The Underwriting (20 page)

The last time he'd been out with them was over a month ago, and being back in the mix felt good, even if work was still in the back of his mind. He sipped his beer and checked his phone. He was going to text Louisa at exactly seven fifteen. He knew her flight from LA had landed already, but there was no need to look desperate.

Todd scanned the room. They'd come to the East Village, where close proximity to NYU translated into younger, lower-maintenance female clientele.

“Dude, bummer you missed Sunday Funday yesterday,” Max said. “We hit Bagatelle
hard
. It was epic.”

“Yeah, this deal's a bitch.” Todd shook his head. He hadn't had a weekend off since before the new year.

“It'll be worth it,” Tom said, lifting his glass. “Everyone's already talking about it. Maybe you can finally start making some real money.”

Todd rolled his eyes. He knew Tom was only partly kidding: hedge fund managers loved reminding bankers of their lower status in the financial services hierarchy.

“Gentlemen, get ready.” Jake arrived from the bathroom, where he'd changed from his suit into a twelve-hundred-dollar Michael Jordan jersey he'd bought on eBay. He passed around neon orange sweatbands. “Trust me, these are chick magnets.”

Jake and Todd had met at L.Cecil and lived in a three-bedroom loft in the Meatpacking District with Max until Jake had gone to Stanford Business School, where he'd picked up Cameron, Will, and a new image as a scruffy beard-wearing creative who loved organizing parties and sporting costumes.

“What are you doing, man?” Jake punched Cameron, who was engrossed in his iPhone and wasn't putting on his sweatband.

“Hold on a sec,” he said. “Gotta send the daily texts.”

“Are you doing your girl alerts?” Jake rolled his eyes and grabbed Cameron's phone to show the table. A spreadsheet was pulled up on the screen, with a hundred girls' names, color-coded and sorted into hot, warm and cold categories. A third column indicated “Nothing/Made Out/Sex,” a fourth column was labeled “Date of Last Outreach,” and a fifth “Total # Outreach.”

“These are all the girls you're hooking up with?”

“You can't manage what you can't measure,” Cameron said, taking the phone back. “I picked up a few things in business school.”

“What do you do with it?” Todd asked, intrigued.

“The hot list gets a text every four days; warm once a week.”

“You put in reminders?”

“Obviously. I can't remember all this shit.”

“What about the cold list?”

“I've got my Outlook set to auto-e-mail them once every three weeks,” he said. “Stay in their minds, just in case.”

Todd nodded admiringly. “Too bad you can't link it with Hook,” he mused aloud.

“
That's
what you should do instead of insurance,” Kyle told Cameron.

Cameron lifted an eyebrow, considering, then went back to his texting.

—

A
N
HOUR
LATER
Todd and a blonde were both drunk and not watching the game. He had no idea what her name was, but she had enormous breasts and seemed like she didn't have a lot of STDs. He checked his phone: it was almost seven. Maybe he could hook up with this girl before he met Louisa, as a warm-up.

Todd felt his phone buzz.

Todd shook his head and blinked to adjust his tipsy eyes.

He read it again. And again. Was she serious?

Todd searched his brain for an explanation: were there cabs in Brooklyn? He typed back:
No worries. What's the address? I'll send a car
.

“Are you okay?” the girl asked, but he ignored her, watching his phone.

After a few minutes, he put the phone in his lap and reached for his BlackBerry, answering a few e-mails to distract himself. But when he looked at the phone again, there was still no text. He reached for the pitcher of beer. “Where'd that chick go?” he asked Kyle, realizing the blonde was no longer at his side.

“Think she left, dude,” Tom said.

“I think we should make a move,” Jake said. The game was finishing, and he hadn't found a girl. “Who's up for Houston Hall?”

—

“W
ILL
YOU
GO
down on me?”

“No,” Todd said simply, rolling the girl over onto her stomach.

“Why not?” she giggled, looking back over her shoulder as she arched her back and pressed herself up onto her hands and knees. “Pretty please?” She was raising her eyebrows flirtatiously.

“Maybe later.” He smiled a fake smile, turning his eyes from her face to her
ass
and jamming two fingers between her legs.

“Oh!” she giggled. “Oh, yes! Yes, yes that feels soooo good . . .” She turned her head back to the bed frame in front of her, and he positioned himself on his knees behind her.

He massaged her
****
long enough to get her
***
, which wasn't difficult, and quickly unrolled a condom down his
***** *****
. He gripped her
****
and pressed himself
****** ** ***
as she moaned. Her
***
was annoyingly bony. The skinny girls looked better in clothes, but it was less fun when they were naked. And given that he would never be seen in public with this girl, he'd just as soon she was twenty pounds heavier with some flesh on her
***
. Maybe he should have gone for her friend instead. But that girl's face had been so beat. If only Louisa hadn't bailed. Fuck! The thought made him angry and he took it out on the girl, levering back and forth, pulling and pushing her
****
around his
****
, looking down to admire his washboard abs. God bless Morgan. She wouldn't still be a lesbian if she caught a glimpse of this. And Louisa wouldn't have gone to Brooklyn. The girl in front of him groaned and moaned and made squeaking “Ohs!” which he tried to ignore. He was drunk and needed to concentrate.

Climaxing had been taking longer lately. Last week he'd been having sex with a girl he'd found on Hook and he hadn't been able to come at all. He'd tried every position he knew, but nothing worked. He thought it was a fluke, but he'd been behind this girl for like fifteen minutes now and nothing was happening.
Think about Morgan and her girlfriend
, he coached himself, imagining them here, in front of him, making out. Nothing. This girl's
******
felt like a watermelon. It was work, he concluded: he'd been working too hard, getting too stressed about the deal. Maybe she'd take it in the
***
? He snuck a finger toward her
****
to test her reaction.

