The Startup Wife(34)
“So will you do it?”
“I don’t want to be a pity hire.”
I swirl my coffee and down the last few drops. I can’t lie to her. “I’m having a hard time watching you struggle to get funding for what we both know is a killer idea.”
“Is it, though?”
“Of course it is. Who doesn’t want safer sex?”
“Apparently, everybody.” I see her eyes start to water again.
“Just do it for a few months. You can still put out some feelers for Consentify, and if you get funded, you can abandon me to my toddler brigade, okay?”
She straightens up, wiping her face. “Okay,” she says, nodding, and we stand up and hug over the mini pancakes floating in their sticky amber lake.
* * *
Gaby has implemented an executive team meeting every afternoon, which means that at three p.m., Cyrus, Jules, Gaby, and I go down to the café and talk about what we’re doing that day. We have four months till launch.
It’s my turn to start. “I’ve got the wireframes.” I show them my screen. Cyrus leans down and scans the page. The logo he’d drawn all those months ago is blue, and the circles are interconnected. The home page has three panels: one where you can scroll through the rituals created for others, another that invites you to create your own after answering eight questions (we did the user testing, Ren has told me, and ten is too many, and five is too few; plus, Cyrus says, eight is a lucky number in China), and the third, where you can post messages to your community—the people who asked for the same rituals—sort of like a bulletin board in your favorite café. Or church, for that matter.
Cyrus isn’t sure about the logo.
“But it’s the one you sketched,” I tell him.
“Yeah, but the colors.”
Jules glances at the screen. “I think it’s fine.”
“Can you ask Ren to send me a few options?”
“Okay. But what do you think of the layout?”
Cyrus gets a notebook out and starts to sketch. “What if we put the messaging at the bottom, sort of like a ticker tape?”
“Sure.” I sigh. “We can try that.”
“Sorry to break up the party, but we need to talk about finances,” Gaby says. “We’ve had some unforeseen expenditures, which means we now have six months of runway, not eight.”
“I thought we had ten,” Cyrus says.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I thought.”
“You guys don’t read a single thing I send you, do you?” Gaby says.
I pretend not to hear him.
“Our overheads are higher than we forecasted,” Jules explains. “And we have to spend on customer acquisition right off the bat—ads are getting more expensive.”
Cyrus turns to me. “How long till you can get a beta out, Asha?”
I do some calculations in my head. “I could squeeze something out in three months.”
We look through the glass at the twelve people all plugged into their headphones. “I’ll do my best,” I say. “Oh, and by the way, Destiny is our new head of marketing.” I say a number. “Gaby, you have to pay her. She can’t make her rent this month.”
* * *
After that, Ren and I work around the clock. We hire two other designers and a front-end developer. Ren drives them all hard, using little other than his own example and the occasional sidelong glance. We’re mainlining the ginseng-doused cold brew that Rory has cooked up in his lab, and I’m up so many hours that I don’t even notice the jitters. I crawl into bed (a mattress on the floor which is lucky if it sees a pillowcase), spooning myself around a sleeping Cyrus, waking up around noon, and rolling up to the office with a Ziploc of Cheerios and a single-serve pack of peanut butter.
The summer passes in a blaze of sweaty nights, dawn breaking over the Hudson and sun slanting into my eyeline; Frappuccinos, slushies, soft serve, bubble tea, the weeks bending and crashing into each other. Cyrus never asks to spend time with me, never says the word “weekend.” He curates a blood baptism using Jell-O mix for a vampire couple, goes back to Cambridge for a yoga funeral, and for three weeks in July is away on a Vipassana retreat, and when he comes back, I swear his voice has dropped an octave and he is at least three times sexier.
On our two-year anniversary, we return to the Book Mill. We stay at Sam and Sam’s again, in the room with the sloping ceiling. I am more in love with him than ever. We seem to have accidentally fallen into a happy rhythm, imposing almost nothing on each other, yet maintaining a deep kind of intimacy, a secret place full of longing, scraps of tenderness we nurture and feed, a little bonsai of love. I’m going to write a marriage guide, I think. I’ll call it The Startup Wife: How to Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time. I’ll tell everyone how great it is to mix everything together—work, love, ambition, sex. Anyone who says business and pleasure don’t mix is an idiot. I can see it in Barnes & Noble, propped up on a table between How to Stay Married and Startups for Dummies.
* * *
Jules’s parents, the Cabots, like to flit around the world—London, Savannah, Hong Kong—but they always spend the last few weeks of the summer in the Hamptons. Jules insists we go for a weekend in August. “You can’t send me into that shark tank by myself,” he tells Cyrus. “You owe me.” We rent a car and drive out late on Friday after the traffic has thinned, Jules driving, Cyrus beside him, and me sprawled in the backseat. They’re playing their favorite car game, where they make up stories about the people in other cars. “Divorcing,” Jules says about the couple in front of us. We can vaguely make them out ahead, a woman behind the wheel with a mass of curly hair, a man in the passenger seat with wide shoulders and a thick neck. “Married for six years and they’re cooked.”