Love on the Web Read online

  Copyright 2015 Neil S. Plakcy. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This book was originally published by Loose Id and is the first in the Love on series. Maryam Salim did an awesome job of editing this book, and the first five in the series:

  1: Love on Site

  2: Love on the Web

  3: Love on Stage

  4: Love on the Pitch

  5: Love on the Map

  6: Love on the Boil

  What reviewers are saying about the series:

  “Neil Plakcy’s Mahu series is a favorite of mine. His command of the local cultures and colloquialisms combined with strong characters and love of the island history has made that such a stunning series. Those strengths are on display [in the Love on series].” (Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words review).

  1 – The Big Picture

  Kermit the Frog sang that it’s not easy being green. Well, it’s no picnic being tall either. I had a growth spurt in seventh grade and shot up, still skinny as a beanpole. I was already starting to show signs that I was going to be gay, so a couple of bullies started calling me the Jolly Gay Giant. I’d be walking down the hall in junior high and hear, “Ho, ho, ho, gay giant!”

  Julian was the first guy who made me feel like my height was no big deal, which was funny, because he was only six feet tall himself. From the moment we started to talk at Java Joe’s, I felt, I don’t know, normal.

  It was close to nine thirty in the evening when I stopped at Java Joe’s, on Lincoln Road. The owners had recently begun experimenting with serving alcohol at night, creating a new party scene. Sometimes I felt like a vampire; I slept late in the morning, worked until well after dinnertime, then hung out at bars with my roommates until the Beach began to go to sleep.

  The bar was jammed with guys in their twenties and thirties, wearing the best clubbing looks from the new H&M store on Lincoln Road, form-fitting shirts that highlighted their guns, ass-hugging tight slacks. I felt out of place in my ordinary jeans and polo shirt.

  I looked around and saw my roommate Gavin holding court at a big round table in one corner, surrounded by his usual coterie of young male models and the wealthy middle-aged men who liked them.

  If you looked up the definition of “male beauty” in the dictionary, you’d see Gavin’s picture there. Six feet tall, with golden-blond hair that flowed smoothly around his shoulders. He was slim but muscular enough, with a tribal tattoo around his right bicep. He looked like a young Robert Redford, without all the wrinkles, of course. He had the same smile, a Nordic profile, and a dimple in his chin.

  Does it sound like I had a crush on him? I did. But a tall, skinny geek like me had no chance with a gorgeous god like him. I’ve been told that I have a handsome face, but I think my scarecrow body negates it. My two older brothers are both good-looking, and I resemble them around the eyes and the nose, but they’re more proportionate than I am—tallish, with a better ratio of body fat to height.

  I got myself a chocolate martini and wandered over to Gavin’s table. There was an open chair next to a guy I didn’t know, and I slid into it, trying not to kick anybody with my long legs. Gavin called over to me as I sat. “Larry Leavis, meet Julian Argento. He just moved here from Silicon Valley. Larry’s a computer genius, so you guys should have a lot in common.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said as I shook Julian’s hand. “I wish I could move out there. Maybe someday.”

  “Are you a techie?” he asked.

  “A programmer. I work for a company that makes custom mobile apps.”

  Julian was handsome in a Latin-lover kind of way. Wavy black hair, dark eyes, and prominent cheekbones. His five o’clock shadow had reached the perfect level of scruffy, and though his English was excellent, he had a very slight Spanish accent.

  Way out of my league, of course. But so was almost every guy who made my dick jump. I had a history of falling for unavailable guys, from my high school science teacher to the captain of the football team to guys I’d meet online who would turn out to be older, uglier, or more married than they had originally indicated. It was almost a joke among my college frat brothers that if I liked a guy, he had to be either straight, committed to a relationship, or hiding some huge secret.

  I heard my other roommate Manny’s voice in my head. “You’re a good-looking guy, Larry. You’ve got to get over your inferiority complex.”

  I knew objectively that my string-bean body had been filling out; I worked out at the gym every other morning. And I wasn’t a troll in the looks department—I have an open, honest kind of face, like Opie from The Andy Griffith Show.

  My biggest problem was an inability to make conversation with other guys. I got along fine with girls; all through my teen years girls had been my closest friends. But I had this morbid fear that every straight guy I talked to would think I was coming on to him and lash out at me for being gay.

  Gay guys were even worse. I worried that my sexual need and inexperience made me seem like a loser who lusted after anybody with a dick—which wasn’t that far from the truth. So I was confused when Julian said, “You and I should talk. I’ve got a start-up I’m trying to get off the ground.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing. Talking.”

  Julian cocked his head, and maybe it was then that I fell a little bit in love. “I meant talk about how we could help each other,” he said. “I had a programmer lined up, but he bailed on me at the last minute. I can do some coding myself, but mostly I’m the idea guy, the money man.”

  The rest of the table ignored us as we talked. “Seems like the wrong move to come here from Silicon Valley if you want to develop something,” I said. “You’ve got a lot more resources out there.”

