Wasn’t she? How could it feel so real, so right, when it was as phony as a phishing email?
She zoned out while she washed dishes from her brunch with Gideon, still trying to unravel her own tangled feelings.
“Charles.” Gideon tapped her on the shoulder. “What in the name of little green aliens are you wearing?”
Charlie dried her hands and looked down at her Mutant Enemy T-shirt and faded jeans. “I think that’s obvious.”
“But why are you wearing it? Have we taught you nothing?”
They’d taught her that all her worst fears were true—men responded to presentation over content. “We’ll be at Waterfront Park all day. It’s supposed to be hot. I want to be comfortable and I want to be able to sit on the grass without being arrested for public indecency.”
Plus, a tiny part of her wanted to test Daniel to see if he’d respond to her the same way if she wasn’t flashing more skin than an X-rated Vegas revue. To see if he might like her for a reason other than primitive mating instincts.
Although, when she remembered his kiss, she wasn’t sure she didn’t harbor a few primitive urges of her own.
Gideon sniffed and crossed his arms. “Comfortable and attractive are not mutually exclusive.”
“Oh fine. If it’ll get you off my case.” She retreated to her bedroom to change into another borrowed outfit. When she returned to the living room, Gideon frowned at the silk scarf she’d looped around her neck to mask her cleavage.
“What did I tell you about unnecessary froufrous?”
She was so tired of trying to converse with a man while he tried valiantly to avoid staring at her chest. She channeled one of Gideon’s own tactics and batted her eyelashes at him. “G, please?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, if you must. I suppose those parts rarely see the light of day. Don’t forget sunscreen, Charles. We want you to get laid, not French fried.”
She shot him her best death glare. “I’m not trying to get laid. I’m just trying to win the stupid bet so I can land the AGS interview.”
“Umhmmm. Getting laid could be a nice by-product, however. Don’t fight it. God knows I never do.” He propped his fist on his hip. “I’ll bet Daniel probably knows a hell of a lot more about showing you a good time than Poindexter ever did.”
“His. Name. Was. Preston.”
“Whatever. He acted like a Poindexter.” Gideon fussed with the scarf, arranging it to his satisfaction. “Have a good time, and if the opportunity for a little horizontal data-discovery arises, encourage it to rise a little more. You shouldn’t have to work very hard at it. The man is gaga over you.”
No. Not me. Not really. She swatted his hands away. “You mean he’s gaga over the vast expanses of skin you think are necessary.”
“No, darling. I suspect you could wear sackcloth and ashes and he wouldn’t care. It’s you.”
Charlie stood marooned on the rug in the middle of the living room, an icy pellet of guilt lodged in her throat. It couldn’t be true. But what if it was? Isn’t that what you really want? What you’ve always wanted?
“He’s a Stage Two. He won’t get attached.” Lord, was that disappointment in her tone? She cleared her throat. “Stage Two relationships never last more than six months. Usually less.”
“Oh really? Feeling the urge to double-check your data?”
No. For once in her life, Charlie didn’t want to see a data-refresh, didn’t want to overprepare. She just wanted to let it go. Enjoy herself in a way that didn’t involve complex theoretical models or advanced hashing algorithms. “Later.”
Gideon narrowed his eyes. “Charles. Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Charlie checked her ridiculously teeny shoulder bag. Keys. Cell phone. Wallet. Yup. All there. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh my God. You’re leaving the house without checking your email fifty-seven times for AGS data feeds?” He clutched his chest and staggered across the room, the back of one hand pressed to his forehead. “It’s Armageddon. You’ve finally put your social life ahead of geeking out.”
Heat swept up Charlie’s throat. God, she’d been so focused on this date, so focused on Daniel, that she’d lost sight of the real world. Although the only thing she’d be likely to see at this point was the daily email taunt from Shanna, counting down the days until the AGS interview deadline. “I…I forgot. I’ll go do it now.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Gideon blocked the hallway. “I’ve waited for this since the day I met you, and you’re not allowed to ruin the moment.”
Relief surged through her chest. She didn’t want to be reminded of the bet. Not today. “All about you again, G?”
“Always.”
The doorbell saved her from admitting anything to Gideon or herself. “That’s Daniel.” She buzzed him through. “I’ll see you tonight after the fireworks.” When she opened the door, Daniel’s smile evaporated any residual ice in her system in a puff of steam. “Hi.”
“Oh, there’ll be fireworks all right,” Gideon murmured. Charlie aimed a photon torpedo scowl over her shoulder at him and followed Daniel out the door.
Chapter Fourteen
Geekronym: VPN
Translation: Virtual Private Network
Definition: Using a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization’s network, while maintaining privacy using security and encryption protocols.
The mass of people who clogged Waterfront Park for the Blues Festival was exactly what Daniel had hoped for. He and Charlie could be safely anonymous in the crowd, and it had the added benefit of forcing them to walk closely, allowing him to capture her hand to keep them together in the throng.
“Wow,” she said, standing at the edge of the slope that led down to the main stage, a steady stream of concertgoers jostling each other along the path behind them. “This would be a terrible place to be attacked by zombies.”
