Hookup

I need to let it go.

Let her go.

Instead, I watch her dance one last time on my phone, staring at the screen where she spins effortlessly in beautiful loops and spirals, her right leg extending and flashing me as she whips through a series of beautiful, obscene kicks. I’m both turned on and resentful that I can’t stop watching her.

When my lead engineer sticks his head in my door, I trigger the script to remove her video from our servers, shove my phone back into my pocket and silently hand him my coffee-soaked laptop. I keep spares on the shelf in my office. Stockpiling avoids downtime. Returning to the code I was working on when Maple busted in seems anticlimactic, however, so instead I amuse myself by looking up my guest. I stay respectful, though, and stick to Google and stuff found online. I do no digging into her personal life, but I still add the following to my Things I Know about Maple list:

1. Maple danced five years for the San Francisco Ballet. They have awesome photos of her dressed as a swan princess (white feathers everywhere) and a hot corsair’s date.

2. A year ago, Maple left the ballet and became an influencer in the athleisure space. This means she works out in fancy clothes eighty hours a week and lives on either ramen noodles or air unless she has a new supply of free energy bars from a partner. In which case, she lives on those. In all cases, she takes pictures. An insane number of pictures.

3. Her Instagram is vibrant, colorful and loud—and full of pictures of Maple in the aforementioned athleisure wear, with food, and in places like the beach, the gym and the airport.

4. She loves puppies.

5. And kittens.

6. People pay her to do photoshoots and spend time in yoga pants. She smiles often, she’s a bit of a goofball, and I’d bet she sells a lot of clothing. I’d buy whatever she’s selling.

7. She’s always on the move—running, dancing, twirling, twitching. It’s entirely possible we could run together and she’d keep up with me. Or beat my ass. She’d certainly look better doing it.

8. There’s a photo of her in a big, poufy fuchsia skirt with a white T-shirt supporting Alzheimer’s research. She’s doing more twirling, along with smiling and standing up for what she believes in, and it’s hard not to smile back because she’s just that passionate.

9. Number seven promptly makes me imagine what Maple would be like in bed.

10. I need to stop this.

It’s child’s play to trace the account that originally uploaded the video. I hack into the owner’s laptop and discover that Madd Dixon didn’t bother to cover his trail or delete the original video. Given his demonstrated lack of ethics, I don’t limit myself to publicly available data, instead going for a deep dive into his cyber life. Just call me Miss Marple. Or maybe Poirot. Mustaches and suits are a better look for me than cardigans and pearls.

When a paper cup and straw materialize in front of my face, I reach for them automatically. The cup retreats. My first thought is that Maple has come back. It’s illogical because she hates me. Still, when I look up and realize it’s just Jack, I’m disappointed if not surprised. We have a standing Thursday taco truck date and I’ve worked through my alert.

“You stood me up.” Jack waggles the cup just out of reach. “And yet here I am, putting out.”

“You’re easy.” I take the cup and hit Save. “And I was busy.”

“Eat.” A paper bag thumps down next to my laptop and I smell cilantro and cumin.

“Thanks, Mom.”

Jack says something else, but I’m no longer listening. I’m planning the next step in my Madd campaign.

“What’re we doing?” He leans against my desk, tearing into his first taco. Jack’s a big guy and he requires a constant fuel supply. He’s also much more observant than most people give him credit for.

“Getting even.”

His brows lift in amusement. “Turned white knight?”

“You don’t have a Kinkster account.” Which means he’s likely the only adult male in San Francisco who hasn’t seen Maple’s video. And while I’m unexpectedly glad he’s a Maple virgin, it also makes asking his advice harder.

“I’m married, remember?” Jack wads up the tinfoil from his taco and lobs it into my trash can in a perfect two-point shot.

I attended his wedding, so I definitely remember. There are, however, married people using my app—and not all of them are hooking up with each other. I note, not for the first time, that Jack doesn’t sound one hundred percent happy. Maybe 70 percent. Sixty even. It could be a bad day, week or year in the venture capital world he rules, but I suspect money’s not the problem.

