Chapter Eighteen
JUDE
On Saturday morning, I do three hours of work from home and then I waste a whole lot of time getting dressed in something that’s not jeans and a Lettercat shirt.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Ella asks me, knocking on my partly open door after I might have been swearing at the mirror.
I throw another shirt on the floor to join the trio already there. I’ve settled on a pair of blue shorts but nothing I own looks normal with them.
“I’m going to brunch with some friends,” I lie. “All my clothes are weird. Maybe that’s why I wear a company t-shirt every day.”
Ella comes in and sits cross-legged on the end of my bed in her pajamas. “Your clothes aren’t weird; you’re just having a wardrobe crisis.”
“Is this really a thing?” I ask her, looking at her face behind me in the mirror. Ella treats things she sees on TikTok like they’re hard science.
“I mean, you tell me: nothing’s comfortable, nothing looks right with anything else, you hate everything you own.”
“Yes. Okay, I’m having a wardrobe crisis.”
“Fascinating,” she says. “I didn’t know guys did this ,too.”
“Ella. Fix it, please.”
She laughs condescendingly. “Oh honey. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Are you going to say that the problem is in my head? I don’t want to hear that.”
She stands up and rifles through my closet, digs out a blue button-down, and tosses it on my bed.
“Fine. Just wear this and roll up the sleeves,” she says. “And don’t tuck it in!”
I walk up the steps of Lacey’s building and press the doorbell next to LANG, remembering the first time I was here, when I let her walk inside because I was afraid of the consequences kissing her might have. Consequences I’m still afraid of, but currently choosing not to think about.
Lacey buzzes me in but I look at the camera and shake my head.
“You don’t want to come up?” she asks through the intercom.
“I won’t want to leave if I do,” I tell her, and when she doesn’t reply I wonder if it was a presumptuous thing to say.
I wait for her on the sidewalk in my blue button-down, overthinking.
It’s been like this since we got back from the hackathon: when I’m with her I’m fine, when we’re texting I’m funny, when I’m away from her for more than three hours I’m in my head and a nervous weirdo when I’m about to see her again.
“Hi,” she says, from the top of the steps.
“Hi.”
“I feel strangely shy,” she tells me. “And I don’t know how we greet each other when we’re not in the office.”
“Same,” I tell her. She skips down the steps and raises her fist for a bump and I kiss her instead. All the worries go away. I kind of like this shirt, it turns out.
Our first stop is coffee, and I hold her hand while we’re waiting in line.
“Thank you for asking me on a five-hour date,” she says. “It made me realize that more people should put end times on social events.”
“Stop. You know why I did that,” I tell her.
“Ahhhhh. No. No breaking your own rule.”
She’s right. The release doesn’t have a green light, and there are absolutely things we could or should be doing today.
But I’ve barely slept in a week, we’ll be shoving something out the door on Monday, and a person can’t work forty-eight hours of a weekend.
So when I texted and asked her to spend five of them with me, I said they had to be work-free hours.
We can look at our phones and message people if we need to, but the two of us will not be walking through Golden Gate Park discussing roadmaps or bugs or internal rates of return.
Her rule was that we couldn’t go anywhere with a ceiling, which means we skip the Conservatory of Flowers and take an Uber to the Japanese Tea Garden.
We talk about our parents and sisters while we visit Buddha and walk through the Zen garden.
While we sit at the tea house, Lacey makes a list of all the Japanese novels that are going to change my life when I get around to reading them.
We rent a pedal boat at Stow Lake, and after a pair of middle-schoolers bump into us and tell us we’re slow—we were busy kissing—we make it a point to lap them, even though they’re not paying attention.
“Alright. Significant exes?” she asks when we return to dry land.
“None,” I say. “Some promising starts that fizzled out before they turned into anything. And yes, I know I’m the common denominator.”
I watch as she considers the red flag that I’m waving.
“Is it insulting if I say I can see how that would be the case?” she asks, smirking.
By the time we make it to the very end of the park, past the Bison Paddock and the windmills, Lacey knows where on her Michigan-map-hand I grew up, and where my grandparents’ lake house was.
I hear a little about her stupid ex who cheated on her.
I know the four hamsters she had as a kid were named Peanut, Cupcake, Nibbles and Gwen, and that Nibbles came very close to being buried alive.
We sit outside at the Beach Chalet for an oddly late lunch.
