“This was such a great party!” Liz gushed after the last guests left. Then she looked guiltily at Brea. “What are we going to do with the leftovers?”
“Grant and Carter will take care of it,” I said, gesturing. My brother and cousin had each taken a tier of tea sandwiches and were having an eating contest. Grant’s wife Kate was watching in horrified fascination.
“Ready to throw in the towel?” I asked Brea, handing her a glass of champagne. “You know, part of war is admitting you lost.”
“I’m still going to make you quit,” she said. “Just wait until the wedding dress fitting. You’re going to want to give yourself a lobotomy with one of my knitting needles.”
“But only if you make it through the wedding website design,” I shot back.
* * *
Brea was still irritatedwhen she showed up at my company headquarters the next evening.
“You know,” she said as she walked into my corner office, “if I hadn’t seen your list of terrible juvenile pickup lines, I would have said this was some off-putting attempt to seduce me.”
“I don’t date women who take pictures of themselves wearing a sock covered in holes,” I retorted.
“That was a work of art!” Brea fumed.
“It was a sock.” I turned back to my computer.My time to shine.
I had my code editor open, displaying all the various computer commands in various colors on a black background.
“Pull up a seat,” I told Brea, patting the chair next to me.
She perched on the edge gingerly. “I don’t know if all of this,” she waved her hand at the screen, “is really necessary. We could just do a website on The Knot.”
I scoffed. “You’re planning the perfect wedding, and you want your friend to have the same website as every other bride in America?”
“You can customize the ones on The Knot!” Brea said defensively.
“Ha! That’s not custom. You’re just changing the colors. Liz has a list of features she wants on her website—she wants it interactive, she wants all the guests to have access to an app so they have the wedding events at their fingertips, and she wants it integrated into social media.”
Brea pursed her lips.
“Can you do all of that?” she asked uncertainly.
“Already started,” I bragged. I loved to code. Normally I wrote programs for military drones. They had to be able to interface with satellites and the Air Force’s software. I also had my various stock-trading algorithms. A website though? That was a piece of cake. I could code it in my sleep.
I tapped a button, and the website opened up on my second monitor. Then I navigated to the app I had made on my phone.
Brea scrolled through it. I could tell she was trying very hard not to be impressed.
“The colors are off.”
“That’s why you’re here: to give it that feminine touch,” I said condescendingly.
Brea punched me in the arm, and I laughed.
“This website needs more of a feminine makeover than a light touch,” Brea said.
“I can change any color you want.”
“It’s not just the colors. I have photos, a logo, and borders I want on this website,” she said, handing me a printout.
It should have been a simple matter of changing the theme. I fumed silently while Brea complained that this button was now too wide and could I make the corners a little less rounded.
“So you want them square?” I said through gritted teeth.
