by Mara Jacobs
Chapter Seven
Normally Lewis wouldn’t talk about an app that was still in development. Especially not with a fellow designer who wasn’t on his payroll. But this was Munchkin, she seemed genuinely interested, and they had time to kill before the doctor would come to examine her ankle.
Much as Lewis would like to get back to the party—there was still time until midnight, but not a lot of room to maneuver his Plan B—he really should stay until Darcy was checked out by the doctor. That way he could give John and Ellen an update when he saw them. Maybe he’d even have time to take Darcy home and get her settled before he absolutely had to get back to the Club for midnight.
Plus, it was just a fun little app—nothing that would change the world—and he’d like to get her take on it.
He took his phone from where it sat beside her hip, still playing music, and started touching and sliding his way to his new baby.
“It’s already available?”
“No, it’s just a prototype, but I have most of the stuff we’re working on stored here,” he lifted the phone to her. “And my tablet. And my laptop. I basically don’t set foot outside the office door without everything in about three places.”
“Still misplacing things, a lot?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“What’s it called?”
He had it called up now, but they were still throwing around name ideas and he didn’t want Darcy to see the working title card. “Um, we’re still working on that.” She was reaching for his phone, but he held it away, waiting for it to load. That was one of the bugs they were working on—the thing took forever to load. “The idea is you load a picture on it, either sending it to your email or something, or even taking a picture of someone right from your phone or tablet. Or, there are some pre-loaded. It starts with a shot of their full face.” Which was now up on Lewis phone, but he still held it out of Darcy’s sight. “Then, when you’re ready, you touch the lips, and it zooms in so all you see is their mouth.” He did just that to his phone so that only lips, though definitely female ones, showed on his screen now. He turned it to Darcy, handing it over. And you…you know…”
“Make out with your phone?”
“Basically, yes.”
She stared at the lips on the screen, then at him. “And you think people will do that? Put their mouth on the phone that they’ve been touching all day?”
“More likely a tablet. That way when you started, the face would be more lifelike in size.”
“Still. All those germs. You’ve had your phone in your pocket, or your tablet in its case, or out in the open…”
“I think the market that we’re gearing this to don’t care about stuff like that.”
“And who’s the demographic?”
He shrugged. “The same guys who twenty years ago would have bought inflatable dolls. This is kind of a high tech version.”
“Um, but Lewis, those dolls had, you know.”
“Well, obviously, this is a little more innocent. Like I said, it was just meant to be a fun, little throw-away app. We’d give it away.” He reached for the phone, but she held her arm away from him. He would have had to stretch across the table—her whole body—to get it. Which actually didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“Don’t be mad,” she said, reading him pretty well.
“I’m not mad.” Defensive, more like.
“Defensive, then. I’m sorry, but you probably have only guys working on this, and you should have a woman’s point of view.”
She was right. He hadn’t thought about it that way. “Okay. You’re right. So, you wouldn’t use it. I get it. It will solely be for guys. Maybe we won’t even pre-load pictures of men on it.”
“What about for gay men?”
He nodded his head. She was good at this. But then, the designer of Mirth would be. That new fact still blew him away. “Right, again. We’ll keep the pics of men on it.”
“And is there a goal? A way to score points? Or are you just…kissing your phone?”
“You’re not kissing your phone. You’re kissing your ideal mate. The person you want to be kissing more than anything, but for whatever reason, you aren’t. So, this is the next best thing.”
She was turning the phone, seeing the lips move from portrait to landscape view. He hoped they’d remembered to…yes, the lips stayed in place, it didn’t zoom back out to show the whole face.
“And yes, there’s a scoring system. We did a weighted algorithm on the components of the perfect kiss, and you score more points as you achieve better proficiency at those components. Due to the…ah…nature of the game, you’d probably just be trying to beat your own best score. I can’t imagine you’d play against someone else.”
“No, I can’t imagine that.” Her brow furrowed, and she bit her lower lip, obviously thinking, and Lewis found himself torn between wanting to hear what gem she was stewing on, and wanting her to keep biting that lip.
Or maybe biting his?
He stepped back, away from the table. Whoa. Where had that come from? This was Munchkin, who’d followed Brooks and him around since they were kids.
But that was just it. Munchkin wasn’t a Munchkin anymore. She’d said it herself, and those curves and that softness he’d held in his arms confirmed it.
“Unless…” she said, which pulled him out of his lust-filled thoughts for his best friend’s sister.
“Unless?”
“I don’t think guys would play against each other, no. You’re right on that. But, have you thought about marketing it to tweens?”
“What’s a tween?”
“In this case, girls around eleven or twelve.”
“Girls? Young girls?”
She nodded, twisted the phone in her hand. “Say you pre-loaded a bunch of hot celebrity photos on here. And you—oh my God.”
“What?”
“What group of fifth grade girls wouldn’t fight over trying to get the highest score of kissing, say, Justin Bieber?”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, Lewis, totally seriously.” The smile on her face was something to behold. He imagined it was the same smile she’d worn when she’d first thought up the concept of Mirth.