While we wait for our food to arrive, Lacey asks me, “So are you going to report the results of your experiment or are you keeping them confidential?”
“What experiment?” I ask.
“The one to determine if you like talking about work and sleeping with me, or if you actually like me?”
I feel my face getting hot. “Lacey, that’s not—”
“I’m not mad!” she insists. “I’ve wondered the same thing myself, to be honest.”
“That’s not what this is. I promise.”
“But if it was?”
I grab her hand. “Everything I learn about you makes me like you more,” I say.
She smiles. “That was a very good answer,” she tells me.
“What’s yours?” I ask.
She looks at her watch and asks for twenty-three minutes.
The five hours ended and the wind brought the fog in, but we’re still together, sitting on the wall at Ocean Beach while I try to understand if what she’s telling me is good or bad. It sounds good, but it feels bad.
“If you look at the Pros column, there’s so much there,” she’s saying. “Professionally, just the opportunity to work directly with the founders.”
I clear my throat.
“Come on, Jude. It could be a chance for me to build a team and a product culture. I love being part of ours, but I can’t say I’m not interested in building my own.”
I stand up and put my hands in my shorts pockets. I’m freezing.
“Should we just have this conversation at my apartment?” she asks.
“I don’t know that it needs to be a conversation,” I tell her. “Edmund’s right, you’re right. And I don’t have a say.”
“But what do you think?” she asks me. Like I’m going to tell her to limit herself and stay at Lettercat, or throw back at her something she said to me pretty damn recently: this is the only place I want to be.
“I think you need to do the thing that’s best for you,” I say. “And it sounds like that might be moving on.”
“I’m not doing anything yet. All I did was tell Edmund that I’m open to a conversation.”
“Exactly,” I tell her, not revealing the part of Glenn’s hiring process where Edmund called me and said, “I’ve found your Head of Product, here’s his contact information.”
If Edmund wants Lacey somewhere else, it’s hers to turn down. I request an Uber: William will arrive in 4 minutes.
“I feel like I ruined a nice day and I’m sorry. I wanted to wait until after Monday but I also didn’t want to keep it from you. I don’t want this to be a distraction.”
I grab her hand and pull her up from the wall. “It’s not a distraction. You didn’t ruin anything.”
We walk to the pickup spot, we get into the car. Lacey leans her head on my shoulder.
“If I leave, I’d do it for professional reasons. But you have to admit it would make things easier. No matter what happens between you and me.”
“I guess,” I say, reluctantly.
“Where does Ella think you are right now?” she asks me.
“Brunch with friends,” I tell her.
“And how was it, lying to your sister?”
“It sucked.”
“Right. And the more time goes by, the more lying we’re going to have to do. This makes it easier.”
Except Lacey’s become my favorite thing about working at Lettercat. I’m going to lose one of the best people on my team because I couldn’t keep it in my pants.
I know that’s a dumb way to look at it. I know she’s talented and I want her to have all of the success she deserves; I just selfishly want her to have it with me.
I walk Lacey to the door of her building and tell her not to worry, we’re all good.
“We’re going to survive tomorrow, we’re going to release on Monday, and we’ll figure everything out after that,” I tell her.
Only two of those turn out to be true.
When I get back to my apartment, I log in and jump on a few bugs that were added to the tiger team queue.
Ingrid’s wrestling with a tough one, so I’m helping swat anything else that comes up.
The finish line is so close, but it’s bittersweet knowing that once we cross it I’m back to decks and spreadsheets.
Ella arrives home but between my focus and my headphones, I don’t notice until she puts a brown paper bag on my desk. It smells delicious.
“I brought you some Thai food,” she says. “How was your day with Lacey? Did she like your shirt?”
I blink at her. I’m too tired to pretend she’s not right.
So I thank her for dinner and then just unload all of it on her, Edmund and Lacey and how much she means to me and to Lettercat.
How I can’t talk to Trevor about it because he works with Lacey, how my founder friends said dating interns is a better strategy than dating employees, because they cycle themselves out.
“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her.
“First, please stop hanging out with your creepy founder friends. But I think you already did the right thing with Lacey,” she says, giving me a hug. “You’re being supportive and letting her make the decision. Stop overthinking it.”
“But it’s my superpower.”
“Maybe try underthinking. If it makes you happy to be around her, just be around her. Less about what you think and more about what you want.”