Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
We stand side by side, the red brake lights of Shannon’s Uber disappearing around a corner and out of sight.
“That went well, I think,” Connor deadpans.
I look up at him standing there beside me with his hands in his pockets and feel a surge of affection for him, my partner in crime. Connor, who toured my sister and her fiancé around to teach them a lesson and then gave up his Friday night just because I wanted him to.
And now it’s just the two of us.
He’s watching me watch him, a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
I push up onto my toes, wind my arms around his neck until my wrists hook around my elbows, securing him into place.
I’ve been waiting all night to do this again, and from the way his arm curls around me, I think he has too.
His right arm glides up my back until his hand closes around the back of my neck, and then we’re kissing.
He kisses me like we have all the time in the world, and like we’re the only two people in the world here to do it.
Everything about him feels so nice and so easy and so good, like kissing is the most obvious thing we could be doing and every part of him just effortlessly clicks together with every part of me.
This is the later he promised me earlier. It’s finally here.
“You know,” he says, pulling just far enough away to speak. “I live really close to here.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
His dimple peeps. “Over there.”
I feel, rather than see, where he points to, somewhere behind me.
“What, like, across the street?”
He nods. I burst out laughing.
“You’re not serious.”
“Do you honestly think that I would joke at a time like this?”
“Is that why you picked this restaurant?”
“You said you wanted a spot in Brooklyn.”
“Are you inviting me to your apartment?”
He stares at me steadily. Nods. He knows what I’m asking. I nod my agreement.
I lean forward and peck his lips. “Then let’s go.”
—
Connor wasn’t exaggerating when he said he lived just over there. We can see the front door of his building from the street corner.
It’s one of those nights that hints that summer’s coming. Though it’s past ten, the neighborhood is filled with the pleasant buzz of happy people starting their weekends, and we amble up to his apartment complex, an old industrial building of gray stone that’s been redeveloped into a condominium.
His hand catches mine just as we reach the awning over the glass front doors, and he leads me inside, through the paneled lobby past the doorman, Joe, who he stops to introduce me to, then into the elevators and up to the eighth floor.
We walk down to the end of a gray corridor, each door painted the same shade of navy blue, matching the skirting that runs along the perimeter.
When we get to his apartment, he fishes his keys out from his jacket pocket, unlocking the door and holding it open for me to pass through. I step inside but am greeted with nothing but darkness. I wait patiently while he closes the door and reaches around me to flick on the light.
I stand there for a moment, taking in my surroundings, then peek over my shoulder.
“Go ahead,” Connor says, one side of his mouth kicking up.
I need no further invitation to snoop.
We’re in a small corridor, with doors on the left and right. The end of the hall opens out into the main living space, a modernish-looking loft conversion with a vaulted ceiling and warm wooden floors.
I do not know what I was expecting, but it was not this.
It’s cool, but not flashy. The whole space is one big, easy rectangle, with enormous windows running along the back walls offering waterfront views.
To my left is the kitchen area, divided from the living space by a counter-cum-breakfast-bar and an enormous concrete pillar that looks sturdy enough to support the weight of the entire building.
I vow to return to that later, but for now step past it, to get a closer look at the living room.
There’s a rectangular dining table to my left, and on the wall to the far right of the room is an enormous cream couch, wide and deep and smattered with cushions.
Behind it, on the wall, is a huge framed poster, and in front of the sofa, a plexiglass coffee table.
On the wall opposite the sofa is his TV, with a unit underneath it that’s home to books and records, and a couple of framed photos sitting on top.
Maybe most surprisingly of all, there’s plants: a tree-looking thing beside the couch, and a few smaller ferns and vines dotted around on the other surfaces.
The whole place feels comfortable, and supremely inviting. It’s tidy, but lived-in. Grown up.
“Do you have a roommate?” I ask him tentatively.
“Just me.” He smiles.
I wander around, poking at all the little things I can find, running my fingers along the spines of his book collection—mostly a mix of biographies and Stephen King novels.
I feel like an archaeologist on a dig site, each new finding an undiscovered piece of Connor I never knew about before.
I rifle around the kitchen for ages, poking around the cupboards and snooping through his fridge, and then once most of the living space has been explored, I turn back toward the corridor.
“Now where am I heading?” I ask him.
He leads me down the hall, stopping at the first door, which turns out to be a closet.
“This is famously where I keep my coats. Also shoes.”
“That’s genius.”
“Here is a bathroom,” he says of the next door, opening it for me and flicking on the light. It’s small, and clean—just a vanity, a toilet, and a small shower cubicle.
“Another closet?” I ask, pointing at a folded door beside the bathroom entrance.
“Laundry,” he says, sliding it open to reveal a stacked washer and dryer. Jeez. Talk about living in the lap of luxury.
I can only assume the last unexplored room in the corridor is his bedroom. My stomach flips over in anticipation as he flicks on the light.
Only when we get there, it’s not a bedroom at all, but a home office space. There’s a double-doored closet at one end of the room and a desk against the wall on the other side, the two enormous monitors a perfect match to the set he has at work.
I stare at the room blankly.
“I don’t understand,” I say slowly. “Where do you sleep?”
A smile dawns. “In my bedroom, if you can believe it.”
“There’s another bedroom?”
He nods.
“The rent on this place must be insane.”
There’s another bookcase in here, revealing a whole new treasure trove of artifacts for my discovery. Connor watches me the entire time, waiting patiently for my reaction.
My eye alights on a familiar figure.
“Oh my god, is that Brian?” I say, picking up the toy dinosaur resting on his shelf. Sure enough, it is Brian: the DinoCode logo is stamped on the bottom of its foot.