  “But a lot more competition too,” Julian said. “For staff and for money. I want to build up a multicultural workforce and tap into some Latin American investment capital.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m having trouble finding a programmer with the right qualifications. SQL, PHP, AJAX for the back end, platform independent on the front end...”

  “Now you’re talking my language,” I said.

  “I thought so,” Julian said. “Gavin told me you were really sharp.”

  Gavin wasn’t the kind of guy who looked out for his friends. He was all Gavin, all the time. So if he’d spoken about me to Julian, there had to be something in it for him.

  Suddenly Gavin stood up. “Let’s all dance,” he said. “Come on.” He took the guy next to him by the hand and tugged him up from his seat. He was older than we were, one of those guys in his thirties who flashed expensive watches and designer clothes, and liked hanging out with younger dudes.

  “You want to dance?” Julian asked me. Java Joe’s was a coffee shop in the morning, but when the sun went down, it shifted into a bar, and the back patio became a dance floor with a very gay vibe. There was a lot of that morphing and mixing on Miami Beach—you could buy parking decals at the hair salon, the woman behind the counter at the dry cleaner doubled as an Avon Lady, and the bodega on the corner of Collins Avenue advertised unlocked GSM phones and prepaid calling cards for Latin America.

  “I don’t dance that well,” I said. I shook my arms. “Too gawky.”

  “I’ll bet you’d be fine.” He stood up. “Come on; we’ll talk more later.” Julian wasn’t as model-handsome as Gavin; few guys are. But I got a real personality from him—something that was often lacking in Gavin.

  I followed the group outside, where
it was hot and humid and the music was fast and tropical. Julian took my hand, and we began to dance. He had an amazing sense of his body, and the way he led me made me feel like I was really dancing, not just hopping around and jerking my arms as I usually do. It was easy to follow his steps, moving when he did, swiveling my hips—or trying to—when he did.

  The best part was when the music slowed and Julian held me tight, pressing his body against mine in a whole lot of very enjoyable places. It was almost a dry hump. After about an hour, I was sweating like mad, and my throat was parched.

  I mimed getting something to drink, and Julian followed me to the outdoor bar. It was jammed at least two deep with guys waiting to be served or waiting to see who came along. “Beer okay?” I asked Julian.

  “Whatever you can get hold of.”

  One advantage of being six-six is that I could see over the heads of all the short guys in front of me, and I motioned to the bartender for two beers. I handed over the cash and got the bottles in return.

  We took the beers and went back inside, where the air-conditioning was running and the vibe was much quieter. It was a big space with high ceilings, lots of comfy couches for conversation and wooden tables for laptop work. The walls had been paneled with fake brick, and the exposed ductwork hung from the ceiling.

  Julian and I sat in big comfy chairs by the plate-glass windows looking out on Lincoln Road. A constant parade of drag queens, elderly women, and cute guys walking tiny dogs cruised past. “Tell me more about this business you’re trying to start,” I said, though business was the last thing I wanted to do with Julian. But I was on firmer ground with geek talk.

  He surprised me when he answered, “I love to read. In English or in Spanish, doesn’t matter to me. You know much about e-books?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have a reader, but I read technical manuals on my laptop with the Kindle app sometimes.”

  “There’s been a huge explosion in e-book publishing over the last few years,” Julian said. He took a sip of his beer and sighed with pleasure. “The New York City gatekeepers have lost control of the business, and authors are publishing their books themselves.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen a few of them,” I said. “I’m not saying I’ve got the best grammar, but some of those are full of errors.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of crap out there. But there are also amazing books. Only in English, though. Nobody is moving into that space yet, translating self-published e-books into other languages.”

  “That’s what you want to do? Be a translator?”

  He shook his head. “I want to create a marketplace for translations, like Amazon has done for audiobooks. A website where authors can register their books and hook up with translators, editors, and foreign-language publicity. I’m going to call it E-Books Everywhere.”

  “Hasn’t anyone done that before? Like Amazon?”

  “Not the way I’m planning. There are sites that will do translations using a combination of human and API, charging by the word. But that’s not practical for independent authors. My site is going to be specifically focused on e-books, with specialized translators, and an author can hire a translator on a royalty share deal, rather than an up-front payment. I want to blast open the market for foreign-language novels and creative nonfiction.”

  “Sounds like a big undertaking,” I said. “The database end isn’t that tough, from what you’ve said. But recruiting all those people? And how do you make money?”

  “I’ve got some contacts among translators already,” he said. “I know a woman who runs a translation certificate program at UCLA, and she could feed her students in. The people who sign up agree to let me be the distributor for their books—I’ll sell them on e-book stores all over the world and take a tiny percentage on each sale.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all thought out,” I said.

  “Just the big picture so far. I have a long way to go.” He leaned forward. “You interested in helping me out?”

  Looking into those deep dark eyes of his, I would have agreed to almost anything. A little freelance programming in my spare time? That was nothing.

