Chapter 43

The evening before.

Dana and Lucca were in an unremarkable cocktail bar, the closest spot to their client’s office, where they could sneak off for a celebratory drink. They sat facing each other across a small two-seat table, leaning in to hear each other more easily over the din of tech workers drinking their after-work drinks.

“I expected them to scope the project down, if I’m honest,” Dana commented, clinking her ice cubes around in a small tumbler of dark liquor.

“They have VC money to burn, we got lucky with the timing,” Lucca said with a half-shrug, and sipped a vaguely-tiki light pink concoction that probably had twice the alcohol as Dana’s sazerac.

“No.” Dana shook her head, lips curved in a small smile. “You sold them on it. I could tell when I walked in that they planned to back out. You changed their mind.”

Lucca looked away, uncharacteristically shy. They shook their head.

“Let’s call it a team effort.”

“Team effort, indeed. Phase one is going to take a dozen people, for six months. That’s huge. You should be proud.”

“We’ll figure out who’s to blame later. Let’s just celebrate, okay?”

“Okay,” Dana replied warmly, with a smile.

“How’s Valerie?” Lucca took a long drink from their pink mystery beverage.

Dana took a few moments to catch up to the change of subject.

“She’s… good. She’s been in therapy. Like you…” She couldn’t decide between demanded and the more euphemistic suggested.

“She needs it. You’re doing a good thing.”

Dana made a discontented sound, and sipped at her drink again.

“What?” Lucca narrowed their eyes at her.

“This wasn’t… this was supposed to just be fun, you know.”

“She’s a human being. You can’t just—”

“I know,” Dana raised a hand, placating. “I know. I know.”

Lucca settled back into their seat opposite her.

“Do you?”

“Give me some credit. Don’t you just wish things could be simpler, sometimes, though?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Lucca replied, with something like a laugh, albeit with a slightly manic edge. “People aren’t simple.”

“You could tell me about it,” Dana offered; not for the first time.

Her words were tinged with an old sadness, the boundary around the thing Lucca had always refused to talk about.

“Some other time. Hey, do you want to lend Valerie to me for a while? I could use someone with her skills on the new project.”

“It’s always some other time.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m serious, by the way.”

“I’ll think about it. What happened to let’s just celebrate?”

She swallowed the last of the dark liquid from her glass.

“Touché. Thanks for the drink, Dee.” Lucca’s eyes twinkled across the table at her.

“Don’t mention it. How’s yours? I don’t know how you can drink those things.”

“The straw helps, even if it is paper. It’s too sweet, and their rum is shit.”

“Mine was fine. Overpriced. You could have just ordered off the menu.”

“The bartender seemed bored.”

“He seemed terrified. Try not to look so delighted about it.”

“You mentioned you have dinner plans, right?” Lucca asked, not contesting the allegation.

Their client had pulled Dana aside at the end of the meeting and invited her to dinner to celebrate— he was a valuable client, but Dana had sensed his invitation was more than business, and she had less than zero interest.

“For our dear client, I am afraid I have plans. Ironclad. Indefinitely. Such a shame.”

“You may not have noticed, but I am not our client.”

“Oh, thanks, I missed that, but now that you point it out, your hair is a little shorter…”

“So, you free tonight?”

“Valerie is waiting for me at home…”

“Where else would she be? I assume there’s no safety issue.”

“No,” Dana shook her head. “She had therapy this morning, and free time after that…” Dana paused. “I told her I would be back for dinner.”

She had meant it, at the time.

“She’s not a child; just text her something came up.”

Dana waved the suggestion away without comment. Valerie did not have a phone. She tried to convince herself that changing her mind was not the same thing as lying.

“Maybe just a quick bite to eat,” Dana hedged. “You hungry?”

“Not particularly,” they said, smiling with mischief.

“Uhm. Okay, well…?”

“Another drink to whet my appetite? I’m sure we can find somewhere better than this.”