I look up and engage in some wishful thinking. My people skills are minimal, whereas Jack is a great guy. Everybody loves him, and not just because he’s a big muscled guy and outstanding eye candy. I’ve heard him labeled teddy bear, lumberjack and Thor. Whatever. He’s one of the few people I care about, and so for him I make an effort. We’ve been friends since freshman year at Santa Cruz when we shared a dorm room and terrorized the computer science department. When we graduated, we went in different directions. He married on the beach and founded a venture capital company. I coded dating apps and had hookups. We also each made a billion dollars along the way but, to be fair, we’re still fundamentally the same people we were back in our college days. We know when the other is full of shit or having a bad week or just needs to get out on the ocean and surf. I’m sure a surfboard is enough to fix Jack this time.

Jack steals a second taco from the bag. Right. He’s waiting for an answer.

“I was at your wedding.” I snatch the bag back and assess. Ten tacos plus the two currently residing in Jack’s bottomless stomach make six each since California is a community property state and dividing shit in half is legally mandated. I pull four foil-wrapped tacos from the bag and pass them to Jack. “Don’t worry, I’ll bear witness that you’re married.”

Jack is suddenly very interested in his taco.

Item: Jack isn’t a hundred percent good.

He points his half-eaten taco at my laptop and even I recognize a brilliant diversionary tactic. “What are you really working on?”

“Revenge. True story.”

Naturally, Jack slides my laptop around to see for himself. The picture of Maple is downloaded from a cached version of the San Francisco Ballet website. In it, she balances on the toes of one foot, her other leg extending into space behind her. Her arms are flung wide as if to hug her audience, and despite the solemn look on her beautiful face, her eyes smile at us. Sparkly white fabric fills the frame around her and there’s something on her head that looks as if a tiara and a peacock mated and produced feathery diamanté babies. I prefer the naked dancing.

Jack returns his attention to his taco. “Who is she?”

“Lola’s friend. She paid me a visit this morning.”

“And you decided to get to know her better?” Jack raises a brow. It’s one of his innate talents and it drives me crazy that I’ve never mastered the move myself.

“She was upset. Her boyfriend posted a video of her on Kinkster. It was our number one video.”

Jack sighs and knuckles his eyes with his hand. “Kinkster doesn’t post cute puppy videos, so I’m assuming there’s a connection between her upset and the boyfriend’s video.”

I’m never a complete ass, not on purpose. “It’s down.”

“But how many people saw it first?”

“It has 2,348,992 hits. It turns out that Maple is a very talented naked dancer and she’s totally uninhibited.”

Jack groans. He’s always been Mr. Rules, while Dev and I are a little more flexible. Dev was the third guy in our freshman suite at UC Santa Cruz, the first of us to earn a billion dollars, and the member of our friendship triumvirate most likely to use his coding skills for evil. His is a wicked taste for revenge. Steal his ecommerce software and you’ll wake up one morning to discover that you’re unexpectedly selling dildos or other hard-to-explain items. I admire the effort he puts into keep our world fair.

Jack clears his throat. Right. He believes we’re having a conversation in which we take turns talking. Honestly, it’s more like a one-way sermon—as his next words prove.

“Which is 2,348,991 people more than Maple intended.”

Is it?

I’m not so sure about that.

I feel my mouth curve up in a smile as I repossess my laptop.

“I can’t make people unsee her,” I say when the silence stretches on too long. Duh. Even I don’t possess superpowers. “But I can get even with Madd.”

“What kind of a name is Madd?” he mutters. I don’t say anything because the answer is obvious. Stupid, pretentious, owned by a man with a small dick and no brains—take your pick. According to Madd’s website, he was born in Orange County, California, but I’d bet five bucks his mother didn’t put that name on his birth certificate.

Jack’s eyes shift up and to the left. Now he’s thinking, too, which means Madd is totally screwed. Jack’s brain is scary good when it comes to revenge and diabolical plots. “Public access records?”

“Mostly? This is why it’s important to beef up government security. Since I’m using my powers for good, however, you can save the lecture.”

To be fair, there will undoubtedly be a next time and the next time might not be motivated by a belief in justice and fairness. I’m a big fan of rule breaking for any reason, plus I’m nosy.

“And the public good is somehow best served by stalking Maple’s boyfriend?”

“Ex-boyfriend.” Five fun facts about Madd?

1. The password on his voice mail was 123. I add fourteen decimal places and record a new message announcing his move to Siberia to seek a natural cure for his STD.

