by Anne Marsh
Item: Ms. Washington’s parents shouldn’t have been allowed to name a child because adding anything to a birth certificate from the Acer genus is wrong.
Item: Bad breakup + revenge porn = most popular video ever
I can’t remember a more successful share on my app and I have an excellent memory for numbers. Leaving the video live is tempting. Naked, dancing Maple is amazing and she’s making me cash—but since the word yes has yet to come out of her mouth, it’s a no-go. I believe a hundred percent that consent is nonnegotiable—plus, she’d just come right back here. And while my dick definitely votes for a repeat visit, my brain suggests that angry hate sex will never, ever top Maple’s to-do list. She’s more likely to kick me in my Smurf-colored balls.
Still, she hasn’t lawyered up to hit me with a lawsuit—she’s just demanded I fix her problem, and even if her timeline and expectations are unreasonable (the internet is forever, ladies and gentlemen, until or unless a gigantic EMP wipes out the world’s electronics), she hasn’t bullshit me, either. Unhappiness is inevitably and directly proportional to monetary demands, so I would have expected Maple’s demands to include a mountain of cash. Instead, she’s all righteous indignation. I half expect her to take a flying leap over desks or an engineer as she barges out of Kinkster. Energy crackles almost visibly off her, along with something else, some charisma or star power, a secret charm I’ve never mastered and that has me—and everyone else at Kinkster—staring after her as our front door bangs shut.
She barely skimmed my shoulder, putting her at five feet four inches tall in shoes. The blond hair piled on top of her head added three more inches. The yoga pants, a cropped shirt and a long-sleeved drapey thing (San Francisco is notoriously damp and chilly) completely covered up what was on display in the video—and before you insist that people don’t walk around naked and gyrating, remember that this is San Francisco. We host annual parades devoted to sex and naked people. I allow myself a minute to imagine Maple leading a parade down Market Street. Fantasizing is inadvisable, but since she won’t work for me and she’s flounced out of my life, imagination it is.
I have her phone, so it isn’t even as if I can call her. Which would have been inadvisable idea number two. She’s gone, making her dislike clear—ergo, I don’t get to fuck her. Ever. I add that to a new list, the list of Things that Suck—Get Over It. Having had her within touching distance, I know the real Maple has brown eyes. And even though she wore flats rather than pink ballet slippers, she moved through my office as if she were dancing. Just thinking about her feet makes me swallow. She has small tits and the lean build of a dancer, a sexy, flexible package that drives every remaining thought from my head.
I need to let it go.
Let her go.
Instead, I watch her dance one last time on my phone, staring at the screen where she spins effortlessly in beautiful loops and spirals, her right leg extending and flashing me as she whips through a series of beautiful, obscene kicks. I’m both turned on and resentful that I can’t stop watching her.
When my lead engineer sticks his head in my door, I trigger the script to remove her video from our servers, shove my phone back into my pocket and silently hand him my coffee-soaked laptop. I keep spares on the shelf in my office. Stockpiling avoids downtime. Returning to the code I was working on when Maple busted in seems anticlimactic, however, so instead I amuse myself by looking up my guest. I stay respectful, though, and stick to Google and stuff found online. I do no digging into her personal life, but I still add the following to my Things I Know about Maple list:
1. Maple danced five years for the San Francisco Ballet. They have awesome photos of her dressed as a swan princess (white feathers everywhere) and a hot corsair’s date.
2. A year ago, Maple left the ballet and became an influencer in the athleisure space. This means she works out in fancy clothes eighty hours a week and lives on either ramen noodles or air unless she has a new supply of free energy bars from a partner. In which case, she lives on those. In all cases, she takes pictures. An insane number of pictures.
3. Her Instagram is vibrant, colorful and loud—and full of pictures of Maple in the aforementioned athleisure wear, with food, and in places like the beach, the gym and the airport.