“I haven’t seen you in six weeks and all of a sudden you want to…”

Lucca shrugged, and actually seemed slightly embarrassed.

“I’ve been busy, you know. I lost track of what day it was. Time gets weird out in the desert.”

It was not an unusual gap. Lucca’s typical behavior was to disappear into work for months at a time, surfacing only if Dana reached out, or during the gaps in between projects. Lucca was definitely prone to hyper-focus, but it always seemed like more than that— an intentional losing themself in their work; and Dana had never convinced them to explain.

Chastened from their last conversation, Dana had not reached out, until business demanded it.

“You should really move somewhere civilized.”

“Who can afford that? Hey, let’s go to that place over by city hall with the waterfall in the basement.”

That first drink at a convenient business bar became a second drink in a dark, tiny basement bar, and then a third— “just a nightcap”. Two knees touching, as if by accident, became a hand on a thigh. Despite the alcohol, they both knew what they were doing.

They spent the night together in Dana’s city apartment, and shared a late night dinner delivered to their door.

As much as Dana and Lucca had a sexual or romantic relationship, this was the pattern of it. Since everything that had happened with Valerie, and given Lucca’s dim view of that situation, Dana had not expected another opportunity with them. She considered herself lucky to have kept them as a friend.

Dana read the same paragraph of the same contract for the third time in a row. For the third time, she lost her place before reaching the end of it. Dense legal language was often not easy to get through, but she had never had quite such a difficult time with it before.

Who does she think she is, anyway.

She had been working — ha, if you can call it that — for three or four hours, and her achievements added up to approximately nothing. She clicked the contract closed, re-marked the email as unread, and sighed.

She’s an adult, she ought to be able to handle a night on her own.

There were three proposals for new work that she needed to prepare, but that kind of writing required a carefully balanced tone of professionalism, joy, and optimism. After another hour spent staring at a blank slide deck template, she gave up trying to find the voice she needed.

Anyway, I didn’t lie. The assurance was no more convincing or believable than it had been the first dozen or so times.

Her neck felt tight, bordering on painful, and the room seemed warmer than the environmental controls claimed. Staring down at a laptop screen all morning was starting to get to her. She felt slightly nauseous, and she could not remember what — if anything — she had eaten for breakfast. There had been coffee before leaving the apartment; but now, the mere idea of food was unappetizing.

She pulled up the master spreadsheet that the co-op used for resource planning. The colorful grid of project names, co-op members, and time estimates may as well have been pure random noise for all the sense she was able to make of it. They did not have enough people free to staff up the new project, and every time she tried to grapple with the complex re-scheduling and re-assigning it would take, she found herself staring absent-minded at the wall of her office.

All she could see was the hurt and bewilderment on Valerie’s face when they had talked, and Valeria had learned that Dana had chosen not to come home as promised.

It wasn’t a promise, she failed to convince herself, again.

The hint of anger when the girl accused her of lying had stripped the lustre from her memory of the prior night. A fun evening of sex and companionship now felt like she had committed some sort of betrayal, and a part of her was incensed at Valerie for tarnishing the experience.

What right does she have to be mad at me?

She had bristled when the girl called her out for not keeping to the plan, and the accusation of lying burned like something sour in the pit of her stomach. She felt like a heavy weight had settled in her chest.

She heard the echo of her own doubts in the accusation. She did not even believe her own repudiation. She wished she could be something as straightforward as angry at Valerie in return, but the reality was much more complicated.

Trying fruitlessly to work was only stacking frustration on top of… she was not sure what she was feeling, only that it was intense and unpleasant.

The whole point of this arrangement was that I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of shit.

She snapped the laptop closed and pushed away from her desk, resolving to find something to distract herself more enjoyably, if she was to be distracted regardless. Playing with her favorite toy seemed like a good way to vent some uncomfortable emotions, and remind them both of the foundation of their relationship. She felt the anger start to win out, and it was a least a simple emotion that she understood.