it.”
I made the connection to the server where Julian was hosting his site. Then I sat back, Julian at my side, and we watched the files transfer.
I noticed that Julian’s hand was shaking. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m nervous,” he said. “I think I might be on a sugar crash too.”
I reached over and took his hand in mine. It was warm and moist, but holding hands with him felt amazing. “It’s going to be great,” I said. “You have a terrific idea, something that the w
orld needs.”
He squeezed my hand and turned to look at me, and before I knew what was happening, we were kissing. He sure knew how, nibbling on my lower lip, stroking my tongue with his, his breath soft and warm. After a little awkwardness I followed his lead, leaning my head back so he could kiss my neck. Then he brought his mouth back to mine, and I closed my eyes and focused on Julian.
My dick was hard as a rock by then. I opened my eyes and saw that the files had uploaded to the new server. I pulled away from Julian and said, “Let’s see how it looks.”
I went back to my computer and hit a couple of keys, and the pencil popped up, in the cowboy hat that signaled the program had recognized my IP address as one in the United States. Everything looked good. “It’s all there,” Julian said, his voice breathless. “Larry, you’re a genius!”
“Nah, just a geek,” I said.
“Way more than that.” He jumped up and took my hand. “Come with me. I want to celebrate.”
He led me across the dining room to the balcony doors, and it felt fun and wild to be holding hands like that, both of us punch-drunk on success and Red Bull. When we stepped outside, he took me in his arms. He turned his face up to me, and I leaned down to meet his mouth.
Our chins grazed against each other. Julian had a bit of five o’clock shadow, and I loved the way it felt against my skin. He smelled like lemon cologne mixed with salt water from the ocean breeze. His lips were hard against mine, pressing forward as I yielded.
“So you’re not upset that I had those pictures?” I asked when we took a break.
“I’m flattered,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how you felt about me until I saw them, and you told me how you’d found them.” He smiled. “Then I knew. It just took me a little while to process everything.”
We leaned against the balcony railing, and Julian began nibbling at my neck. I ran my fingers through his thick dark hair as my skin tingled. He reached down and stroked me through my cargo shorts, and I thought I was going to come right there. It was so sexy on the balcony with the night wrapping around us. Julian untucked my T-shirt from my shorts and tugged it over my head, then dropped it onto one of the recliners.
“I’m still going to pay you,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel like—”
“Don’t worry about what I feel. It’s all good.”
Then he pulled his polo shirt off, kicked off his sneakers, and dropped his pants to the floor. He wasn’t wearing anything under there, and his body was slim and gorgeous, with a layer of silky black hair on his chest that ran down to his groin. His arms and legs were hairy too, which was a huge turn-on for me, because my body is so smooth.
“You’re not...” he said, and I realized I was still wearing my jeans.
“No, no, I am.” I was already barefoot, and I dropped my pants to the balcony floor. I was embarrassed that beneath them I was wearing old tighty-whities. If I’d known there was a chance Julian was going to see my undies, I’d have worn something sexier.
Julian wouldn’t let me shuck them; he got down on his knees, his dick bobbling between his legs, and licked up along the length of my shaft. Electric shocks ran through my body, and I felt droplets of sweat under my arms. He put his mouth on the head of my dick and began sucking me through the thin fabric.
Oh, Jesus, I thought. We were going to have sex right there on the balcony. It was such a horny idea that I couldn’t help myself, and I shot off in my briefs. Julian looked up in surprise. “You came?”
“Sorry,” I said. “But don’t worry; I’ll take care of you.”
He stood up and smiled. “That is so sexy! I can’t believe I made you come so fast.”
Julian kissed me again, pressing his hand against my softening dick. It was so sensitive against the fabric, with the come pooling around the head and dripping down the side.
I wrapped my fist around Julian’s dick and began jerking him slowly as he nibbled on my neck and shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” he mumbled into my neck. “That feels so good.”
He whimpered as I jerked him harder, and a moment later he spurted in my hand. “Now we’ve tied the score,” he said, looking at me and smiling. He held up his right index finger, licked it, and pretended to mark an imaginary scoreboard. “One each.”
I laughed and pulled off my come-stained shorts. I wiped my groin, and then my hands. “Want something to drink?”
“Yes, please!”
We picked up our clothes, and I led him back into the kitchen, where I pulled a pair of beers from the fridge. They were Manny’s, but I’d pay him back for them.
“Where’s your bedroom?” Julian asked.
“I’ll show you.” I reached for his hand, but he shoved his half-hard dick forward instead, and so I grabbed it and led him down the hall. His dick was moist and hot in my hand, and it stiffened as we moved. Mine popped up in response, and by the time we were lying on my bed together, we were both hard again.