4. She loves puppies.
5. And kittens.
6. People pay her to do photoshoots and spend time in yoga pants. She smiles often, she’s a bit of a goofball, and I’d bet she sells a lot of clothing. I’d buy whatever she’s selling.
7. She’s always on the move—running, dancing, twirling, twitching. It’s entirely possible we could run together and she’d keep up with me. Or beat my ass. She’d certainly look better doing it.
8. There’s a photo of her in a big, poufy fuchsia skirt with a white T-shirt supporting Alzheimer’s research. She’s doing more twirling, along with smiling and standing up for what she believes in, and it’s hard not to smile back because she’s just that passionate.
9. Number seven promptly makes me imagine what Maple would be like in bed.
10. I need to stop this.
It’s child’s play to trace the account that originally uploaded the video. I hack into the owner’s laptop and discover that Madd Dixon didn’t bother to cover his trail or delete the original video. Given his demonstrated lack of ethics, I don’t limit myself to publicly available data, instead going for a deep dive into his cyber life. Just call me Miss Marple. Or maybe Poirot. Mustaches and suits are a better look for me than cardigans and pearls.
When a paper cup and straw materialize in front of my face, I reach for them automatically. The cup retreats. My first thought is that Maple has come back. It’s illogical because she hates me. Still, when I look up and realize it’s just Jack, I’m disappointed if not surprised. We have a standing Thursday taco truck date and I’ve worked through my alert.
“You stood me up.” Jack waggles the cup just out of reach. “And yet here I am, putting out.”
“You’re easy.” I take the cup and hit Save. “And I was busy.”
“Eat.” A paper bag thumps down next to my laptop and I smell cilantro and cumin.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Jack says something else, but I’m no longer listening. I’m planning the next step in my Madd campaign.
“What’re we doing?” He leans against my desk, tearing into his first taco. Jack’s a big guy and he requires a constant fuel supply. He’s also much more observant than most people give him credit for.
“Getting even.”
His brows lift in amusement. “Turned white knight?”
“You don’t have a Kinkster account.” Which means he’s likely the only adult male in San Francisco who hasn’t seen Maple’s video. And while I’m unexpectedly glad he’s a Maple virgin, it also makes asking his advice harder.
“I’m married, remember?” Jack wads up the tinfoil from his taco and lobs it into my trash can in a perfect two-point shot.
I attended his wedding, so I definitely remember. There are, however, married people using my app—and not all of them are hooking up with each other. I note, not for the first time, that Jack doesn’t sound one hundred percent happy. Maybe 70 percent. Sixty even. It could be a bad day, week or year in the venture capital world he rules, but I suspect money’s not the problem.
I look up and engage in some wishful thinking. My people skills are minimal, whereas Jack is a great guy. Everybody loves him, and not just because he’s a big muscled guy and outstanding eye candy. I’ve heard him labeled teddy bear, lumberjack and Thor. Whatever. He’s one of the few people I care about, and so for him I make an effort. We’ve been friends since freshman year at Santa Cruz when we shared a dorm room and terrorized the computer science department. When we graduated, we went in different directions. He married on the beach and founded a venture capital company. I coded dating apps and had hookups. We also each made a billion
dollars along the way but, to be fair, we’re still fundamentally the same people we were back in our college days. We know when the other is full of shit or having a bad week or just needs to get out on the ocean and surf. I’m sure a surfboard is enough to fix Jack this time.
Jack steals a second taco from the bag. Right. He’s waiting for an answer.
“I was at your wedding.” I snatch the bag back and assess. Ten tacos plus the two currently residing in Jack’s bottomless stomach make six each since California is a community property state and dividing shit in half is legally mandated. I pull four foil-wrapped tacos from the bag and pass them to Jack. “Don’t worry, I’ll bear witness that you’re married.”
Jack is suddenly very interested in his taco.
Item: Jack isn’t a hundred percent good.
