Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(84)

“Hey.” Adam frowns. “That is totally uncalled for. Don’t listen to her. Buy it. Buy three.”

“I’m out.” I hit end, and then unmute the sound on my tablet.

Blake is smiling and shaking his head.

“You know,” Adam says thoughtfully, “possibly we should have gotten her in on the script from the start.”

Blake just smiles. “Ah. That’s one we should talk about later, too.”

24.

TINA

My mother drives me back to the Bay Area. This time, though, we take a proper freeway instead of going through winding mountain roads.

We don’t say much. Her only commentary on the whole matter is this:

“If Blake’s dad is so rich, can I make him pay for the gas money I spent to come up here?”

For months, I worried about precisely this: my mother discovering I have a source who could fund her hobby to an extreme she’s never discovered before. I thought I would be embarrassed. Ha. Adam got me thrown in jail. He owes me.

“Soak him,” I tell her. “Hell, don’t stop with gas money. You don’t know how rich people think. Make him fund a nonprofit center for you. You can quit your job.”

She wrinkles her nose. “What, and let that bossy pain-in-my-butt tell me what to do with my time? Ugh. Gas money, and he can pay for my hours today.”

She doesn’t ask me any other embarrassing questions. She doesn’t make horrible demands. She’s just there for me.

I look up Cyclone’s press release halfway through the drive. It came out concurrently with our conversation. This release lays out the facts of what happened last night in startling clarity. It mentions Adam’s cocaine habit and his subsequent heart attack. It says that he’ll be going into rehab.

There’s more, too. Sometime this morning, the Board of Directors had an emergency meeting. Cyclone will be undergoing a reorganization. The CEO position will be split into three, going forward: a chief product officer, a chairman, and CEO. They don’t say anything about the deal Blake cut with the DA.

The news is confused. Half of everyone thinks the whole thing is a stunt. The other half doesn’t know what to think. Some law firm is already talking about a derivative shareholder suit, but Cyclone stock is up—way up.

Still, I’m out of jail. And he’s apparently out, too, since he’s done at least one interview since the launch. It just goes to show: you really can’t trade lives. There’s no way I could have managed that, not even with all Blake’s money. But that realization no longer makes me feel bitter. It just…is. There’s nothing I can do about it. No matter what happens, everything he does will always be easier for him in every way.

Except when it isn’t.

I come home to find Maria waiting for me with pad thai.

“You know,” she says as we spoon food onto our plates, “you may end up the most famous Tina Chen of them all. You could be the first Google result for your name.”

“Fuck that,” I say. But for the first time in years, I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know what my future holds. All of the things that I had planned, every stepping stone I had imagined… I’m not sure that I actually need them. I don’t know that I’ll do what’s safest.

I don’t have to anymore.

9:15 PM

Hi Tina.

Sorry this has taken so long.

The day’s been kind of crazy.

Can we talk?

9:15 PM

Sure. When? Where?

Don’t take this the wrong way but I kind of want to see you in person.

9:16 PM

Is there a wrong way to take that? ;-)

Meet me here in 45 mins

He sends GPS coordinates. When I check, they’re a ten-minute walk from his home in the Berkeley Hills. I’m not sure what to say to him. I’m not sure how any of this is going to work. But after I take a quick shower, I go to my closet. Ever since that day in the parking lot long ago, ever since Maria got my favorite sweater dry-cleaned, I’ve been afraid to wear it.

I’ve been afraid to believe in what it once represented: the hope that maybe today, everything that can go wrong, won’t.

I’m not afraid any longer.

I put it on.

BLAKE

I’m waiting in the park when Tina walks up. She’s wearing jeans and a white sweater. It catches the light in all this darkness, makes it easy for me to chart her progress up the street.

I stand. I can’t keep myself from going to her. My heart is pounding; my head feels dry.

Her hair is dark around her shoulders, cloaking her in the night.

“Hi, Blake.” She walks toward me. Her head tilts back as I come close, and the light from a streetlamp nearby spills across her face. I want to hold her, touch her.

“Hi, Tina.”

She’s the one who reaches for me first. She takes my head in her hands and then pulls me down to her. I wrap her in my arms and kiss her. And for a moment—or maybe an hour—I don’t do anything else. I just hold her close and kiss her in the dark, let our lips, our hands, our bodies melt into each other. They say all the things we could whisper. We kiss and kiss, first, like there’s no tomorrow, and then—when we’ve made our way past that, when our lips and tongues are acquainted once more, we kiss like there is one.

We end up on a bench.