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Twenty-Four

O zzy and I tackle one last event before we head to the airport.

It’s an awards ceremony for a second-tier surfing competition that wrapped the day we arrived in Cabo.

Roz explained our presence as two hours of mingling and eating free canapés.

Various TripFriendz executives and their venture capital buddies are also supposed to put in an appearance, but I don’t pay much attention to that guest list. She asks us to play nicely with others, which means I smile with grim determination while Ozzy’s pretty jaw imitates granite.

He’s so tense that I’m afraid his mechanical clapping may crack him.

When we enter the ballroom, he’s hailed by dozens of people, all of whom want to have a conversation that iterates on the following:

Ozzy looks awesome for someone who had a near-death experience five months ago and had to be dragged out of the water and resuscitated.

When is Ozzy “getting back out there”?

Does he plan to surf at contests X, Y, and Z?

His response is to imitate a caveman. He grunts. He fists his hands. He strides around the ballroom like he’d like to kill something. I try to mitigate his crankiness, but Roz is not going to be happy with us.

Mostly he keeps a protective hand on the small of my back. He fetches me champagne and snacks. When he spots yet another surfer that he knows, I promise to meet him at our table and steal away to the restroom. My inner hermit needs emergency alone time.

After longer than anyone should spend hiding in a bathroom stall, I wash my hands, give myself a pep talk in the mirror, and start over.

In the seven eternities it takes me to find our table, I learn three important facts.

Fact number one: the competition isn’t well-known.

If it’s even televised at all, it’s on an obscure channel that has maybe a dozen regular viewers.

TripFriendz has brought us to a middle school musical and not to a Broadway production.

Fact number two: I stick out like a sore thumb. The dress code is cocktail attire, and the room is full of lean, built men and toned women. I guess that’s to be expected when most of the people here work out for hours a day.

Fact number three: these are my people. It takes five minutes to figure out that they all have one thing in common: they’re hungry, and not for the weird canapés that are being passed around. They want to win.

When I came to TripFriendz I was determined to make a name for myself. I was going to do whatever it took to be the best, and I don’t think I considered what I would do after I won my dream job. Step one was becoming the new chief play officer, but step two was vague.

But now that I’ve gone for it—and gone on this road trip—I don’t know what I want to happen next. Mostly, I just want to keep spending time with Ozzy. I want him, and not as my boss or a sexy workplace romance. Ozzy is the best of prizes.

I want him all to myself. I want to toss him into the van and drive off into the horizon with him. We’ll have van-rocking sex at sunset in the desert. We’ll live happily ever after. I’ll ride on his board like a surf dog, adoring him with my eyes, tongue out, little life jacket firmly affixed.

The room is full of round tables that seat six, like fancy polka dots or craters on the moon. Naturally, ours is right up front where everyone can see us. We might as well be seated on the stage.

I’m the first one here, so I collapse onto my assigned chair and whip out my phone. Ozzy’s been waylaid across the room by a toned brunette in a black cocktail dress. She’s talking animatedly at him, waving her hands like a pissed-off octopus.

As I don’t know anyone and don’t feel like making friends, I code. The phone is not my favorite development environment, but it beats staring off into space.

It’s been ages since I did dev work on Crystal Cluster Cosmos, but it doesn’t take long to get back in the rhythm.

I code a few fixes and then decide to make a new planet for Ozzy.

It’s nice to be God in my world. Plus, I think he’ll like it—planets are just really big rocks, and rocks are now kind of our thing.

I add an ocean made of gas so he can surf if and when he decides he wants to.

For good measure, I pepper the planet’s surface with rocks.

Big ones, small ones, sparkly, non-sparkly, and in all the colors of the rainbow.

Other people turn up eventually, although not Ozzy. Ozzy gives me head tips, smiles, and warm eyes from across the room, and I try to communicate telepathically with him. Can you believe we have to do this? This is the WORST . You look superhot in your suit, though, so there are compensations.

I meet a few TripFriendz executives and their venture capital buddies. I’m unclear as to why they’d bother to fly down to Cabo just to witness the end of our road trip, but maybe they really like Cabo. Or getting to take a road trip of their own.

Someone sits down in the seat to my left, a big, broad-shouldered man who’s probably in his fifties.