Julian was very inventive in bed. Our initial horniness had been satisfied, and we went on to lick armpits, kiss behind knees, suck and rim each other until my guts were boiling.
He ended up on top of me, dick to dick, and began a slow, rhythmic frottage. He arched his back like a cat, licked his lips and panted. It was so fucking sexy, all that slippery hair and skin rubbing against me, his pubic hair scratching my dick. I looked up at his eyes glazed with lust.
My whole body shook, and I began to whimper. “Sí, sí,” Julian said, his voice strangling, and he jerked hard against me, and I felt his cream on my skin. I couldn’t hold back any longer, and I was spurting until my dick ached.
Julian slid down beside me and rested his head on my chest, and in minutes we were both fast asleep. We didn’t wake up until around sunrise the next morning, our bodies sweaty and sticky. Julian hopped out of bed and headed for the bathroom. I heard him say hello to Manny on the way.
Manny leaned in my bedroom and gave me a broad smile and a thumbs-up. I smiled lazily back at him.
When Julian came back, he was all cleaned up, carrying the clothes we had left in the kitchen. “I’ve got some beta testers lined up,” he said. “I’ll get them going. I know you have to work today. You think we could meet up again this evening to go over any bug lists?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
He blew me a kiss from the doorway and left, and all too quickly I had to get up and get ready for AppWorks.
23 – A Good Secret
I checked my laptop before I left home on Thursday morning. E-books Everywhere hadn’t crashed, though I was sure there would be a million bugs to fix once we started inputting data. But I smiled all the way down to AppWorks.
Dom was already there. It looked like he was following through on his lifestyle changes: his hair was combed, his beard still neatly trimmed, and he didn’t smell bad. It also looked like he might have lost some weight—his shirt buttons didn’t strain against the fabric so much.
“Boris wants to talk to you,” he said. “He heard back from the bank you did that app for, and I got the feeling from him that they’re not happy.”
I wondered if the bank had made substantial requests, or if Victor Kunin was getting his banker friend to fuck around with me. I walked over to Boris’s office and stood awkwardly in the doorway. He was speaking rapid, guttural Russian to someone on the phone, and he motioned me to the seat across from him.
When he finished his call, he looked at me. “You are okay, Larry? Because is not like you to release app with bugs. You know, is very fast business here. Programmers got to keep up—good products, quickly.”
“I’m sorry, Boris. I thought I had caught everything in the bank app.”
He turned to his computer and typed, and a page spit out of his printer. I read it while he looked at the screen.
“These aren’t bugs,” I said after I’d read through the list. “Nothing is broken. This is feature creep.” That’s when a client keeps adding stuff to an application after the initial project design, after testing,
after launch. It could go on forever.
Boris nodded. “I see. But is good client. You can add these without much time?”
“If I can put off the sandwich-shop app, I can do it all today.” One of the new features was a lot like something I’d done for Victor’s model-agency app, so I was sure he was the one who had spoken to the banker and suggested it. But had he done so because he was sure of my abilities? Or was he trying to make me look bad at work?
I went back to the cube farm and told Dom what I had to do. “I’m up to my ass in alligators,” he said. “Boris took on two new projects yesterday, and everybody else is slamming on their own stuff. So I can’t help you out. Sorry.”
“No worries. I’ll get it all done.”
I sent Julian a quick text to tell him I’d be working late. He replied that he would be testing the site and compiling a bug list. Hooray.
I wrote the routines for each of the extra features the bank had requested, and then banged away at testing each one. There was no game-playing that night; everybody was busy. We ordered pizza and kept coding. Around nine o’clock I put the bank app aside and went back to the sandwich shop. I got totally into it and didn’t look up until midnight, when the rest of the guys were ready to call it quits.
I wanted to stay later, pull an all-nighter if I had to, in order to finish incorporating the routines into the sandwich-shop app. But Dom wouldn’t let me. “You need to sleep, dude,” he said. “Trust me on that. You work too long, and you start screwing up your code.”
I’d pulled a lot of all-nighters at FU, but Dom wouldn’t budge, and he and Noah were the only ones with keys to the office. I splurged on a cab home, since the buses were on an infrequent schedule that late. I was still buzzed by the time I got home.
I needed to open my laptop and put in a couple of hours on Julian’s website, knocking out a half dozen bugs he had found. I went to sleep around four, but I was back at the office at eight thirty on Friday morning, as Mila was making the first pot of coffee.
“What are you doing here so early?” she asked.
I explained that Dom wouldn’t let me stay late the night before. “I need to get to work.” I hesitated. “Say, Mila, do you ever do any freelance work? Proofreading translations?”