2. He’s either unaware that his phone automatically saves the photos he takes to the cloud or he’s the ultimate narcissist because his cloud storage includes 129 dick pics. I make picture 116 his avatar on all his social media accounts.

3. Madd isn’t into charitable giving. I help him out by rerouting the contents of his checking account to an erectile dysfunction research group and a save the gorillas campaign. Personal growth is important and this way he’s covered literally and metaphorically.

4. Madd’s inbox is a busy, busy place after I run a handy little script that signs his email up for every known newsletter on the planet without an unsubscribe link. He currently has 19214 welcome emails.

5. He uses the same insecure password on his dating profile, his bank account, his rideshare apps and multiple online shopping sites. Naturally, I change them and his security questions to a twenty-seven-character password complete with arcane punctuation in random spots.

6. His real name is Raymond. I haven’t decided what to do with that yet. I’ll save that dessert for later.

Jack shakes his head when I close the lid of my laptop three minutes later. Mischief managed. “I hope you have a good lawyer.”

This is a rhetorical question since we have the same firm on retainer. You get what you pay for and we pay a lot. I flip him the bird. “I won’t get caught.”

“This isn’t college,” he says, and I hear the warning there.

“I know.” I do, too. Sometimes I miss those days. Not the broke-and-starving part, but the freedom to do whatever we could get away with. Having a company of people who depend on me for their paycheck and health insurance took some getting used to, but so far I haven’t let them down and Kinkster makes good money. Still, I’m standing on the steps in the pool of life while Jack and Dev splash around in the deep end. While the number of married couples in the United States with kids is currently at an all-time low, it’s still not unlikely that Jack and his wife procreate in the none-too-distant future and then things will change even more.

I finished inhaling my first taco. “How’s Mrs. Jack?”

Jack shoves the remainder of his taco into his mouth and chews methodically. I count to freaking forty before he swallows. I’m never quite sure when people are legitimately acting weird—maybe he’s on one of those diet quests where you chew twenty times and commune deeply with your meal so that you enjoy more, consume less and magically shed weight. It’s equally possible, though, that he’s avoiding answering my question.

“You killed her and buried the body,” I deadpan, going for my second taco.

He frowns. “She’s traveling for work.”

Huh.

Mrs. Jack travels a great deal. I’d share that comment or make a joke, but Jack’s face takes on a closed-off look I process while I consume tacos three and four. He doesn’t want to talk about Molly, I decide. Usually Jack’s an open-book guy, happy to share and either tell you all about the awesomeness that is his life or bitch about the work-related stuff. Sometimes, though, he gets in a mood and slams the book shut. I’ve had my fingers pinched more than once, so I back off. I’ll ask Dev and then we’ll figure out how to fix whatever is wrong with Jack.

“Maui?”

“No.”

“Mexico?” Molly’s work takes her mostly to tropical destinations. She’s visited Mexico, the Bahamas and Thailand in the last year. I had no idea that being a pharmaceutical sales rep was so much fun, but Jack claims she’s really, really good at it and that these trips are often company-sponsored rewards for being a superstar employee. While Jack tries to remember where his wife is this particular week, I briefly debate with myself whether or not my fellow Kinksters would be more or less productive after a week in Mexico.

Honestly, we’d probably single-handedly destroy trade relations between Mexico and the US. At the very least, some of us would end up on a first-name basis with the consulate and since I like keeping my vacation options open and my engineering team intact, I finish off my fifth taco and reluctantly scratch “group tropical vacation” off the mental prize list I keep. When I was a kid with a reluctant acquaintance with toothpaste, my dentist used to motivate me with postcleaning visits to a cardboard treasure chest he kept underneath the receptionist’s desk. I’m the dentist now in this scenario and my employees are fishing for prizes. The most popular is cash, although Prada bags and Harleys come in second and third.

“Iceland,” Jack announces.

What?

Right.

Mrs. Jack.

“They sell drugs in Iceland?”

Jack takes a sip of his drink. “Molly went to Iceland.”

Iceland has never struck me as a hotbed of industry, but I’m pretty sure that’s where the northern lights are and it sounds really cool. And then I have a moment of sheer genius.

