“I don’t, but the codes are also kind of a mess right now.” I noticed the panic in his eyes and laughed. “A documented mess!” Jonas and I had spent too many hours bitching about developers who didn’t properly document their codes for him to think I’d joined their legions. He let out a dramatic sigh of relief, and I laughed for what felt like the first time all day. “But I don’t know that you’d really be able to make sense of it. I wouldn’t mind the company though.”
I reached for my laptop, but Eli smacked my hand. “Pizza first. You probably haven’t eaten—”
“Since lunch,” I cut him off. I could feel all of my friends staring at me. When I turned around, I noticed Holden at the kitchen door. Yeah,allof my friends were staring at me. “I don’t always skip meals when I’m coding.”
“When you’re so deep in that you’re canceling Thursdays, you do,” Eli insisted.
I sighed. “Not now that Noah’s figured out that I get too deep in,” I admitted. “He texts me a few times a day to make sure I’m eating.”
“Damn, why didn’t we ever think to do that?” Seb questioned with a laugh. “Wait, lunch wasn’t just chips and a soda, right?”
“And a sandwich. Ham.”
Eli still wouldn’t let me have my computer until I had two slices of pizza. I had a feeling he would’ve tried to force more down me if Jonas hadn’t stopped him. I slid off the couch with my laptop to give Seb and Jonas more room on the couch. Once again, Holden and Eli were crammed into the armchair. They were sitting closer than Noah and I did when he’d come over, and Noah was my boyfriend.
But then, we were taking it slow.
I sighed as I pulled up my coding project. Holden and Eli started wrestling for the remote, and I was accidentally nudged in the back of the head by Jonas’s knee as he reached over to steal it from them. I started typing away while my friends bickered about a show to watch. There was something calming about their presence, something that made the bits of code I’d written and had been struggling to connect suddenly make sense.
An hour later, I was loading up my testing program on my laptop. “Jonas, you want to test this?” I asked him. “I would, but I think I’m turning code blind.”
Jonas slid off the couch to sit beside me, and I passed him the computer. I watched as he clicked around the program I’d built. “Stop watching,” he muttered. “Sit on the couch and let me play.”
“Yeah, sit on the couch and tell us about how your boyfriend is managing to get you to eat and respond to text messages,” Seb teased. “Let Jonas play.”
I didn’t have a choice. Just like I didn’t have a choice in my friends not allowing me to miss our Thursday night hang out. Besides, I did want to tell my friends about our decision to take it slow. Maybe they could offer me some tips. After all, Seb and Jonas were both in relationships, and neither of them had tripped and fell headfirst into love in less than two weeks of dating someone. Jonas even had history with Silas and had managed not to fall into that trap. That history had been mostly negative, but it was still there.
“He came over Sunday and found me deep in the coding hole. Surrounded by ducks.”
“How many ducks is surrounded by ducks?” Holden asked. They all knew how extensive my duck collection was.
I grimaced. I did not need to admit how many ducks I had out that day. They’d think I’d gone off the deep end. Besides, I’d lost count somewhere Saturday. Which might have been Sunday. Hell, it might have even been Friday. Time had no meaning in the coding hole.
Holden read the harsh reality in my expression. “Ouch, that many?”
“He thought I’d gone off the deep end,” I admitted. “He cleared a path and started talking in this soothing voice. You know the kind of voice, the one people use with wounded animals when they don’t want to spook them.” My friends laughed. “Anyway, he managed to break me out of the coding hole. I thought it was still Saturday, and he got a bit freaked out.”
“Been there,” Jonas muttered as he clicked another button on the screen. His brow furrowed, and he clicked it again before pulling up the code itself. “Is this button supposed to do something? The code looks like it’s supposed to—You’ve got a colon instead of a semi-colon.” He adjusted the code and hit the button. “Perfect. Anyway, Noah made you realize that you’d been sitting on the couch… floor? Probably the floor knowing you… for what? A day? Longer? Less?”
“No idea,” I admitted. My friends knew me too well. “But yeah. He made me take a shower, made me some chicken, had me take a nap, then we watched a movie. He went home, but he’s started texting me around lunch and calling me around dinner to make sure I’m eating more than just chips.” I sighed. “It’s making things really hard.”
“How is your boyfriend taking care of you making things hard?” Seb questioned. “Pretty sure that’s what boyfriends are supposed to do.”
“It is,” Jonas piped up from his spot on the floor. “Silas always makes sure to take damn good care of me.”
“I bet he does,” Eli teased. Even I couldn’t miss the lewd undertones of his comment. Jonas picked up the dark blue rubber duck I’d been working with from under the table and lobbed it at Eli. Unfortunately, Jonas couldn’t throw and Holden was the one that got hit. The living room filled with laughter, and I was grateful for the distraction of the momentary duck war that started when Holden threw it back.
Luckily, there were only so many ducks out. If they’d come over Sunday, the duck war may have become an epic battle.
“Okay, okay, truce!” Jonas shouted from the floor after he’d been pelted with enough ducks. Holden answered by throwing one last duck. “Weren’t we trying to figure out how having a caring boyfriend is a problem for Matt? Because I’m pretty sure we were doing that.”
“You started it,” Holden whined.
“Hush it,” Eli cautioned with a grin. I would have rather they kept throwing ducks, because Eli’s sharp eyes were back on me, and I knew the interrogation was about to begin again. “So, you gonna tell us why it’s a problem?”
“Because we’re supposed to be taking it slow, and he’s making it really hard.” I explained myself a little more to my friends, and I answered a few more questions before Jonas dubbed my project workable for a phase one. I hit save and closed the laptop. I’d clean up the coding in the morning.
The rest of the evening was dedicated to my friends.
