Page 9

Five

B y ten o’clock on Thursday night, I have wrestled TripFriendz’s bug queue down to triple-digit numbers. I am Crocodile Dundee grappling with programmatic reptiles in the wilds of Australia. I’m muddy and exhausted, and for the next few hours I plan to hide from the world and mine space gems.

I stop downstairs before I head up to my loft. After Basketgeddon on Monday, I went stress shopping, and a text has alerted me to the presence of my pillowy consolations. They are a menagerie of embroidered flowers and orange tassels. There may be faux zebra fur, as well.

The problem with this step in my self-care plan, however, is that all packages are delivered to the building’s mail room.

My box of pillows is therefore trapped in a small room that only just meets the guidelines laid out by the United States Postal Service in their Postal Operations Manual .

Most of the available space in this room is currently consumed by Ozzy, who is chatting up a delivery lady as he shows her pictures of random sea life on his phone.

She beams at him, he smiles back, and then they pose for selfies together.

Jesus Christ, does this man never go to work or leave the building?

I zip in, grab my box while he’s distracted, and hustle out the door. My usual superpower of invisibility does not work around him for reasons unknown, possibly because he lives to torture me with his incessant cheerfulness.

I make it as far as the mail room door. The wide expanse of the building’s communal living space stretches out before me, a sofa-filled game reserve where I am the prey. I’ve got this. Head up. Walk fast. No eye contact.

“Wait up!” Ozzy bounds after me like a herd of graceful, predatory elephants.

I pretend he’s talking to someone else.

The elevator looms in front of me. I peel off to the right and opt for the stairs. Voluntarily enclosing myself in a small, mirrored space with Ozzy is a bad idea, and he won’t leave me alone now that he’s got me in his sights.

He follows me at a jog. It’s the fastest I have ever seen him move. His usual pace is more king of the jungle, a leisurely, masterful, lazy saunter. He sprawls. He takes up space. He occupies not one but two reserved parking spots in our basement garage. I hate him.

Biceps bulge as he juggles an enormous stack of boxes into a one-handed hold. He reaches a hand out to me. “Can I carry that box up for you?”

“Completely unnecessary.” Although now I am tempted to order a cast-iron tub and watch him wrestle it up the stairs.

“Did you get the fruit basket?” He peers around his stack of boxes to look at me.

I slide him a look. He sighs.

“You did. You didn’t like it. Or are you allergic? Shoot. Does pineapple make you itch? I shot a commercial once with a girl who couldn’t stand the stuff.”

He does not shut up. Ever.

He talks and talks and talks. By the time we reach the third floor, I am out of breath and he is rounding (finally) into the conclusion of his TED Talk on promoting a pineapple-flavored lip balm.

I should tell him that I do not need to know about the weird rash his fabulous costar got when they kissed on set because he was wearing said pineapple lip balm.

As attested to by his social media—which I have not looked at in months—he is a bright, shining, beautiful star.

He wears a smile on his face in almost every picture, flashes a self-deprecating laugh in the remainder.

Even wiping out, falling off his board, being rolled by a wave, he is joyous.

How can he be so perfect even in those imperfect moments?

Charisma is his weapon and he wields it like a man-bunned Thor.

The urge to retreat, to hide before he can hurt me more, is an undertow sucking me out to sea.

I add to my bucket list moving to a deserted island, a remote island in a frigid lake, an igloo on an iceberg.

He pauses by his door. “Good talk,” he says.

It’s my turn to say something, but I’m speechless.

A second passes.

An eternity.

“Night, neighbor!” he carols, disappearing inside his condo.

I imagine moving.

Not for the first time, I fall asleep sitting up.

I jerk-startle awake from a dream in which I’m piloting a small spacecraft through pineapple-shaped debris.

My eyes fly open, my hands instinctively clenching on my laptop as it slides toward the floor.

I cannot afford to break my hardware now.

We’re days away from my demo and four weeks from code complete, and our codebase is anything but complete.

Lines of Java spill through my brain, pieces of logic connecting, and I should whiteboard this…it’s right there almost…and then the solution I’ve been chasing for weeks gives me the finger and romps away to get lost in my hippocampus, leaving me 80 percent awake and 100 percent out of luck.