I look back at the shelf and gasp. “You have Julie too?”
“I forgot they were friends of yours,” he murmurs.
“And yours, clearly,” I counter, waving the toys at him. He only laughs. “I can’t believe this. All this time you’ve been teasing me about liking DinoCode when you’re the super fan.”
“Busted.”
“I don’t get it,” I say, clutching Brian and Julie to my chest. “Did you used to work there or something?”
He pauses for way too long. “In a way.”
I glance up from my inspection. “Why are you being so shifty?”
Connor does the thing he does whenever he’s uncomfortable. He scratches the back of his neck.
“Well, the thing about DinoCode is…” He takes a huge breath and on the exhale he says, “I invented it.”
I laugh, that’s funny. When I see the look on his face, I stop. “It doesn’t feel like you’re joking.”
“That’s because I’m not.”
“You…invented…DinoCode.”
“Yes.”
“You invented—” I break off, holding the dinosaur right up in front of his face. “Brian.”
“Yes.”
“And Julie.”
“Ben invented Julie.”
“BEN INVENTED JULIE???”
“Yes.”
I stare off into the middle distance, trying to make sense of what he’s saying to me. I’m getting nothing.
“Connor Reid, you explain yourself right now,” I demand. “Is this one of your weird nerd jokes I don’t understand?”
“One of my—what?”
“Did you invent this the same way I invented Coco-nutty ice cream? Because that doesn’t count!”
I’m still clutching the dinosaur figurines. They’re now being used to punctuate my surprise. Like little prehistoric pom-poms.
“This is going about as well as I thought it would,” he mutters, gently prying the toys out of my grasp and putting them back on the shelf.
“Back in college,” he explains, “I made up Brian as part of an assignment for a game development class I was in. Ben was also in this class. We had the idea for this little kids’ game where they learned to code through a series of tasks.
Our professor at the time really liked it and told us to apply for this grant through the school so we could develop it. ”
“OK.”
“We won the grant and used it to make DinoCode in senior year.”
“But,” I say, not remotely getting it. “You work at Taskio.”
“After graduation, Ben and I kept working on it. We worked with an elementary school near campus to get kids to interact with it and give us feedback and stuff. A lot of them really liked it, I guess, and one of the dads of a student there worked at an education software company and got in touch. Eventually, they offered to buy it.”
I have nothing to say to this, so I don’t. My mouth is hanging open, like I’m a fish caught on a line.
“Ben and I were still in California, working out of the kitchen of our house share. We had no big plan for it. Mostly we just hoped it would help us get jobs after graduation. And building up a company is hard. We were running out of money and needed a lot more than just the two of us if we were going to turn it into anything. And then we got an offer.”
I take this information in, picturing Ben and Connor working and living in close quarters fresh out of college. It is not hard to imagine; they still work in close quarters and look like they’re fresh out of college. Which explains a lot.
“Did you ever consider running it yourselves instead?”
He shrugs. “Ben wanted us to try. I wanted to sell. I had a girlfriend back in New York and was dying to get home. I overruled him.”
“How did Ben feel about that?”
His smile twists. “Pissed, but eventually he agreed with me. We were in way over our heads, and there was a company offering us a ton of fucking money to buy a game we made up in college. It made sense to sell. We figured we could eventually use the money to do other things.”
“And then you joined Taskio instead.”
“After the acquisition, we both stayed on to consult for DinoCode. And then a guy at the new company had a sister in New York who was looking for an engineer to help build out the software for a startup she was working on. That was Naomi, by the way.”
“So you took the job?”
He nods. “I came back to New York, then Ben followed me out here six months later.”
“And the rest is history.”
“That it is,” he says, abstracted now. He picks the Brian toy up again and turns it over in his hand.
“Do you regret it?”
“Not really,” he says, setting Brian back on the shelf. “Sometimes I do wonder if we gave up too soon. Or if I gave up, I guess. But I still think it was the right call.”
“I don’t get it. If you made all this money from DinoCode, why work at Taskio?”
“Well, we were like twenty-three when we sold it. I had to do something. I liked the energy of a startup but not the stress, so Taskio was a good fit for me.”
“Makes sense.”
What he doesn’t say is that he’s also practically a founder of Taskio, something he hinted at last week but hasn’t explicitly said. I wonder how big his stake is. Someday it will also make him millions.
I look at Connor like I’ve never seen him before. He’s like, an actual grown-up. Who invents things. That’s hot.
“You’ve gone very quiet on me there, Annabelle,” he says, gently drawing his index finger down the bridge of my nose.
“Just—processing. How come you never told me? You know I’ve been playing DinoCode.”
“I figured if I told you, you’d stop.”
I smile. “That is probably true.”
“And honestly,” he continues. “I liked that you were playing it. It felt like my worlds colliding.”
“Man,” I say. “I feel like such a slacker now. No one told me we were out here inventing things. I feel like I need to come up with something.”
“Oh yeah?” he says, pulling in close. He slides his arms around my waist, kisses the side of my neck.
“Definitely. Something’s coming to me, actually.”
He turns me toward the wall, hands guiding my hips.
“Just go with me on this. It’s an educational game for grown women who need to learn to code.”
I feel a warm hand at my neck, then the slide of a zipper. Cool air on my back.
“I’m thinking it’s an animated coconut who loves…bodybuilding?”
My dress slides over one shoulder, then the other. Down my arms.
“You’re right. Too obvious. An animated coconut with an ice cream shop.”
His thumb brushes across the lace of my bra.
“I’ll keep working on it,” I say breathlessly, and spin toward him.