He grinned down at her. “Is there a good place to be attacked by zombies?”
“Of course.” She slanted a glance at him from under the screen of her curls. “Someplace with two clear exits, no possibility for an attack from the flank, and a weapons cache located conveniently nearby. Make that two weapons caches.”
“Damn. And here I am without my spare crossbow.” He tugged her hand and drew her with him, braving the crowds headed in the other direction like salmon fighting their way upstream. They made it to the relative peace of the riverfront sidewalk under the Hawthorne Bridge, in back of the stalls selling batik clothing, handmade jewelry, and for some reason, plastic and ceramic skulls on sticks.
The breeze off the river, welcome in the heat of the afternoon sun, cooled the back of his neck and lifted the hair off Charlie’s face. The slope of her neck mesmerized him. He raised one hand, tempted to trace the smooth line from her jaw to her shoulder, but before he could touch her, she shifted out of reach.
“Look.” She pointed to a nearby food stand. “Root beer floats.”
He took a deep breath and followed her through the crowd. Don’t move too fast, Shawn. You’re in public, remember. Keep PDA to a minimum.
He joined her in the short line in front of the stand. “Last time I had one of these was at old man Jakachi’s diner with you back in grade school.”
“You remember that?”
“How could I forget? He set the thing down in front of me, you stuck a spoon in the glass, and the whole thing overflowed into my lap.”
“You had a science test coming and you didn’t get heterogeneous nucleation.” A smile quivered on her mouth. “So I demonstrated. You always responded better to the practical than the theoretical.”
“So bicycling home in root beer-infused pants was for my own good?”
“Absolutely.” She broke out i
nto a full-fledged, heart-kicking smile. Christ, he was a goner. “Don’t worry. You’ll be safe today. Plastic spoons aren’t as reactive, and by the time we sit down, a lot of the CO2 will already be released.”
“Thank God.”
They took their floats to one of the blue-clothed tables next to an al fresco dance floor. No bands were onstage, so they had relative quiet to talk and catch up on the missing years.
She told him about her awkward undergraduate years at Stanford, about meeting Gideon and Lindsay when she’d arrived at UO for her psychology master’s, about her inexplicable acquisition of Toshiko at Columbia. He told her about the years he’d spent building up the academic capital to get into journalism school, earning his tuition money as a freelance car mechanic.
“You can fix cars.” She stared at him over her nearly empty float as a band began to set up. “That’s so cool.”
Christ, the woman had four degrees, and she was impressed because he could rebuild a carburetor. “Yeah. Turns out all those auto shop classes in high school weren’t just a way to keep my GPA out of double zeroes. They actually gave me a marketable skill.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” She scooped up a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. Daniel watched her lips close around the spoon and shifted in the hard plastic chair, his pants suddenly too tight. “How sometimes the things we learn as a lark turn out to be important in ways we don’t expect. I’ve gotten more projects for COBOL refactoring than anything else, and I only learned it on a dare.”
“Who dared you?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You did.” She put the spoon down. “Seriously, Daniel. What else have you forgotten?”
“If I could tell you, then I wouldn’t have forgotten it, would I?”
“Daniel—”
“Learning things, committing them to memory doesn’t come easy for me. I have to work at it.” He wadded up his napkin. “After Dad…well, I just didn’t make an effort. It was easier to forget. Besides…” He smiled tightly. “I could never have matched your mental firepower, even if I’d wanted to.”
She ducked her head, pink sneaking across her cheekbones, shrugged, and took the last sip of her root beer. “It wasn’t important. Just a stupid argument we had. Actually, we had it at the state fair while you were trying not to upchuck after your third ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl.”
“No wonder I don’t remember.” He gathered up their trash and tossed it into a nearby bin. “What did I lose on that bet other than my lunch? My autographed picture of Mr. Spock?”
She smiled, but he could tell it was forced. “Nothing. By the time I’d mastered the language, we weren’t…well, let’s say it’s just as well you avoided me in middle school, because you would have been buying my lunches for at least a month.” She turned her head to watch the musicians set up onstage, and her shoulders lifted with a deep breath. “Our last bet,” she murmured.
Daniel rubbed the back of his neck. How many other cherry bombs were hidden in the rusty locker of his memory? He scooted his chair toward her and took her hands. Made her look at him. “Charlie, please believe me when I say I wish I hadn’t been such a dick back then. I wish I’d made different choices.” About a lot of things.
She stared at their joined hands. “I admit, I held a grudge for a long time. But I’m starting to think it was all for the best. Even if you’d been around more, I’d still have been the freaky, introverted geek, the one nobody talked to unless they wanted to borrow my notes.”
He groaned and released her to drop his head into his hands.
“Daniel.” She touched his knee. “It really is okay. If you’d been different, if I’d been different, our lives would have followed different paths. So what if I hated high school? I got out early.”
He lifted his head and met her worried gaze. “How early?”
“I was sixteen. Bypassed senior year altogether.”
