Rise

by Piper Lawson

  Now, standing close enough to touch her…

  I remembered why it’d taken so long to let go.

  “What's your excuse?” she asked, nodding to my suit.

  “Lawyer.”

  “I see,” she murmured.

  “I own cufflinks. And, technically, half a gaming company.”

  She lifted a shoulder, dragging my attention to her curves under the dress. “I’m surprised.”

  “That I clean up so well?”

  “That you're Max Donovan’s guard dog. The Riley I knew wouldn't have settled for that.”

  Before I could respond, Jonathan descended from nowhere. “Samantha, there's someone else who would like to meet you.”

  I wondered if he was pimping her out by the minute. At least until I noticed his hand on the small of her back.

  Maybe I'd gotten too close and the graying wolf had come to defend his territory.

  With a last look, she turned to follow him.

  The Riley I knew wouldn't have settled for that.

  The words rang in my ears, a dull buzzing I couldn't shake.

  By every objective standard I was successful. Had an Ivy League law degree, made my first million by twenty-five.

  I couldn't remember the last time someone had given me a dressing down like that. Outside of a negotiation, at least.

  It took a second before I noticed my phone vibrating in my pocket.

  I reached to switch it off, noticing the LA number. Probably some contract we were working on.

  I sized up the room, forcing my gaze past Jonathan and Sam and saw a man and woman discussing whether to buy a painting.

  I crossed to them, glancing at the discreet tag on the wall.

  “This one’s no longer for sale,” I offered, pleasant.

  The man blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m buying it.”

  “But… We were here first.”

  “You were looking. I’m taking action. My girlfriend will love this. Coco loves art.” I winked at the woman on his arm as I reached into my pocket.

  He held up a hand. “Now hold on a second. I want this painting.”

  I shook my head. “No. I get this for my woman, it’s going to be worth my while. If you know what I mean.” The man frowned. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll outbid you for it. The lady can be our auctioneer.”

  She grinned, happy to assume her new role. “Fine. We’ll start the bidding at… twelve thousand?”

  “Twelve.” I said it without hesitating.

  “Thirteen,” the impromptu auctioneer said, gaining confidence.

  With a swallow, the other man said, “Done.”

  “Fourteen.” I nodded.

  “Fifteen thousand.” His forehead beaded with sweat. I turned back to the painting, a grin on my face.

  “I’m going to get so lucky tonight,” I told him in my most earnest voice. “The things Coco is going to let me do to her—”

  “Fifteen.” He spat the word, and I lifted my hands, graciously conceding defeat.

  “Well done. I suggest you have this wrapped up before I think of being less than a gentleman and going back on my word.”

  I watched the proud winner cross to Jonathan, who was still talking with Sam.

  The man said something that caused them both to look in my direction.

  I turned back to the painting I’d had no intention of buying and counted in my head.

  One.

  Two.

  Though now that I looked at it, there was a wall in my spare—

  “What the hell was that.” Sam was beside me, a beacon of red in a bustling, twinkling room.

  “I made you an extra five thousand on the list price,” I murmured into my wine glass.

  “Meaning?”

  I grinned. “Meaning you'd better make it a great fucking pie.”

  Her chin lifted, and the overhead lights found new angles on her cheeks, her lips.

  Her gaze sparked. “I take it back,” she said under her breath. “Even without the chain wallet, you haven’t changed a bit, Lee.”

  An innocent syllable shouldn’t have the power to suck the breath from your lungs, or make your body clench.

  But she faltered too. Once the nickname came out, she looked every bit as surprised to say it as I was to hear it.

  In that instant, memories rushed at me in a wave. Colliding, competing, drowning me with the sheer force and feel of them.

  The decade that'd passed was gone.

  She was the old Sam.

  My Sam.

  The one I’d had a million inside jokes with.

  The one who’d drawn tattoos on my arm with a Bic pen.

  The one who taught me how to be a rock when someone was being thrown around by the waves.

  Despite every part of my body saying it was a bad idea, I stepped closer. Her scent flooded my nose, familiar and new at once.

  “Max and his girlfriend had a baby tonight.”

  “Give them my congratulations.” But her eyes widened, like she wasn't sure how she felt about the fact that we were inches apart, that she had to angle her head to hold my gaze.

  I set my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. “Did you know Max bought one of these?”

  Her fingers found the seam of her dress as she nodded. “I ran into him at an event recently, and sent him the link to the show. He asked which one I thought his girlfriend would like.” He gaze softened. “Max Donovan in love, and a dad. Never thought I’d see that.”

  “What about you?”

  Her eyes darkened from caramel to chocolate. “You mean what about love? I’m in love with my art.”

  My phone buzzed again, and for once I wished I didn't have to leave.

  Even though I shouldn't have, I said, “There’s one problem with loving art.”

  “What's that?”

  I pulled out my coat claim ticket, allowing myself one last look at her face before I turned for the exit. “It can’t love you back.”

  3

  Ambition

  There’s a perception that people who make video games are either hella glamorous or still live in their parents’ basement.

