I stare at the door swinging behind him after he disappears through it. Huh. Now I’m trying to remember how Errol used to takehiscoffee when we would hang out at the diner for hours until they kicked us out.
“Here you go.” He sets down the mug and starts wiping down the rows of bottles. “So, what were you going to tell me yesterday before we got company?”
I run a hand through my unruly hair and let out a groan. “Goddamn, Errol, what is wrong with me? Twenty-nine years old is too fucking young for me to be having a midlife crisis.”
He gives me a wry grin. “So, what’s going on, man?”
I sigh. “OK. So, I built this app called ASK that lets companies pull all of their workflow software together into a single dashboard with…”
Errol nods. “I know.”
That stops me short. “You do?” He looks down, busying himself with the bottles of well liquor at the front, but I can see that he’s flushing all the way to his ears. I frown. “How do you know about the app? It’s not, like, consumer-oriented. In fact, it’s kind of boring as fuck.”
He meets my eyes, but there’s an anxious expression flickering in them. “Uh, I read about it in… shit, I forget. Some business journal or other.”
“Oh, which one? Wait, what? You did? Why?” My brain is a little slow on the uptake, in spite of the combined jolt of the sugar and the caffeine.
Errol looks a little abashed. “I thought what you were doing sounded cool. It seemed really smart —I didn’t think it was boring.”
I’m not sure how to respond, but Errol keeps talking anyway. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’ve kind ofbeen keeping track of the work you’re doing. I liked knowing what you were building or developing or whatever.”
“Why?”
“I guess it just made me happy to see you doing that stuff, being successful and all.” He squares his shoulders and looks straight at me. “I was —Iam— proud of you. And the sale —that’s just impressive.”
With that, he turns away and busies himself with something. I blink in surprise when he sets two shot glasses onto the bar a moment later.
“I’d say a congratulatory shot is in order.” He hunts for a second before selecting a bottle from the back shelf, nodding at it before looking at me. “You’ve got good taste,” he says approvingly.
He’s not wrong. It’s super-nice bourbon. “Hell, yeah. This one is my favorite!”
He gives me a little smile that’s at once shy and sly. “Yeah, I know.”
I wasn’t expecting that answer. I look at him in puzzlement. “How…”
He gives me a shrug with a bit of squirm to it. “Uh, I remembered seeing the pictures you posted from your birthday last year.”
I don’t know how to answer. I’d probably be creeped-out if anybody other than Errol said that to me. But he looks really happy with himself for knowing my favorite bourbon, so I just thank him, clink my glass to his and take the shot. It’s so fucking smooth.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to make things weird,” Errol says as he gathers the shot glasses and puts them somewhere beneath the bar.
“You didn’t.” Actually, I’m flattered, butthatprobably would be weird to admit right now. So I just follow up my shot with aslurp of coffee and a sigh as I contemplate his comment. “Dude, I think you might seriously be theleast-weird thing in my life at the moment.”
Errol snickers. “Oh boy. What’s going on, then?”
“So, our director of marketing, Eliza, was also my girlfriend. Yeah, I know, I know —that was a bad fucking idea. But I thought I was going to be smarter than everybody else out there banging people they work with. I figured with one more round of funding, we could maybe go public. It was either that or be acquired, which I didn’t really want to do because then you give up operational control.”
Shit, I’m probably boring the hell out of Errol. I should probably skip to the good part. “Anyway, I partnered with an investor willing to take most of his compensation in equity. And I felt like such a fucking idiot! Because I thought everything was going great –all according to plan, you know?”
I take a deep breath to try and push down the swell of bad feelings rising in my guts. “And then I swung by the office one night to drop off some paperwork connected with our plans for an I.P.O. Eliza and I were living together by that point, and we had moved to New York City. She said she was getting together with a cousin who was in town. And I came in and there she was, bent over the desk while my investor — Tyler — was fucking plowing her.”
Errol lets out a low whistle. “Thatsucks, dude.” He shakes his head. “I’m really sorry.”
Reliving the experience had been making me angry, but Errol’s sympathy sends that anger careening off-track, and I suddenly feel like I want to cry.
“She was going on — saying all this ‘fuck me harder, give me that big cock’ type of stuff to Tyler. She wasneverlike that with me! She never said shit like that! I walked in and it was like theneedle down a record. Tyler pulled out of her and I realized he wasn’t even wearing a fucking condom!”
“Fuuuuck,” Errol breathes. “What did you do? Throw the asshole out of your office?”
