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AARYN

E rrol’s face definitely brightens when he turns and sees me settling onto a barstool. I made sure to get here earlier than yesterday, hoping maybe we’ll have more time to ourselves.

“Hey, stranger! I was hoping you’d stop back in,” he says as he strolls over to me. His jeans today are black and his button-down shirt is a deep red, with the sleeves rolled up like they were yesterday.

“Feel like we kind of got interrupted yesterday,” I say. “I didn’t want to be talking your ear off when you had real customers.”

“Talk away, long as you don’t mind me tidying up.” He walks towards the far end of the bar and waves me over. “Have a seat over here so we can hear each other. Oh, and can I get you anything?”

“Any chance I could get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” He looks at me for a moment with his head cocked and eyes slightly narrowed. “Still a shit-ton of sugar, no milk?”

I laugh, at once surprised and flattered. “You remember that?”

He grins. “Be right back.”

I stare at the door swinging behind him after he disappears through it. Huh. Now I’m trying to remember how Errol used to take his coffee 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 of been 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 —I am — 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, but that probably would be weird to admit right now. So I just follow up my shot with a slurp of coffee and a sigh as I contemplate his comment. “Dude, I think you might seriously be the least -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. “That sucks , 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 was never like that with me! She never said shit like that! I walked in and it was like the needle 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?”

I laugh bitterly. “It was technically his office so I couldn’t exactly do that. Errol, she’d probably been banging Tyler since… I don’t even know! I just —I felt so fucking stupid . Like, how’d I not see that coming? Why didn’t I realize what she was doing?”

“You can’t blame yourself for not going through life assuming people who supposedly care about you are secretly trying to fuck you over,” he says. He folds his arms, eyes flashing. “Seriously. She was really shitty to you.”

My words are uncomfortably thick in my mouth. “Thanks, man.”

“So what’d you do after the dust settled? Wait —” Errol frowns. “When did this happen?”

“Last week — not even enough time to get tested and make sure she didn’t leave me with a fucking parting gift I need antibiotics to return,” I say bitterly. “Because we were still fucking! That’s the thing —well, one of the things —messing with my head about this.”

I shake my head. “The other thing was finding out that every motherfucking one of my employees knew about Eliza and Tyler.” I huff out a dark laugh.

“And here I thought I was finally becoming less socially clueless. I was so fucking embarrassed.” As anger and shame roil my guts, it dawns on me that chasing super-sweet coffee with a shot of whiskey on an empty stomach was a mistake.

“You OK?” Errol asks suddenly. I must look as green as I feel. Before I can answer, he hurriedly fills a glass with water and pushes it towards me. “Here. Get some of this down. I’m sorry, I shouldn't have given you that shot.”

“It’s alright.” I wave his concern away. “I’ll be OK.” But I drink the water anyway, just to be on the safe side, before I take a deep breath.

“So anyway, I went straight into my office. And then I made one phone call.”

“Marcus Enterprises,” Errol says.

I blink in surprise at him. “Shit, you weren’t kidding when you told me you tracked what my company was doing!” When I remember the bourbon thing, I frown. “I don’t know if I should be flattered or worried. You’re not, like, stalking me, right?”

Errol turns beet red and glances down. “No —of course not,” he mumbles. “Just your work stuff and, you know, looking at your social media feeds. But not often! Not often enough that it would be creepy or anything, I swear!”

This is unexpected information to try and process right now, especially because… “Um, aren’t we friends on social media?” Still looking down, Errol shakes his head. “Not on any of them?” I ask.

I’m a little embarrassed to realize I just assumed. I’m not really on any of those platforms much. I get so many resumes, idea pitches and the like that going on there starts to feel like work after a little while.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not on them much.”

“You used to be more,” Errol says. He’s not wrong. It dawns on me that he might have been following me the entire time we’ve been living separate lives. OK, so maybe that’s a little stalkery. But I’ve been a terrible friend, and he’s not holding that against me.

Fuck it. At this point, I could really use a friend.

I drain the rest of my coffee and turn back to Errol.

“So, yeah. I guess you know the rest of the story. The CEO of Marcus had been hounding me to sell the company to him. I always brushed him off, but he made one last pitch —and sweetened the offer — after rumors started circulating that we were going to go public. I called him that morning. Told him he could fucking have it — just like that. He thought he was going to have to ply me with all sorts of incentives to give up operational control. I told him to add some more money to the offer and I’d basically just hand him the keys and walk away. ”

“So this wasn’t great for Tyler, though, right? For his investment, I mean.”