“Why don’t you join her for the weekend?” My fingers are already flipping the laptop open, pulling up my favorite travel site, and plugging in dates and airport codes. Wow. If you get bored having hookup sex, you can stare out the window at glaciers and lava fields. Or go fishing! Or have sex in geothermal pools! (Actually, I’m not sure of the effect of what is essentially superheated bathwater on the male penis, but kissing has to be possible.)

Jack frowns. “She’s working.”

24/7?

I open my mouth and close it. Don’t go there.

Plus, Jack’s already off onto another topic.

“Are you planning on hooking up with Maple?”

Quickly finishing my last taco, I protest, “I’m not interested in her.”

Jack just snorts. “Sure you aren’t. She’s a girl and you haven’t hooked up with her yet. That makes her your type.”

I shrug. “Clearly, she’s attracted to asshole idiots and I only qualify on one count, not both.”

Jack laughs, which was my plan.

The thing is, Maple and I might have something pretty important in common.

I love to watch.

And she clearly lives to perform.

I’m not Mr. Relationship—hello, I wrote a hookup app. Can I be any clearer? Hookups are short, expectations are agreed upon in advance, and everyone goes home with the fabulous parting gift of an orgasm. Plus, when I open my mouth I run everyone off. I’m blunt, I love numbers and I’m the nerdiest billionaire ever. Yes, I own a Jedi lightsaber and I’d have levitated out of bed and through my day if I could. I have two PhDs, I type at light speed but my handwriting is shit, and I remember everything in numbers: miles, seconds, URLs or IP addresses. The ladies not on Kinkster frown on numbers unless they’re the number of zeroes in my bank account. Maple is obviously creative (very, very creative, particularly at 1:12 in her video), so there’s no way we could ever work. Plus, she’s more than a little crazy—and (let’s be honest) I’m an engineer at heart. A dirty, filthy rich billionaire engineer, but she’s way too unpredictable for me. Code does exactly what you tell it to do, with no surprises, no messy emotions and no drama.

Fifteen minutes later, Jack abandons my office for his and I go back to stalking Maple online. Ten minutes more and then I’ll stop. I promise. From their respective Facebook timelines, I learn that Maple and Madd had been seeing each other for eleven months. In dog years, that’s fourteen years. In human years, that means hundreds of cute couple photos. There are so many that I skip counting them because I’m burning through my minutes and I already know that Madd is a total dick.

I’m not sure I’ve done enough, to be honest. A quick check in Kinkster’s databases reveals Maple currently has an impressive 937 hookup requests. I send her 937 lavender roses as an apology because purple is the color of royalty (I google it) and she’s a fucking queen.

Deleting her video from our online storage takes even less time. A few keystrokes and Kinkster no longer has its very own dancing ballerina. Removing her performance from our backups requires a few additional steps and documentation, but five minutes after I start, I’ve erased all traces of her. No breakup was ever quicker or more thorough.

Goodbye, Maple.

CHAPTER THREE

Maple#cheatnight #notsohealthy #betterthansex

“HE SENT YOU the flowers?”

The he is one Max O’Reilly, hot, sexy, frustrating-as-hell, impossible-to-read billionaire bachelor. Yes, there’s an entire app devoted to dating financially successful San Franciscans. Yes, I looked him up. Yes, despite his weird dating-and-job extra value combo meal proposition, he’s as commitment averse as any of the guys I’ve dated before and the only relationships he seems to have embraced have been brief connections between his penis and a handy vagina. He’s like public transit in San Francisco, rushing from stop to stop and predictably overcrowded, while I’ve always been more of a Trans-Siberian Railway girl, in it for the long haul and the memories.

Lola stares at me, nail polish brush hovering over my bare feet in her lap as she waits for my answer. Or possibly she’s just dizzy from the overpowering scent of roses in full bloom. I’ve been walking around in a rose-scented cloud since they arrived three days ago. I hum a few bars from The Blue Danube waltz. Strauss wrote it to cheer up the Austrian nation after they got their butts kicked in the Seven Weeks’ War and went broke, so it seems like a good post-Madd-breakup theme song. Plus, it’s catchy and the ultimate earworm.