He introduces himself as Benji. He’s wearing an expensive dark-colored suit with a baby blue tie, and his graying hair has been clipped ruthlessly short.

His eyes crinkle up as he takes me in, and I hastily slip my phone in my purse.

“You’re the gal who wrote the algorithm for fun. TripFriendz’s secret weapon!”

It takes me longer than it should to figure out he means that probably I’m the girl who turned having fun into a software project.

He moves the conversation along.

“How was your trip?”

I give the only acceptable answer. “Great.”

In the ten thousand variations of this conversation that I’ve had today, the other person either asks me to find them their perfect trip buddy or monologues extensively about their most recent Mexican vacation while I stand there awkwardly.

Ozzy saunters up to our table and glowers at Benji. Apparently, they’ve met because they greet each other by name before Ozzy throws himself into the empty chair on my right. He picks up my phone and, when I nod, launches his starship into the galaxy.

“Which sports do you play?” Benji asks me. “Do you surf?”

“No.”

Ozzy’s mouth curls upward. He’s amused.

“Ozzy here has two brothers and a sister.” He nods toward Ozzy, who is flying over an asteroid belt with grim determination. “A football player, a golfer, and a surfer. She won this week’s tournament. He’s second-string on the family sports team!”

He laughs jovially—hur, hur, hur. His voice belongs on TV.

“I didn’t know Ozzy’s sister surfed.” I also didn’t know he had a sister, but details. Rosie would be disappointed in me. This is Stalking 101.

“She’s very good,” Ozzy says. He directs his rocket ship a few degrees to the north. “She hasn’t fallen off her board in forever.”

Benji’s mouth purses up. “My baby boy is such a kidder.”

My eyes are cartoonishly wide. “Excuse me?”

“Ozzy likes a good joke,” Benji clarifies. “He’s the jokester in our family.”

The floor falls out from underneath me. He told me his family was sports-adjacent. You pick out a sports-adjacent career and go do that. That’s the next level in your game.

“I’m pleased that Ozzy’s taking an interested in his post-surf career. He’s an asset to the family business.”

“Benji,” Ozzy warns. “I don’t think we need to discuss that now.” He sets my phone back down on the table with a click. He’s shutting down this conversation.

“What is the family business?” I’m a cruise ship, not rocket ship. I’m sailing through a nice, peaceful lagoon with pretty, turquoise water. I am the calm.

“Venture capital,” Benji says like it’s no big deal.

Oh, yeah, we have so much cash that we invest it in other places—like your workplace.

We own your asses. “We mostly fund sports and adventure lifestyle start-ups. When Ozzy brought TripFriendz to my attention, I knew it had potential. Sending people out to explore the world. Rock climbing, surfing, paragliding…” He lists off a phone book’s worth of sports.

“Ozzy needed a new direction after his last competition, so I convinced him to come in with me. Put up some cash. It was great the way the two of you met. Real serendipity.”

Ozzy is a backer’s son. I’m fuzzy on exactly how venture capital works, but a case could be made that he’s a part owner.

He certainly has a financial stake. No wonder the executive team was so willing to bring him on board.

I’m sure they’ve been wondering when I’d figure out that I was banging an investor.

It will 10,000 percent look like I slept my way into a job.

“Ozzy?” I can give him a chance, I decide. Maybe he can explain this.

“Benji is my dad,” he says.

Benji frowns. “Didn’t he tell you? He had a lot of fun with you on the road.

You’re such a good sport to go along with this.

He’s so excited about the idea of adventure travel.

He’s been working like crazy to identify prospects, get our feet in the door.

TripFriendz was perfect. I shouldn’t have left so much of the heavy lifting to him, but he’s the best at charming folks.

He’s game for anything. He’s such a fighter. ”

Benji laughs a good-natured laugh. This is my cue to declare him charming, too.

“He’s something,” I mutter.

“Panda.” Ozzy sets a hand on my arm.

It weighs a billion pounds. Ozzy stares at me with concern.

It was never real between us, was it? I was stupid to think that I was his choice. That what we felt was real. It was just computer code, lines of text that tell a machine what to do and how.

My phone screen blinks.

Game Over.

You can’t code love.