  The amount of time I spend at Comic Con or in media interviews or actually playing games is laughable in comparison to the time I spend pouring over spreadsheets, reviewing legal agreements, and sitting on teleconferences.

  Sure, I consume more Red Bull per annum than most small European nations. But I don’t wear sweat pants, I don’t live on pizza from the shared kitchen, and my acne cleared up well before I won my first mock trial in law school.

  Before Titan became a company, it was a game. One Max had made when he dropped out of college. I’d helped with the business side. When it took off, we looked at each other and said ‘let’s keep going.’ Since then we’d put out a follow-up hit, Phoenix, that broke all of Oasis’s records as the number one indie game of all time.

  That business now paid for more than forty staff in five countries, many of which worked outside my office.

  We’d released to the media that our newest game, Omega, followed the story of the last person on Earth in a post-apocalyptic world, facing down every demon nature and hell could throw at him in his quest to find safety and ultimately rebuild the planet.

  What no one knew was that we were investing in new, state-of-the-art gameplay to make it happen.

  Gameplay that, apparently, was even more fucking expensive than I’d thought.

  People who aren’t entrepreneurs think working in tech is like living in the Wolf of Wall Street. Money, coke, and ass for days.

  It’s not.

  Since the launch of the Phoenix game, Max and I’d make bank to rival some Fortune 500 CEOs. We also paid our staff above market rates, something non-negotiable as far as I’m concerned.

  But it’s always a dance. Budgeting enough to get us through launches, ensuring distributors and retailers pay us in time, and selling enough to cover the gambles we take.

>   With Omega, I thought we had…

  At least until I saw the latest payroll numbers for development, which looked even bigger in the unrelenting LEDs of my computer screen.

  “What the fuck, Max?” For this much money we could be building a new internet, not just a game.

  The cell phone on my desk interrupted my dark thoughts.

  “Riley McKay,” I grunted.

  “Mr. McKay. I have David Stern with Epic Studios. Let me put him through.”

  I’d been playing phone tag with his office in LA since he'd left a cryptic voicemail the night before.

  I leaned back in my chair, propping my feet up on the desk and scanning my corner office at Titan as I waited.

  My Rolling Stones poster occupied wall space next to my motivational poster of a rock climber standing on top of a mountain that says AMBITION: Climb as high as you can dream. Then choke on the lack of oxygen.

  Neither the motivation nor the irony was comforting.

  “Riley.” The voice that came on the line was peppy. The head of a Scout band gearing up for the first camping trip of the year. “David Stern.”

  “David. What can I do for you?”

  “Our film option on Phoenix is expiring the end of December.”

  “If you’re looking for an extension, send me a memo. I’ll review it with our management team.”

  In other words, me and Max in beanbag chairs.

  “We don’t want an extension. We want to exercise the option.”

  My feet dropped off the desk and my chair snapped upright with a metallic clank. “Excuse me?”

  “We want to exercise the option,” he repeated. “We’re going to make a film.”

  I hadn’t had enough energy drinks today to induce hallucinations, so I switched to speakerphone to pull up the agreement without cutting off the call.

  More than a year ago, I’d brokered the deal giving them the chance to turn our most recent hit game into a movie. It was a step in the process, ticking a checkbox to maximize dollars from our launch. These things rarely went anywhere, but I was doing my job.

  “We’ve got someone working on a script,” he went on. “And we’re talking to potential directors. Of course, we intend to keep your team updated. We’ll have to decide how to involve Titan in pre-production. Then there’s licensing, merchandising…”

  His words blurred together as I pulled up a file.

  There it was. The agreement, signed by David Stern at Epic Studios and a team of attorneys, authorizing the fat check we’d collected in exchange for the right to put our concept in their thick stack of ideas.

  “Riley? You still with me?”

  I did eight figure deals in my sleep, but for some reason since he’d uttered the word ‘film’, I was having trouble processing.

  I rubbed both hands through my hair, my heart pounding. “I’m here. One question, David.”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  Max had bought the tenth and eleventh floors of the modern building at once, the first for Titan and the second for him. I’d always preferred to have a line between work and home life, even if it was imaginary more often than not.

  I made my way up the stairs to the eleventh floor. There was no point knocking on the door of Max and Payton’s suite. The entrance was always unlocked.

  Since Payton had moved in with Max more than a year ago, she had added softer touches to the marble and industrial feel of the massive condo.

  “Vodka at noon?” I asked Max as I spied my friend in the kitchen, barefoot in his usual uniform of black T-shirt and worn jeans. I eyed up the clear liquid in his lowball glass. “Tell me we’re not going there again.”

  He lifted a finger to his lips. “Water,” he grunted. “Tristan’s finally asleep. So’s Payton. I need to do approvals on the current MVP. I thought I’d get them done last night but I fell asleep on my computer.” The circles under his eyes had me doing a double take. Usually my friend worked long hours, but I’d never seen him look ready to cameo in The Walking Dead. “I woke up to bunch of garbage code and key-shaped dents in my face.”