“What? No graduation ceremony?” He lifted one eyebrow in an attempt to lighten up the conversation. “No prom?”
“Daniel.” Her voice held a hint of amused exasperation. “The only person who ever asked me to prom was you.”
“Me? I don’t…” Holy shit. Once she’d given him the clue, he didn’t have to try as hard to pull the memory out of his ass.
It had been the day he’d received his final college rejection, when he’d finally gotten an inkling of what his actions had meant to himself and the most important people in his life. He’d attempted to make amends.
He’d caught her between classes.
“Prom? You want to go to the prom with me?” Charlie’s voice was barely audible in the milling crowd.
“Why did you think—” he began, intending to finish with I wouldn’t.
“Hey, everybody. Did you catch that?” The voice of Pete Dawson, Daniel’s chief toady, echoed in the hallway. Charlie flinched, pulled her shoulders forward, and tried to curl herself around her calculus book. “Nit just asked the Destroyer to the prom. As-fucking-if.”
Daniel frowned, glancing at the sudden wall of faces that surrounded them. “Shut it, Pete.”
“Are you kidding? This is too good. I’ll see you in weight training. Hey. Marco. Wait up.”
Pete ran down the hallway, grabbed Marco’s shoulder, and delivered the news, both of them casting avid glances at Daniel and Charlie. Daniel tried to stare them down, warn them off, but he could do nothing from this distance. He turned back to make sure Charlie was okay and to get her answer, but she was gone, shouldering her way through the crowd of grinning onlookers. More than one person said something to her and laughed, and her head bowed further with each jeer.
“You dodged me for days. I took that as a no.”
She blinked, her mouth dropping open for an instant. “You mean…you were serious?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You hadn’t spoken to me in years. I never thought…I assumed it was just…” Laughing softly, she shook her head. “It’s probably just as well. I hated crowds then even more than I do now.”
“You’re doing okay with this one.”
She glanced around, as if she was surprised to find other people surrounding them. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
The band struck up a Zydeco-flavored tune. “Turns out, I never went to prom, either. I think I was suspended at the time for decking Pete and Marco after that scene in the hallway.” Daniel stood up, holding out his hand. “Since we both missed out on the penultimate high school experience, may I have this dance?”
She took his hand. “As long as you don’t care that I haven’t the faintest idea how to follow.”
“That’s okay. I haven’t the faintest idea how to lead. We can faint together.”
She laughed, that wonderful peal that lit up her face and resonated in his chest, and he drew her onto the dance floor and into his arms where she belonged.
…
A week ago, Charlie would have refused, because really? Standing up in a crowd of strangers and displaying her nonexistent dancing ability? People would look at her, and looking was one step away from judging, and judging one step away from mocking. In no time, she’d be teetering on the edge of another pit of humiliation.
But today she lived in a different world. One where VR-Charlie could pretend nobody else mattered, because this alternate dimension had only one other life-form. Real-life Daniel, with his laughing eyes and square, long-fingered hands, and a heart bigger than she’d given him credit for.
She swayed in his arms, not knowing if anyone stared and not caring if they did. This little bubble of virtual reality was all she needed right now, this point in the space-time continuum with Daniel all that mattered. His light grip on her waist, her hands on the back of his neck, his cheek pressed against her temple.
Toshiko was right. The past was fixed, but she could alter the way she perceived it, change her rea
ctions to it, splice this moment over that last hideous moment in the high school corridor.
This is what it should have been all along. The two of them, weathering any derision the crowd threw at them. Together.
…
After that dance, something built in Daniel’s chest, expanding until he began to worry that his rib cage couldn’t contain it. A warmth that had nothing to do with the sun. A buzz that had nothing to do with the beer. A thrill that had nothing to do with the music.
It was 100 percent Charlie.
At the end of the evening, they stood together, his arm around her waist, her head on his shoulder, as an America-themed rock medley played over the PA system and the fireworks exploded over the river. Their glitter reflected in Charlie’s eyes, and the thing in his chest finally detonated, but it wasn’t painful or destructive. It was a rightness. A sense of finding something he’d lost.
He turned, stroking the smooth skin of her arm with his thumb. She looked up at him, and the fireworks cast flashes of varicolored light on her face. He cupped her cheek with one hand. Her eyes widened, her pupils dilated from the dark and the excitement and, Christ, he hoped from him, as well.
He lowered his head, took that mouth in a kiss. He was in no hurry. The whistle, pop, and boom of the rockets, the shrieks and cheers of the crowd, all of it faded away as he concentrated on the sensation. The softness of her lips. The sweet taste of her when she opened for him. The shape of her body when he pulled her to him, her breasts pillowed against his chest, her hips and legs against his in a long, smooth line.
The final explosion echoed over the river. The crowd erupted into applause, and Daniel swore it was all for him, because he’d finally gotten a freaking clue.
All the dissatisfaction with his life, all his lousy choices, the discontent that he’d tried to conquer since high school. All of it was because this woman had been missing from his life. Because he’d driven her out.
He had her back now, and he’d make damn sure she didn’t get away again.
Lost in Geeklandia Page 12