I’m hosting our monthly girls’ night in my San Francisco studio. Despite the limited space (made even more limited by the addition of 937 roses in full bloom), I love my tiny, closet-sized living quarters. Said quarters are at the very tippy-top of a house fronting a square that’s alternately foggy, hot or just outright grimy, and inhabited by trees, pigeons and the occasional homeless guy. Everything in San Francisco is short on space and so the house is tall and gangly like a twiggy, sun-starved plant reaching for the occasional spot of sunshine when it breaks through the inevitable clouds and fog. The outside is all decorative bric-a-brac and a real-life turret with a wind vane sitting on its red-tile top. I had a choice of living in the turret or the unit next door, which has a balcony. If I’d been a billionaire, I’d have gone for both and knocked down the wall between them, but instead I chose the balcony. I do a morning barre routine there, fingers curled around the balustrade while San Francisco trundles sleepily below me as I plié.

Lola alternates pink with white polka dots and pink stripes on white, which means my toenails are as cheerfully pretty as the rest of my feet are not. Years of dancing en pointe have changed the shape and look of my toes, and even though they’re no longer blistered and bloody from hours of daily dancing, they’ll never look the same again. Doesn’t matter. I love them. They’re a reminder that I really can do anything if I try hard enough and long enough.

“He sent 937 roses when he returned my phone.” At least I’m almost certain they’re from Max. The handwriting on the florist’s card was really bad, to the point where if you’d told me the note was in Cyrillic, I’d have believed you. The one person I know, however, who did not send those flowers is my ex-boyfriend. Madd never sent me roses. In retrospect, I’m lucky he didn’t gift me with an STD. Part of me wants to laugh or find a way to rub my ex’s face in my flowers (starting with the thorny bits), but the rest of me is still a sad, angry llama that appreciates expensive flowers. And the quick phone repair job. I definitely wasn’t offended by that.

“Wow.” Lola caps the polish. “That’s random.”

“It’s very precise,” I counter. “I think he sent one rose for each hookup request I had on Kinkster.”

Frankly, that number is obscene. Literally. I need no more dick pics in my life, so flowers and a free phone repair are a welcome change even if the only “message” was Max’s name scrawled on the florist’s card in black Sharpie, bold and impatient. The picture I snapped of my new floral accoutrements already has a thousand likes on Instagram.

Lola just grins. “That sounds like Max actually.”

I try to sound cool, as if hot, smart guys send me the contents of a florist’s shop all the time. “He sends flowers wantonly and indiscriminately?”

Lola considers this for a nanosecond. “Max is not a flower guy.”

“His mother? Dead coworkers? Nada?”

“You’d have to ask him, but flowers are for the well mannered. Max is blunt.” She makes a face. “Wrecking-ball blunt. He tends to put people off. It’s the precision flower-sending that makes perfect sense. He wouldn’t send a dozen roses, but 937? Absolutely. That number means something to him and he loves numbers. He’s equally likely to send you 937 truffles or 937 thong panties or 937 of whatever else pops into his dirty mind.”

“Tell me more.” The smile stretching my own face is as big and goofy as, say, a bouquet of a thousand purple roses. I only want to know more because he’s seen me naked, I tell myself. And never mind that by that standard I should be holding mass meet and greets across the foggy, fine city of San Francisco. “Is he seeing anyone?”

Lola snorts. “Not for more than an hour at a time.”

I don’t have relationships.

I have hookups. For sex.

Doesn’t he realize that relationships are special? Any two people can hook up, but it takes effort to maintain that connection. It’s the difference between a salad of edible flowers and growing a garden from seed. It’s what makes Madd’s betrayal so much harder to stomach, because not only had I almost decided that he was my forever man, but I’d invested a considerable amount of time in us.

“He’s a billionaire,” Lola says. “That makes it harder, if you know what I mean.”

Now it’s my turn to snort. “Because not having any money makes everything so much easier? Pardon me if I’m not feeling sympathetic.”

“People date him for the experience or because they want stuff from him.” She turns my foot, admiring her handiwork.

I’m not stupid. I’d connected a few dots even before flouncing out of his office on Monday and then promptly checking him out on the Billionaire Bachelors app he created, an app that’s apparently the best way to meet the love (or lay) of your life. Think about that for a moment. He’s the CEO of a company that hooks people up for kinky sex and DIY porn. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s a money-making idea, but billionaire conjures up images of hot, cut guys (or old, fat guys) in expensive suits. But maybe that’s like assuming all dancers run around in tutus 24/7?