  An hour earlier, I’d planned to drop the issue of overspending on man hours for Omega at his feet. It was his responsibility that we’d been using too much developer time on the new game.

  But that was before everything changed.

  “I have news,” I announced.

  “They’re introducing a twenty-fifth hour in the day.”

  “Even better. Epic’s exercising their film option.” His expression went blank. “I just got off the phone. Phoenix is going to be a movie. A nine-figure-budget, CGI-artist’s-wet-dream, Whedon-worthy production.”

  He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Huh.”

  “Let me help you. ‘Riley, you’re a genius. This is the best thing to happen to me since Nintendo 64.’” Adrenaline rushed through me. “This is a game changer, Max. Aside from the fact that we both just moved from the ninetieth to the ninety-fifth percentile of coolest people on the planet, it gives Titan visibility. Licensing opportunities. New revenue streams.” I paused for breath.

  Max shook his head, but the weariness had fallen away a few degrees, replaced by disbelief. “Shit.”

  “Right there with you.”

  Of the two of us, Max was the real gamer and I was the film buff. I’d seen every superhero movie of the last twenty years.

  No, thirty.

  Having someone turn our latest hit game into a movie would be the culmination of everything I’d wanted.

  Today was like getting a new Avengers movie on Christmas, delivered to your door by Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson.

  “I just wanted to deliver the good news. Oh, and one more thing. I dropped off your check at the gallery. When were you going to tell me you’d run into Sam Martinez?”

  Wariness edged into his expression. “I tried to at the hospital the other night. I know you guys were… complicated.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “What is it you think happened?”

  “If I had to guess?” He shrugged. “After living in each others’ heads senior year, she broke your heart. Or you broke hers.”

  I shoved a hand through my hair. “Sounds about right.”

  I turned for the door.

  “Well?” he called after me in a half-whisper, half-shout. “Which is it?”

  4

  October

  Senior year

  “Who can solve this equation? Nobody? Come now, we’ve just spent twenty minutes factoring cubic functions. Miss Taylor and Mr. McKay, would you kindly stop flirting long enough to…”

  I glanced up as my math teacher, Mr. Hopper trailed off.

  Lauren, who sat two seats ahead of me, had been leaning back over the empty desk between us going on about a party I'd missed. Sometimes I swear high school girls get paid by the word.

  It was her giggling that had attracted the attention of our teacher.

  At least until we’d been saved by the girl in the doorway.

  She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a backpack dangling from one arm. Her skin was warm like caramel and her hair was dark, almost black, and longer than any of the other girls’ in our year. Her head came halfway up the doorframe, and for a second I wondered if she was a junior.

  “Miss Martinez.” Hopper read from the sheet of yellow legal paper she handed him. “Would you like to introduce yourself to the class?”

  “Pretty sure you just did.” Her voice was deep, and she said it like a fact, not like a burn.

  “There’s a seat for you.” He pointed and the girl, with a gaze that slid over the entire classroom in one long, wary pass, wound her way back to the desk between me and Lauren.

  I tuned out of math—I could’ve solved the equation the second he’d put it on the board—and studied the girl in front of me.

  She was physically tiny. One of my arms would probably go around her entire body.

  But she didn't seem small. Maybe i
t was the way her eyes had flashed when she’d taken her seat. Like there was something giant inside her, waiting to get out.

  When the teacher assigned the class to do some work and ducked out into the hall, I shifted out of my chair to peek over her shoulder.

  “What’re you working on?”

  Well damn. New girl had an edge.

  “That’s Frank Miller.”

  She covered the drawing with both hands in a black belt defensive move. “It’s none of your business.”

  “This is high school. Everything’s everyone’s business.” I took her raised brow as an invitation. “That’s Sin City. Gail. And Dwight.” Surprise flashed across her face. “The comic was incredible and the movie was underrated. They could’ve done more with it, but…” I shrugged. “I’m Riley. This is Max.”

  My friend lifted his chin in hello from the next desk over.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “Sam.”

  “Sam like Samantha.”

  “Sam like Sam.”

  Now that I saw her up close, she was the kind of pretty my sisters would spend hours in front of the mirror to achieve. But instead of playing it up, she played it down.

  She couldn't erase them entirely. Her eyes, which couldn't decide if they were green or brown, were framed with dark lashes. In their depths was curiosity, intelligence, plus something I couldn’t read but wanted to.

  “Hey. You have lunch plans?” I asked on impulse.

  Max muttered something inaudible next to me.

  Sam looked between us. “Eating. Was the plan.”

  “Good. You’re showing me those.” I nodded toward the drawings.

  “I'm not showing you anything.”

  “What?” It was her turn to surprise me.

  “I said no. Have you heard the word before?” Something in the way she said it made me wonder if she'd caught Lauren's display of literal back-bending to get my attention.

  “Mr. McKay.”

  I straightened in my chair, looking around Sam as she turned to face the front. “Mr. Hopper.” I met the teacher’s narrowed gaze. The rest of the room had fallen silent.

  “How are those proofs coming along?