Nothing Personal (14 page)

“Well, she did a great
job. She still helping you pick out your wardrobe?”

“No
, unfortunately. She’s working in the U.K. now, brand manager for one of the big packaged goods companies. She’s a star. But my neighbor shops with me sometimes, when I need an opinion. The one who thinks you’re hot.”

“My fan club,” Alec agreed.
“And she wasn’t the only future star in that apartment. Where did the two of you graduate?”

“Davis,” she said in confusion. “Like I said.”

“No. In your class. Let’s have it. The dirty number.”

“She was number three
.”

“And?” He made a beckoning motion. “Come on,
Desiree. Give it to me.”

She laughed and surrendered. “Number one.”

“Gee, Dad, I’ve hardly been able to sleep all week, I’ve been so exci
ted for today,” Brandon needled, walking into the foyer on Sunday afternoon and handing Alec a six-pack. “My very favorite thing, watching football with women. Hope you bought some chick snacks.”

“And what woul
d those be?” Alec asked calmly, leading the way into the kitchen and shoving the beer into the huge stainless steel Sub-Zero fridge that didn’t have all that much in it besides, well, beer. He handed Brandon one of the bottles he’d already chilled, pulled out another for himself.

Brandon
went over to sprawl beside Joe on one of the oversized white leather couches. Joe nodded at him without speaking, finished putting away his laptop. He and Alec had taken a couple hours to go through a few things together, multitasking as usual.

Brandon grabbed a
taquito from a plate set on the stone surface of the massive coffee table and took a crunchy bite. “You know.” He waved the crispy roll through the air like a cigar. “Teeny-tiny vegetables on a special hand-painted platter. Little round tomatoes and baby carrots. Hummus dip, weird nasty whole-grain chips. Light beer. All that low-calorie shit.”

“Does Rae look like somebody who
has to count her calories?” Alec popped the top on a beer for himself and carried it back out, glanced at the 80-inch screen hung against the white wall opposite. Still just talking heads yapping about strategies and tactics, filling time. “And what do you care anyway? You put the “miss” in “misogynistic,” you know that?”

“Oh, that’s good,” Brandon
said. “That’s very good. Did you think that up in the weight room today, or is that one right off the top of your head?”

“Damn, y
ou’re cranky. Still upset that I did the presentation at the conference? I thought we were good with that. Or are you just not gettin’ any?”

Brandon laughed, took a long swallow of beer.
“Nah, just messing with you. And I’m getting plenty. No problems there. Haven’t seen you down in Ziggurat lately though, any day but Friday, or anyplace else either. You got somebody stashed away someplace? Getting serious on us?”

“
Not hardly. Busy working, that’s all.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m getting old. Matching digits now, 33. Maybe I’m starting to feel like one of those old guys driving around in his 911 convertible in one of those stupid English tweed caps that are supposed to make him look like some kind of suave international playboy, when everybody knows it’s covering his bald spot.”

“Hey,” Joe objected.

“When your bald spot’s your whole friggin’ head, you aren’t allowed to take offense,” Alec told him.

He was interrupted by the buzz of his phone, picked up. “Yeah, thanks, Anthony. Send her on up.”

“She’s here,” he told the others unnecessarily, feeling a little flutter of nerves that had him pretty damn astonished at himself. “So not so much of the ‘chick snacks’ jokes.”

Brandon
lifted his beer and the other palm, ducked his head in subservience. “I live to obey you, O Powerful One.”

Alec went to the door, opened it and waited a minute or so. Heard the
ding
of the elevator, saw her step out, look around. Cream-colored leggings under a long, soft, clingy sweater, a cautious fraction more casual than her workday attire. Her hair was still up, though. He was beginning to be obsessed with the idea of seeing it down. He wanted a look at those curls. Well, to be honest, he wanted to wrap his fingers around those curls.

“Hi
.” He stepped into the hallway to meet her, took the paper bag she offered, looked inside to see a bottle of chilled white wine. “Thanks for coming. You didn’t have to bring anything.”