He points his half-eaten taco at my laptop and even I recognize a brilliant diversionary tactic. “What are you really working on?”
“Revenge. True story.”
Naturally, Jack slides my laptop around to see for himself. The picture of Maple is downloaded from a cached version of the San Francisco Ballet website. In it, she balances on the toes of one foot, her other leg extending into space behind her. Her arms are flung wide as if to hug her audience, and despite the solemn look on her beautiful face, her eyes smile at us. Sparkly white fabric fills the frame around her and there’s something on her head that looks as if a tiara and a peacock mated and produced feathery diamanté babies. I prefer the naked dancing.
Jack returns his attention to his taco. “Who is she?”
“Lola’s friend. She paid me a visit this morning.”
“And you decided to get to know her better?” Jack raises a brow. It’s one of his innate talents and it drives me crazy that I’ve never mastered the move myself.
“She was upset. Her boyfriend posted a video of her on Kinkster. It was our number one video.”
Jack sighs and knuckles his eyes with his hand. “Kinkster doesn’t post cute puppy videos, so I’m assuming there’s a connection between her upset and the boyfriend’s video.”
I’m never a complete ass, not on purpose. “It’s down.”
“But how many people saw it first?”
“It has 2,348,992 hits. It turns out that Maple is a very talented naked dancer and she’s totally uninhibited.”
Jack groans. He’s always been Mr. Rules, while Dev and I are a little more flexible. Dev was the third guy in our freshman suite at UC Santa Cruz, the first of us to earn a billion dollars, and the member of our friendship triumvirate most likely to use his coding skills for evil. His is a wicked taste for revenge. Steal his ecommerce software and you’ll wake up one morning to discover that you’re unexpectedly selling dildos or other hard-to-explain items. I admire the effort he puts into keep our world fair.
Jack clears his throat. Right. He believes we’re having a conversation in which we take turns talking. Honestly, it’s more like a one-way sermon—as his next words prove.
“Which is 2,348,991 people more than Maple intended.”
Is it?
I’m not so sure about that.
I feel my mouth curve up in a smile as I repossess my laptop.
“I can’t make people unsee her,” I say when the silence stretches on too long. Duh. Even I don’t possess superpowers. “But I can get even with Madd.”
“What kind of a name is Madd?” he mutters. I don’t say anything because the answer is obvious. Stupid, pretentious, owned by a man with a small dick and no brains—take your pick. According to Madd’s website, he was born in Orange County, California, but I’d bet five bucks his mother didn’t put that name on his birth certificate.
Jack’s eyes shift up and to the left. Now he’s thinking, too, which means Madd is totally screwed. Jack’s brain is scary good when it comes to revenge and diabolical plots. “Public access records?”
“Mostly? This is why it’s important to beef up government security. Since I’m using my powers for good, however, you can save the lecture.”
To be fair, there will undoubtedly be a next time and the next time might not be motivated by a belief in justice and fairness. I’m a big fan of rule breaking for any reason, plus I’m nosy.
“And the public good is somehow best served by stalking Maple’s boyfriend?”
“Ex-boyfriend.” Five fun facts about Madd?
1. The password on his voice mail was 123. I add fourteen decimal places and record a new message announcing his move to Siberia to seek a natural cure for his STD.
2. He’s either unaware that his phone automatically saves the photos he takes to the cloud or he’s the ultimate narcissist because his cloud storage includes 129 dick pics. I make picture 116 his avatar on all his social media accounts.
3. Madd isn’t into charitable giving. I help him out by rerouting the contents of his checking account to an erectile dysfunction research group and a save the gorillas campaign. Personal growth is important and this way he’s covered literally and metaphorically.
4. Madd’s inbox is a busy, busy place after I run a handy little script that signs his email up for every known newsletter on the planet without an unsubscribe link. He currently has 19214 welcome emails.