I’m so, so tired, and in less than five hours I need to achieve 100 percent awakeness and go back into the office.

This close to our deadline, work from home has been forbidden.

This is supposed to make us more productive, but instead just makes us hate each other.

One more week of this and my team members will be complaining that they can hear each other breathing.

The problem is the code. Specifically: it doesn’t work, despite endless rewrites. I see whiteboards in my dreams. I fix bugs in my dreams.9

I must have fallen asleep mid-descent on my ten-minute break, because my space shuttle is crumpled nose-down on an asteroid. Game Over blinks on the screen. Play again?

I check the bug queue automatically. I’ve closed more tickets than any other engineer in TripFriendz’s history, but it’s not enough.

Fixing code may be my superpower, but the problem is that the original architecture simply doesn’t work.

As soon as I fix one issue, another crops up.

Like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, I’ll be here all night trying to stave off disaster.

Not even an octopus with eight hands could contain this mess.

Worse, the director of engineering knows it.

The looks I get when I venture out into TripFriendz’s communal kitchen in search of caffeine are knowing and sympathetic.

My head will be the first to roll as Margie’s is safe on her cruise ship.

There are tersely worded emails in my inbox.

Meeting requests. Noah is sending out his résumé. We are dead men walking.

Thumping noises emanate from the neighboring unit.

They are loud, rhythmic, and totally obnoxious.

Oh God, Ozzy’s exercising at one in the morning.

From the sound of things, he is running, singing like he’s in a cadence competition and desperate to win first place.

He does far too many plyometric exercises.

Each jarring thud of his big body hitting the hardwood floors jolts me further out of my sleep.

Time to grow a spine. I set the laptop to one side.

My reflection in the glass slider is more Grim Reaper than confident, kick-ass woman. My tension lines have tension lines. My anxiety is mapped on my face for everyone to see, and I will need a truckload of collagen before this product release.

It’s tempting to put on my noise-canceling headphones and disappear back into the Crystal Cluster Cosmos. Pink geodes make everything better.

Something sparkles outside, something far less pleasant than crystal-filled hollows. Thanks to the streetlights, half a moon, and a not insignificant amount of light pollution, it’s easy to make out Ozzy’s bare feet. They’re bare and tanned, like the rest of him.

The bottom of one foot is nonchalantly braced against the half wall separating his space from mine; the other arches up and over, invading my air space.

The enemy has fired its missile. The ball is in my court.

I launch myself off the sofa and out the door. He may call out a “Thanks for the orange tree,” but I can’t hear him over the sound of my righteous indignation.

I charge over. “Remove YOUR FEET from MY WALL !”

I whisper-shout in deference to the nine o’clock noise ordinance.

A lazy, volume-agnostic “Hey, neighbor,” floats up toward me.

I growl like a werewolf at a full moon. My fingers close around his offending ankle and nudge him back over the invisible line that divides us.

Mistake. His skin beneath my fingers is warm, and there are muscles and tendons, a seductively tensile strength in his ankle. God, what is wrong with me?

The lines of code marching through my brain blip out of existence. I feel Ozzy’s body beneath my fingers. I’m imagining running my thumb up his misbehaving arch, kneading his skin. I’m unbending to go so far as licking. Tasting. Biting is definitely on my agenda.

He is entirely oblivious to the need churning in me.

“Good idea! Brace me!”

What on earth… His body shifts , surging against my hold, and I make the mistake of looking down.

He’s a delicious golden brown all over. The sun has kissed him everywhere, and I am envious.

I bet he doesn’t even realize how beautiful he is.

He moves his body into some impossible geometric shape with no visible effort.

His heel is braced against my hand. I am part of this.

I should let go, should push him away, but I am stuck.

He is an irritating burr that hooks into my leg, the barnacle to my whale, the remora riding the side of my shark.

He’s not wearing any pants. This is fine by me. This is—

Danger.

“Where are your pants?”

My question comes out nowhere near as calm and accusing as I would like.

My words are, in fact, betrayingly breathy.

I blame his boxer briefs. They are a black cotton, pillowy soft and wash-worn.

The elastic waistband sits snugly below his six-pack.

They are also covered with bananas. Bright yellow, cheerful, embroidered bunches of bananas.

Bananas are a dick-shaped fruit. I cannot look away.