LUKE: Complete Series (13 page)

“Okay, I didn’t need to hear that,” Milo replied, as he grabbed a glass vase off the top shelf and placed it on the counter. “Is this….?”

I snatched the vase off the counter and hastily wrapped it up. “Yes. It’s the vase that came with the flowers you gave me. It felt like a waste to toss it in the dumpster.”

“Brina, you need to go to that conference,” Jill interrupted, as she pulled a stack of unpaid bills out of a drawer and slapped them on the countertop. “You’re the one who fucked up. You need to make the grand gesture.”

“He probably has a new girlfriend by now.” Just thinking of this made my chest ache. “Oh, God. What if he has a new girlfriend? Oh, this is just too depressing.”

And suddenly I couldn’t stop imagining Luke’s mouth on someone else’s lips.

Milo grabbed my arms and looked me in the eye. “Stop torturing yourself. He does not have another girlfriend. I’ll bet anything that when he’s not at work the guy is holed up in his mansion sucking down bottles of whiskey while watching Howard Hughes flicks.”

“He doesn’t have a mansion.”

“I know he doesn’t have a mansion.”

“He drinks bourbon.”

Milo grabbed my arms tighter and shook me. “Listen to me, Brina. I am making us a couple of fake press passes and we’re getting into that conference on Monday. You are going to this thing and you are going to pull out every last bit of charm, so help me.”

I looked him in the eye, a bit frightened by the intensity of his glare. “Fine, but we’re going separately. I don’t want Luke to see me with you, which is assuming we’ll even get in. You know it’s invitation only and there’s a barcode on the invitations.”

Milo let go of my arms and leaned against the counter as the smug expression returned to his face. “Come on, Brina. You think I can’t get past a fucking barcode?”

“The barcode isn’t used to get in,” I replied. “When you scan the barcode with an app released only to those who received invites, the barcode reveals a password that attendees give at the door. The app is programmed to work for two hours right before the conference begins, and that’s it.”

Milo’s smug grin disappeared. “Well, I’m always up for a challenge,” he replied, as he climbed over a cardboard box and made his way toward the open front door. “I guess I’d better go. I have a lot of work to do. Goodbye, ladies.”

Once he was gone, Jill grinned at me. “Is he single?”

I crumpled the sheet of newspaper in my hands and hurled it at her. “Don’t even think about it.”

PART FOUR: PASSWORD

1: BRINA

My father set the brown paper bag of groceries on the counter and I immediately began pulling out the contents:
Fiber One
cereal,
Metamucil
powder,
Activia
yogurt.

“Geez, is it going to be one of those ‘stay away from the downstairs bathroom’ kind of days?” I asked, as I opened the refrigerator to put away the yogurt.

My dad grabbed the box of cereal off the counter and opened the cupboard. “Hey, don’t blame me; blame the lab. They botched that biopsy and literally scared the shit out of me.”

“Gross, Dad.” I pulled a head of lettuce out of another bag. “You don’t have cancer. There is no need to torture us with this new fiber regiment. Trust me, this will not end well.”

He chuckled as he grabbed my arm and planted a kiss on my cheek. “It’s great having you back, pumpkin.”

He left the kitchen to get more bags of groceries from the car and I sighed. Of course my dad loved having me here. I was unemployed and I would no longer be assaulting his pride with my monthly parental support checks. I couldn’t afford to help them anymore. I had to save up my unemployment income to put down the first and last month’s rent on an apartment as soon as I found a job. My dad might be glad to have me back, but I needed out of this house pronto before the memories, and the fiber, smothered me.

I finished putting away the groceries and raced upstairs to call my best friend Jill Ramirez. My fiery Filipino friend (that was what I called her in private, though it made her inordinately angry) promised she wouldn’t allow the receptionist at the travel agency to leave me on hold for days the way she normally did. Jill’s family’s travel agency was way understaffed ever since Jill took over when her mother got sick. They couldn’t afford to hire anyone other than a receptionist. Jill literally spent ten hours a day on the telephone talking to clients. Her phone never stopped ringing.

I didn’t even bother calling her office phone anymore. I usually just texted her and she’d respond within a few minutes, but today I needed to talk to her. I needed her moral support.

“K&R Travel. Jill speaking. How may I help you?”

“You can start by telling me I’m not about to make a huge ass out of myself.”

Jill sighed. “Oh, thank God it’s you. I’m about to slice my throat with one of these shiny new brochures. Unless you’re looking for a deal on a trip to Ireland then I guess I’d better use the letter opener.”

I couldn’t respond. Jokes about committing suicide with a brochure would have been at least somewhat amusing to me eight months ago. But when you’ve been friends as long as Jill and I have, it’s hard to remember the topics that are off-limits. I wasn’t angry with her. I just didn’t know what to say.

“Fuck. I’m sorry,” she said, and I could imagine her eyebrows scrunched together between her shiny black eyes.

“Sorry for what. You made a joke. It was funny.”

“Obviously, I mean, just listen to all that rip-roaring laughter.” She paused, probably waiting for me to respond, but I wasn’t in the mood to dwell on my brother’s suicide. “I’m a jerk. Just tell me I’m a jerk and we can move on.”

“You’re a jerk.”

“Good. Now, you are not going to make an ass out of yourself. You are going to that conference today in your best T-shirt and jeans and you’re going to plant a big, delicious kiss on that perfect mouth.”

“Jill.”

“You get the point. He won’t be able to resist you. For Christ’s sake, Brina, he loved you.”

I rolled my eyes. “The keyword being ‘loved’ not ‘loves’. Am I making a huge mistake? What if he’s already moved on? A lot can happen in five weeks.”

“You are not backing out of this. Milo went to a lot of trouble to get you in there.”