“We already looked into pre-loading celebrity photos. More along the lines of Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson, though, not Bieber. Can’t legally do it. We were going to hire models for the photos. And buy stock photos.”
“But you have an option to upload your own photos, right?”
“Of course.”
“So, you make it easy. Make a link to the Google Images search engine. They type in Justin Bieber, find the image they want and tap a button to make it part of…part of…”
“Like I said, no title yet, it’s—”
“The Perfect Kiss.”
“What?”
“The Perfect Kiss. That’s what you should call it.”
He didn’t like it. Way too girly.
“Yes, it’s girly,” she said, reading his mind. “But Lewis, I really think that’s your market. Young girls who have crushes. It’s sweet and innocent and non-threatening. It’s like horses being girls’ first loves.”
“You lost me.”
She waved her hand, dismissing him, clearly in her own zone. “I had pictures of boy bands all over my walls in middle school. I used to kiss one particular boy goodnight every night. Imagine if I’d had him on my phone and could try to beat my best score of kissing him goodnight. My parents would have had to drag the thing out of my hands.”
She went on, “Of course, girls may be more advanced now, so this would be geared a tiny bit younger. And you’ll want to put a message on about wiping off your tablet, or phone, between users. Maybe a stop in play when you go to a new user with a “Did you clean your device?” prompt. Where you have to answer yes to move on. But word it better than that. You don’t want to break the mood with a bunch of techno-speak.” She was pointing at him like he was an old-fashioned stenogra
pher taking dictation, and she was a cigar-chomping boss yelling, “Did ya get that?”
And his hands may have been empty, but oh, he got it. He may walk by his front door all the time, but he never forgot a detail about one of his creations.
Which was quickly turning into one of Darcy’s creations.
And he was totally cool with that. The business was full of collaborations. Some went really well. Lewis’s company was proof of that. And some landed you in court with movies made about it.
“So tell me about the algorithm. How do you score points? How do you achieve—drum roll, please—the Perfect Kiss?”
Okay, the name was starting to grow on him. “Well, there are certain parts of kissing that obviously can’t be measured with an inanimate object, like…um…moisture.”
She grimaced. “You mean, like if you’re a wet, sloppy kisser.”
“Right. Can’t measure that.”
“No, I suppose not. Too bad, because if you using it as a learning tool, that’s the one thing you’d want to instruct on.”
Was it? Well, yeah, of course it would be. Suddenly his mind was full of thoughts of his own kissing. The kernel of idea for this app had come from doing some preliminary reading on good kissing, years ago, right before a different New Year’s Eve and his kiss with Grace. She hadn’t swooned and fallen into his arms after that one like he’d hoped.
Was it because he was a wet, sloppy kisser? He’d never had any complaints from any of the girls he’d dated. But then, would you tell that to someone?
“So, if not wetness, what do you measure?” she asked.
“What?” he asked. She held up the phone. “Oh, right. Well, amount of pressure was another thing we thought was important—”
“Of course.”
“But that can’t be gauged from a device.”
“Right…” She was leading him now, hungry for every word.
“But you can measure length of pressure.” She processed that, looked at the phone, nodded her head. Her golden hair shimmered, even under the God-awful hospital fluorescent lights. “And…movement.”
Her eyes grew wide and damned if she didn’t lick her lips. And damned if her eyes didn’t drop to his mouth.
And damned if he didn’t start sporting wood. He moved closer to the examining table, right next to it in fact, putting his offending area out of her eye-line. And himself closer to her body. Which included that mouth. Hers, not the one on his phone.
“So, more points for more movement? That doesn’t seem right. You could just rub your mouth up and down the screen and be high scorer, but that’s not good kissing. But you would have thought of that.”
He knew she continued on, but Lewis heard nothing past “you could rub your mouth up and down.” He pressed into the side of the table.
Holy crap, get a handle on it. You’re in a hospital!
“So what was the measurement?”
“What?”
“How did you decide what types of movement would score higher?”
“Research?”
She giggled at that. “I can just imagine those design update meetings. ‘Well, Mr. Kampmueller, we’re nearly there. But I’m taking Susie out one more time tonight to make sure the algorithm is in place’.”
“They don’t call me Mr. Kampmueller.”
Now she outright laughed. Then she looked at him, shook her head and said, “Oh, Lewis.”
The way she said his name. Not with good-natured exasperation like he got with most people, when they shook their heads at him in disbelief. No, it was breathy, and full of warmth, and…knowing.
“But yeah, there was personal experience, both good and bad, that played a part. Discussion of course. We watched…um…movies.”
“Porn.”
“No, not porn. Well, not always porn. We found a list online of the one hundred best movie kisses and we divvied them up and watched those.”
“So, what was the final consensus on movement and length of pressure? What did you build into the scoring algorithm?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. First we…” he stopped. She was watching him, and then she licked her lips and nodded for him to continue.
All logic flew out the window of the windowless examination room, and he leaned forward and said, “It’d be easier just to show you.”
And then he kissed her.