“If I didn’t want to drink beer,” she said, “I figured I might.”

He laughed. “Wine, I’ve got. Snacks, even.”
Including
cut-up vegetables, which he pulled out of the fridge once he’d ushered her inside. He’d been fairly specific with the catering company about providing “some stuff a woman would like.”

“Just don’t ask me to make a three-course dinner,” he said,
setting the platter on the marble-topped breakfast bar together with the—well, the bowl of hummus, “and I’m good.” He got out a stack of plates, too. Women liked plates.

“Yeah, me too
,” she said. “But
I’m
good as long as you have popcorn. That’s my favorite.”

“Got that. Buttered, though.”

“Buttered’s how I like it. The more the better.”

“A woman after my own heart.” He smiled down at her.
Thought about watching her lick the butter off her fingers. Or he could do it. Yeah, that’d be good.

“Hey, Rae,” Brandon said, not botheri
ng to get up. Joe stood, though, courtesy of Alec’s parents, who’d drilled the same manners into Joe over the years that they’d instilled in Gabe and himself. They were good at that.

He could see
Desiree’s shoulders tensing a little as she greeted the others, though as usual, her face and voice betrayed nothing. She set her bag down on a stool, leaned against the breakfast bar while Alec opened the chilled white wine she’d brought and poured her a glass. She took it from him and wandered over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that covered half of two walls of the living room, coming to a dramatic point. He watched her stop and stand at the apex as everyone did, look out at the piers, the towers and suspension cables of the Bay Bridge, the water beyond, gray against the gray sky on this drab February day.

“He
re we go,” Brandon said, picking up the remote and turning up the volume on the speakers discreetly placed in the walls. “National anthem.”

Alec indicated the
matching easy chair sitting at right angles to the two couches, seated himself next to Rae, across from Joe and Brandon. They watched the overly dramatic musical interlude in silence, followed by the flyover, the segue to the inevitable overpriced commercial.

“Sometimes I wond
er why I still watch this thing,” Alec commented as lemurs scampered across the big screen, for some bizarre reason. “Another of those things you do because everybody else does.”

“Excuse to eat popcorn,”
Rae said, taking a handful from the big bowl on the coffee table. She did manage to get through a fair amount of it during the first half, Alec noticed with surprise. And she didn’t ask any stupid questions, either.

“Holding,” he heard her say quietly once, just as the official blew his whistle, tossed the yellow flag.

“You know football,” he said. “Dixie a fan?”

She smiled. “Forty-Niners all the way, win or lose. My grandpa was too. She wears her hat while she watches the games.”

“Of course she does,” he teased. “Got a big red-and-gold foam finger too, I bet, that she waves every time they get a touchdown.”

That made her laugh. “Close.”

“So what do you think of Alec’s
place?” Brandon asked her when the game was over and they were waiting for the premiere of the show to begin. “Pretty sweet, huh?”

She looked around, and Alec could see the hesitation. “Great view,
” she said at last.

“Great
view?”
Brandon challenged. “That’s it? Know how much it costs to get into this place, or how much a couch like this runs you?”

“Man, that’s real classy,” Joe said. “
Maybe Alec should’ve left the price tags on. Rae could’ve been adding it all up in her head, so she could figure out exactly how impressed to be.”

She
ignored all that, to Alec’s relief. “I’m more of a traditional furnishings kind of girl,” she explained. “My neighbors give me grief about it all the time. They say I have grandma taste.”

“Well, I can see why,
” Alec said. “You’ve got a grandma, after all. And that’s OK. This didn’t really turn out the way I wanted. I mean, it’s what I thought I wanted, but I’m not so sure now. A little hard-edged, I guess.” He laughed. “When you see the show, you’ll get an idea why, at least I’m guessing you will, because I imagine that’s how they’ll spin it. Talk about your cognitive dissonance, coming home from that.”

“Really,” she said. “What
was hard to adjust to, besides the modern furnishings?”

He
shrugged. “Like, I drove back by myself, because Gabe was with Mira.”