“Oooohh! You're so dirty!” she cooed.

“Do you want it there?” he leaned forward and whispered.

“I've never done it before.”

Score
.

“I want to be your first,” he heard himself say soothingly.

“I don't know . . .”

“Relax. It'll be fun.”

She bit her lip and closed her eyes. She was drunk, which would help. “Okay. There's some lube in the nightstand. We need lube, right?”

Todd kissed the girl's mouth. Screw Louisa: he didn't need her. He carefully pulled her
**** ******
apart and pushed slowly so she wouldn't tense up. She didn't. What a pro.

“That feels . . .” she started. “That feels . . . good. Oh yeah, that feels really”—she hiccupped as he pressed
***** *******
—“really good,” she stammered.

Yes, that was it.
***** *****
. He
******
******
and
******
and
**** ****
, grunting, his brain melting into a blur as he sighed and fell over onto his back, hardly noticing as she curled her head into his shoulder and he passed out.

—

T
HE
SUN
WAS
STARTING
to rise when he woke up, and he shook his head to remember where he was. A blonde girl was drooling on his chest and he laughed as it came back to him. He pushed her away gently so he wouldn't wake her up.

He pulled on his jeans and slipped out of the apartment without a sound. It was seven a.m. and he wondered how far he was from the office. His head was pounding—they'd been at Houston Hall until at least three in the morning—but he'd made it a great night and he'd make it a great day, just like he always did.

JUAN

W
EDNESDAY
, A
PRIL
9; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Are you seriously still at the office?
Juan instant-messaged Neha when she responded to an e-mail he'd sent with the user demographics she'd requested. It was midnight in California, which meant it was three a.m. in New York, and the first e-mail she'd sent him that day had been time-stamped 7:15 a.m.

NEHA:
Yes.

JUAN:
Do you ever leave?

NEHA:
Every few days.

He started to write
LOL
, then realized she wasn't kidding. He'd worked those late nights back when Hook started, but he'd been building something, not entering numbers into documents no one was ever going to read.

JUAN:
Do you like it?

NEHA:
What?

JUAN:
Investment banking.

NEHA:
Sure. I think I'm going to get a promotion soon.

JUAN
:
Nice! Will that make your hours better?

NEHA:
Probably not.

JUAN:
Then why do you want it?

NEHA:
You do less grunt work as an associate.

JUAN:
Is that what Beau is? An associate?

NEHA:
Yeah.

JUAN:
He seems to have better hours. He's usually hanging out with Julie when you guys are out here.

NEHA:
That's because he's rich. He only got the job because his dad's a client of the firm.

JUAN:
Oh.

NEHA:
Ugh. I am so sick of Tara.

JUAN:
Why?

NEHA:
She's just so self-absorbed. She acts like her stuff is SO important and it isn't—Todd does all the models. All she does is make sales decks.

Juan really liked Tara. She was friendly.

JUAN:
I guess I hadn't noticed.

NEHA:
BRB.

Juan read the message and hoped he hadn't offended her. He liked Neha. She was anal and worked way too hard, but she had an underlying feistiness that Juan thought was funny. He and Brad had decided to try to get her drunk at the party they were planning for the day Hook went public, just to see what would happen.

Juan went back to the database where he was pulling statistics on how many active users there were in various parts of the world.

This database was one of several that stored all the connections, ratings and private comments every user had made since downloading the app. Juan hadn't looked at them since he and Josh had first developed them, but doing so now made him realize the massive influence Hook now had with its five hundred million users. He especially liked the map of the world that had a dot for every user currently logged in, in their live location. There were millions of dots, all over the world, and Juan's skin prickled thinking about all those people using a product he helped create.

He zoomed into Europe and down into France and then Paris and the Eiffel Tower and twenty-seven dots clustered around it. He clicked on one of the dots to see where the account was registered: Hamburg, Germany. He watched more information load and marveled at how cool it was that Henric Baumann was presently matching with Amelia Guilb—

Wait: why could he see their names?

Juan blinked at the computer. Provided information, like a user's name, was supposed to be separate from what they tracked, like user location. He clicked on another dot: Benjamin Thibodeaux. He clicked Benjamin's name and the computer prompted him to “Return to Database.” He clicked the link, but it redirected him to a different database than either of the two he'd been working in: this one cross-correlated private and collected data.

“What?” Juan looked at this new database. It was a list of all users, with columns of data indicating all prior history. There was a search field in the upper right corner. The IM box appeared again on top of the database.

NEHA:
Sorry. Just got harassed by this stupid analyst.

JUAN:
All good.

“I wonder,” he said out loud, then shook the thought away. He didn't know where it had come from, but this database shouldn't be here, and he definitely shouldn't pry.

Then again, it
was
here, and he should at least know how it worked. She probably didn't have a profile anyway.

But when he typed in her name, he found that Neha Patel, birthdate 12/03/92, zip code 10019 did, in fact, have a profile. He opened her information. She'd created an account two years ago and spent a month logging in around Manhattan. She'd swiped right for four guys but none had swiped right for her. She'd messaged one of them and then viewed his profile thirty-two times in four hours, but he'd never replied. She herself had only gotten thirty-six right-swipes, no reviews, and just one message, from a fat forty-two-year-old who looked like a serial killer.

Maybe they should use part of the funds from the IPO to create a service to help girls like Neha. They could develop an algorithm that would help her know what she needed to do to increase her likability, and that would increase her confidence, and then maybe she'd find someone, or at least feel less rejected.