I could hear the sound of shuffling papers and I felt the need to wrap up the conversation to let her get back to work. We couldn’t all sit at home discussing our father’s bowel movements.

“You don’t even know what Milo did to get us in, but I get it. You know, if this were you you’d never do it.”

“I know,” she replied sheepishly. “I live vicariously through you. Don’t judge me.”

“Not a chance.”

“Go get him.”

I hung up the phone and immediately dialed Milo’s phone number. I had never actually called Milo in the two years I’d known him. He was always the one to call me to talk about work or, occasionally when he was feeling extra confident or a little buzzed, to ask me out. He had texted me last night just before midnight to tell me he had found us a way into the developers’ conference. He refused to tell me how he had gotten a hold of the password to enter the conference and, truthfully, I didn’t care.

Milo picked up on the second ring. “It’s all set up. I have to pick up your invitation and the phone you’re going to use to get in.”

“I need a phone to get in?”

“Yeah, the app that releases the password to get into the conference is only installed on the phones that were sent out with the invitations. He fucking thought of everything. Well, except one thing. He forgot that human’s are inherently greedy.”

“You paid someone to give us their phone?”

“Hey, there are some things that can’t be hacked. Humans, on the other hand, are nothing but walking bags of corruptible code.”

I tried not to imagine that he was talking about me and how I had almost betrayed Luke in the worst way imaginable.

“Hey,” he interrupted my thoughts. “Put on your best come-hither expression. I’m picking you up in an hour.”

One hour and thirteen minutes later, Milo picked me up from my parents’ house in his silver Prius.

I slid into the passenger seat and my gaze skated over his outfit. I had never seen Milo in anything but Armani suits, with the occasional Hugo Boss mixed in. Today he wore carefully distressed jeans and a faded T-shirt bearing the name of an indie band Ryan brought to my attention last year. He had switched out his contacts for square hipster glasses and his watch was missing.

I inhaled the new car smell as I gawked at him. “Did you buy a new car
after
you got fired from NeoSys?”

“I got tired of the Lexus.”

My mouth dropped. “What kind of severance did they give you?”

He rolled his eyes as he turned onto Pike Street. “Your phone is under the seat.”

I slid the box out from underneath the seat and removed the phone from the box. I was accustomed to changing phones every time I started a new project for NeoSys, but this time was different. It felt wrong, holding a phone that didn’t belong to me.

“How much did you have to pay for this?” I asked, as I turned on the phone and was prompted for a pin number.

“You don’t want to know.”

“You’re really pissing me off, Milo. Do you know how much severance Kip gave me? Five thousand dollars. He told me I was lucky to get that. How much did they give you?”

“I signed an NDA. I can’t talk about it.”

“Don’t you dare pull that on me. Don’t forget that you royally screwed me on this assignment.”

He stopped at a red light and glanced at me then stared straight ahead as he muttered, “Ten million.”

“Fuck!”

“Settle down. They only gave me that because they’re still afraid of me.”

I huffed. “No wonder you haven’t bothered getting a job.”

“Hey, I have a job. I’m working from home now, doing network security consulting.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I wanted to strangle Kip.

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

Milo parked on the fourth level of the parking garage on 8
^th
and we sat in the Prius in silence as I stared at the phone in my hand.

“I’m sorry. I should have negotiated a better severance for you.”

“They probably would have given you the same bullshit excuse they gave me. You don’t have to apologize.” I turned to him and his face looked different, softer. With his button nose and his brown eyes staring back at me all wide-eyed, he appeared way too young to be sitting on so much cash. “How much did this phone cost you?”

He sighed. “Twenty-five grand.”

“Ugh. You could have lied to me that time.”

“I did. It was actually forty grand.”

“Oh, stop it. Please. I can’t take anymore.”

He reached over and squeezed my knee and I froze. “Sorry,” he said, as he pulled his hand away. “Just a reflex.”

“All right. What do I do with this phone?”

Milo put on his business face and I almost smiled. He was a year younger than me, the same age as Ryan, and even though he could be a complete asshole at times, his serious business face sometimes made me want to giggle. It was like watching my little brother put on a suit to go to church on Easter Sunday.

He explained the procedure for retrieving the password once I got inside the conference center then gave me a fake press pass bearing the name of the person who sold their phone to him for forty grand. Today, I would be Hilda Marin.

“Hilda?” I muttered, as I hung the pass around my neck.

“Hey, we can’t all be Brina Kingston or Luke Maxwell. Many of us have to suffer with the names our parents gave us.”

“Aw. Poor Milo.” I pinched his cheek and he batted my hand away.

“Don’t do that.”

“Ooh, here comes Angry Milo.”

“Yeah, maybe you should get going.”

I punched him in the arm before I climbed out. “I owe you one.”

The walk down 7
^th
to Pike Street felt like a long walk down death row. I had been up until three in the morning obsessing over what I would say when I finally saw Luke, but I had a horrible feeling I was going to freeze and forget everything.

I had never been in this position before—the one seeking forgiveness. My college boyfriend, Mike Herod, cheated on me twice. I’ve always believed everyone deserved a second chance. I had gone back and forth in my mind trying to decide if I actually deserved one from Luke. Though I never actually gave Milo the password to Luke’s mirror network, I thought about doing it—many, many times. I considered destroying all those years of hard work Luke spent on Blaze for my own gain. For a fucking promotion.

I didn’t know if I deserved to be forgiven, but I knew I had to at least try.

I queued up behind a group of twenty-some people lined up outside the entrance to the conference center. At the door, they would scan the barcode on my invitation and give me the pin code to unlock the phone. Once I unlocked the phone, I would gain access to an app called
Blaze
, which would display a password for me to provide at the entrance to the conference room.