5. He uses the same insecure password on his dating profile, his bank account, his rideshare apps and multiple online shopping sites. Naturally, I change them and his security questions to a twenty-seven-character password complete with arcane punctuation in random spots.
6. His real name is Raymond. I haven’t decided what to do with that yet. I’ll save that dessert for later.
Jack shakes his head when I close the lid of my laptop three minutes later. Mischief managed. “I hope you have a good lawyer.”
This is a rhetorical question since we have the same firm on retainer. You get what you pay for and we pay a lot. I flip him the bird. “I won’t get caught.”
“This isn’t college,” he says, and I hear the warning there.
“I know.” I do, too. Sometimes I miss those days. Not the broke-and-starving part, but the freedom to do whatever we could get away with. Having a company of people who depend on me for their paycheck and health insurance took some getting used to, but so far I haven’t let them down and Kinkster makes good money. Still, I’m standing on the steps in the pool of life while Jack and Dev splash around in the deep end. While the number of married couples in the United States with kids is currently at an all-time low, it’s still not unlikely that Jack and his wife procreate in the none-too-distant future and then things will change even more.
I finished inhaling my first taco. “How’s Mrs. Jack?”
Jack shoves the remainder of his taco into his mouth and chews methodically. I count to freaking forty before he swallows. I’m never quite sure when people are legitimately acting weird—maybe he’s on one of those diet quests where you chew twenty times and commune deeply with your meal so that you enjoy more, consume less and magically shed weight. It’s equally possible, though, that he’s avoiding answering my question.
“You killed her and buried the body,” I deadpan, going for my second taco.
He frowns. “She’s traveling for work.”
Huh.
Mrs. Jack travels a great deal. I’d share that comment or make a joke, but Jack’s face takes on a closed-off look I process while I consume tacos three and four. He doesn’t want to talk about Molly, I decide. Usually Jack’s an open-book guy, happy to share and either tell you all about the awesomeness that is his life or bitch about the work-related stuff. Sometimes, though, he gets in a mood and slams the book shut. I’ve had my fingers pinched more than once, so I back off. I’ll ask Dev and then we’ll figure out how to fix whatever is wrong with Jack.
“Maui?”
“No.”
“Mexico?” Molly’s work takes her mostly to tropical destinations. She’s visited
Mexico, the Bahamas and Thailand in the last year. I had no idea that being a pharmaceutical sales rep was so much fun, but Jack claims she’s really, really good at it and that these trips are often company-sponsored rewards for being a superstar employee. While Jack tries to remember where his wife is this particular week, I briefly debate with myself whether or not my fellow Kinksters would be more or less productive after a week in Mexico.
Honestly, we’d probably single-handedly destroy trade relations between Mexico and the US. At the very least, some of us would end up on a first-name basis with the consulate and since I like keeping my vacation options open and my engineering team intact, I finish off my fifth taco and reluctantly scratch “group tropical vacation” off the mental prize list I keep. When I was a kid with a reluctant acquaintance with toothpaste, my dentist used to motivate me with postcleaning visits to a cardboard treasure chest he kept underneath the receptionist’s desk. I’m the dentist now in this scenario and my employees are fishing for prizes. The most popular is cash, although Prada bags and Harleys come in second and third.
“Iceland,” Jack announces.
What?
Right.
Mrs. Jack.
“They sell drugs in Iceland?”
Jack takes a sip of his drink. “Molly went to Iceland.”
Iceland has never struck me as a hotbed of industry, but I’m pretty sure that’s where the northern lights are and it sounds really cool. And then I have a moment of sheer genius.
“Why don’t you join her for the weekend?” My fingers are already flipping the laptop open, pulling up my favorite travel site, and plugging in dates and airport codes. Wow. If you get bored having hookup sex, you can stare out the window at glaciers and lava fields. Or go fishing! Or have sex in geothermal pools! (Actually, I’m not sure of the effect of what is essentially superheated bathwater on the male penis, but kissing has to be possible.)
