The Vibrant Years(4)

The circle of men closed around her, laughter and questions and offerings of more wine, and cheese, and all the elaborate analysis of why a certain cheese paired with a certain wine. These were men who’d had time to explore the things they deemed fine. Men comfortable with success, but not so much that they were unconcerned with broadcasting it.

All of that set him apart from them. Lee.

When she looked back, he was gone, but the women had left the shade of the clubhouse and made their way out into the blazing sun. Bindu Desai was no longer invisible. And just like that, she knew exactly what she was going to do with the money.





CHAPTER TWO


CULLIE


Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t caught Bhanu snooping around the hotel that day, looking for trouble.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

Six months later . . .

In for four, out for six. Cullie Desai counted her breaths as she made her way up in the elevator of the building she’d worked at for the past five years. For the first couple years after she’d moved to San Francisco, she’d had to do this almost every time she made the fifty-three-floor elevator ride up to the NewReal Networks offices.

Being a twenty-year-old genius college dropout in the big bad world of tech sounded far more glamorous than it had been. Although Cullie would never admit that to anyone. She needed them to believe she had this. She needed them to believe Shloka’s future was bright. From the age of sixteen, when Cullie had first envisioned the app to help herself deal with her anxiety, a problem she didn’t feel she could share with anyone, she’d done nothing but work on Shloka.

In for four, out for six.

She rubbed the short hair at the back of her cropped bob. The friction helped her breathe. Over the past year, she’d really gotten hold of things with the help of a good therapist and a prescription it had taken her far too long to admit she needed, in conjunction with her own app. She’d gained some control over the constant sense of dissolving into the air around her, from this thing that felt terribly close to fear but wasn’t. Because fear gave you something tangible to avoid.

Her phone buzzed, and she looked down at it. You here yet? It was Steve, of course, and she was, of course, late.

She couldn’t decipher the tone of the text, but that stubborn (and stupid) awareness sparkled across her skin. She tugged at the snug neck of the black crew she’d tucked into black jeans. He went back to his wife, for heaven’s sake, Cullie! She tried to use her mother’s voice to yell at herself, to snap herself out of this. Whatever this was. Because she hadn’t slept with Steve for six months now.

He was waiting for her outside the elevator.

“You’re late.”

Focus on the fact that he sounds prickly. It’s his dick voice. The one you hate.

The one she loved.

Because she was the prickliest of people, and his prickliness had made her feel like she was home when she’d first met him. When she’d beaten him, one of the judges, in the final round of that hackathon, and he’d reached out to her to see what she was working on.

This isn’t your usual CS Geek code. It’s . . . it’s . . . beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Those words had landed like a caress on touch-starved skin.

“I texted Linda to let her know I was running late.” Yes, she’d communicated with his assistant. Just the way he’d asked her to. It had been months since they’d spoken directly.

It’s for the best, he’d said.

Best for whom? she’d wanted to ask. But smart people didn’t ask questions they knew the answers to.

He grunted.

She tried not to let the sound hit her in the solar plexus and followed him to his office.

“How are you?” He shut the door behind her and left his arm there, caging her.

Not caging, exactly, because it was just one arm, but he felt too close.

Eyes the color of the Pacific met her from behind wireless glasses, and she needed to take those breaths again. In for four, out for six. How had she let a man who looked this harmless destroy her?

His face was open, bare of his usual defenses. Naked. The sudden shift sent alarm spiking through her nerves.

“Why would you ask me that? Is it Shloka? Did the board make a decision?”

Hurt flared in his eyes, all those grays and blues sparkling with it. “It’s always Shloka with you, isn’t it? Do you even care about anything else?”

How dare he! He knew Shloka was everything to her. She’d been working on it for what felt like her entire life.

“Are you really asking me that?” She’d given him her app. She’d let him take it to the VCs, trusted him to take it to market. They’d made a lot of money for a lot of people.

And then he’d gone back to his wife. A year after their divorce had been finalized. The happiest year of Cullie’s life. His hand went to her cheek. So gentle she sank into it, her existence distilling to that one touch.

“I wish I hadn’t met you when you were so young.”

For the first two years after she’d dropped out of the computer science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and joined him to take Shloka to market, she’d been in awe of him. Or rather in awe of how in awe of her he was. His respect for her work, his faith in her: it had been like a drug that blasted her into herself.