“Spoiler alert,” Joe pointed out. “You just clued Brandon in.”

“Kind of hard to hide that you’re engaged to your co-star,” Alec said. “At least from your family and friends. You and Rae already knew, because you’ve both met Mira, so what the hell, now Brandon knows too. I’m sure it’s a major plot point, and that they’ll make sure everyone starts getting the idea right from Episode One.”

“But you drove yourself back,”
Rae prompted.

“Yeah.
Decided to go down through Idaho, see more of it, because it’s actually a really beautiful place. Which was fine, except that I kept getting honked at, and then realizing it was because I was going 50. I even got pulled over once by a cop for a sobriety test, I was driving so slowly. That was all fairly new. I usually have the opposite problem.”

“Yeah, you’ve had a speeding ticket or two,” Joe agr
eed, reaching for another potato chip.

“
My insurance agent would tell you so. And I kept stopping to eat at places with neon beer signs and antlers on the wall, guys in John Deere caps, and being just fine with that.”

“Still not going to tell us whether you won?” Brandon asked. “Not that half a million would have mattered much to you. But you know, a few hundred thousand here, a few there, and before you know it, you’re talking about real money.”

“Winning mattered, though,” Alec assured him. “It mattered a lot. Wait and see.
Because I’m
sure
that’ll be part of the storyline.”

“Wow,” Rae said as the credits rolled over the
America Alive
logo. “That looked like some hard work, unless it was in the editing.”

“Not
in the editing,” Alec said. “There’s no way to show how hard it really is, physically, not to mention every other way. The hardest thing I’ve ever done, bar none.”

“Harder than
DataQuest?” Joe asked, referring to his and Alec’s first venture, begun when they were still at Stanford. When they’d subsisted on Red Bull and tortilla chips for what had felt like weeks at a time, and sleep had been a precious luxury.

“No contest,” Alec assured him. “
You want to know how easy our lives are now? Go back to 1885 for a few days, never mind a couple months. That whole training period, I’d wake up and my entire body would be one giant ache.”

“
The blonde chicks were hot, though,” Brandon put in. One too many beers, Alec judged, because that wasn’t his first comment on the subject, and Brandon usually had a little more class than that in mixed company. A
very
little. “That must’ve been some consolation. You put some moves on there? Sure looks like they were up for it.”

Alec frowned at him
, gave him a quick, sharp shake of the head. He hoped they weren’t going to include that in the storyline, but he had a bad feeling that they would. At least they hadn’t shown it today. But when they did . . . Why hadn’t he thought more at the time about what he’d be showing the world, six months down the road? What he’d be showing his parents? What he’d be showing somebody like Rae?

“
Time for me to go,” she said, getting up from her chair. “But thanks. That was some entertaining viewing. The show, I mean, not so much the Super Bowl. I prefer a little closer game, but maybe that’s what we’ll get with the show, Alec. Some real competition?”

“
Yes,” he said, standing up himself. “I’m allowed to say that, at least. And that I think you’ll be surprised.”

“I’ll look forward to i
t. Thanks for having me over.”

“I’ll walk you to your car
.”

She laughed. “That’d take a while. I didn’t bring it.”

“I’d be glad to give you a ride home,” Joe put in, surprising Alec. “Or to BART, or whatever.”

“No, I’m good.” She waved a hand in the guys’ direction, and Alec walked her to the door.

“Sure you’re OK?” he asked when he’d opened it for her. “Because it’s dark, and it’d be no trouble to drive you.” Not that he knew where she lived. He could have accessed her employment file, of course, but he hadn’t. Because he’d wanted to know badly enough that it had felt too much like stalking to check it out.

“I’m fine on my own,” she insisted. “I’m used to it.”

The elevator doors opened, and she stepped inside. He raised a hand in farewell and watched the doors close, then headed back into the apartment.

“
You sticking around?” he asked Joe. “I’d like to run through a few things with you. Rae was right, I guess, about the game being boring, because I got an idea in there about how we can punch through that roadblock with the error-handling subroutine.”