  “Julian,” I said. “I would be delighted.”

  2 – Can’t Take a Joke

  Julian and I swapped cell numbers and e-mail addresses, and he asked if we could get together over the weekend so I could look at the coding he had and tell him what I thought.

  I agreed, and he left Java Joe’s a few minutes later. After hanging around with Gavin and his posse for a while, I started to yawn, so I left the bar and walked up Lincoln Road toward the apartment, feeling kind of sad. Here I’d had this very cool connection with Julian, but all he wanted from me was my programming skills.

  The pedestrian street was jammed even that late at night, with middle-aged restaurant goers heading back to their cars, partying Latins singing off-key, and weird-looking bums leaning against light poles, smoking cigarettes.

  If there was a god for geeks, I thought, he was keeping me from screwing around too much. I hadn’t even come out to myself until I was at FU. At eighteen, I was still a virgin in every sense of the word—the only time I’d ever been naked with anyone else had been in gym class, and then I’d been so focused on not popping a boner that I’d been scared to look around me.

  My first time was after a recruitment party for the gay frat I ended up joining, Lambda Lambda Lambda. The house manager, Fitz, and his boyfriend, Chuck, were the ones who first told me that I was cute, that my body was buff, and that I had a bubble butt. When I went to their room with them, I was so excited I came as soon as they got my shorts off.

  It was a huge embarrassment to me, but Chuck and Fitz pretended to be impressed. We went on to have some killer sex, and I joined the fraternity, where I met Gavin and Manny.

  Manny got a job right after graduation, with a real-estate developer, and a couple of weeks later I got an offer from AppWorks, an application developer with offices south of Fifth Street on South Beach. As we were trying to figure out where to live, a guy Gavin knew from New York bought this apartment in a high-rise on the Beach as an investment. Gavin convinced him to rent it cheaply to the three of us while the guy waited for the market to pick up.

  It was an awesome place and came fully furnished. Gavin got the master bedroom, with attached bath; Manny and I each had our own room and shared the second bathroom. Manny’s door was already closed by the time I got home; he had to be at work at some ungodly hour in the morning. I climbed into bed and drifted off to happy dreams about Julian Argento, his handsome face and his sexy dance moves.

  The next morning I got to work at ten. Boris, our boss, was very cool about schedules. The office staff started at nine and knocked off at five, but we programmers could come and go when we wanted, as long as we got the work done. Most of the guys came in around noon and stayed at the office late into the night, sometimes working, sometimes playing networked games online.

  My desk was in a cube farm—a big room of cubicles separated by movable dividers. Because I’d only been there a few weeks, the walls of my cube were pretty barren, just some FU paraphernalia and stickers from some of my favorite computer games.

  I was about to put my headphones on when Kaitlyn bopped into the room. She was a skinny girl, a couple of years older than I was. She wore the kind of expensive clothes sold in boutiques on Washington Avenue—tight blouses and narrow skirts and high heels. She was in charge of selling our services to potential clients.

  “I need a programmer for a meeting,” she said, smiling brightly as she came up to me. She had a habit of raising her voice at the end of a sentence so that it sounded like a question. “And I was afraid Noah was going to be the first one in today. I’m glad it’s you, Larry!”

  Noah was our most hygienically challenged coworker. He was twenty-eight and seemed to be allergic to bathing. His hair was shoulder-length and stringy, and he smelled.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Can you sit in with me
? In case the client has questions?”

  I agreed to join her in the conference room at eleven and spent the next hour integrating animation routines designed by our resident artist, Lilah, the girl geek, into an app I was designing for a Mexican restaurant. Their mascot was a cactus called Pepe, and they wanted him to dance to announce a new message from the restaurant.

  I thought it was silly and vaguely racist, but I put my head down and did my job. At eleven I walked across to the conference room, where Kaitlyn was talking with an incredibly handsome guy who was introduced to me as Victor Kunin. He had the kind of chiseled good looks I associated with movie stars and billboard models—an older, more distinguished version of Gavin.

  Kaitlyn told me that Victor ran a modeling agency on South Beach, and from looking at him, I guessed he might have modeled himself. If he’d been in his underwear, or naked, I’m sure I would have remembered where I’d seen him.

  Instead he wore a sharp-looking business suit in a light tan plaid, nipped and tucked in all the right places. One of my roommates could have told me the designer. Victor’s white shirt was crisp, and his brown tie was studded with gold crowns. As usual with handsome men, I was tongue-tied, stumbling through my greeting and trying not to look at the client like I wanted him naked on the table in front of me.

  “Our business here is designing mobile apps that help you run your business better,” Kaitlyn said as she began a basic explanation of what we do at AppWorks. “Our apps help clients engage with their customers, improve employee efficiency, and gamify routine transactions.”

  “Gamify?” Victor asked.

  Kaitlyn looked at me. I got asked that question a lot, so I had a packaged answer, which I delivered while looking over Victor’s right shoulder. “We use the strategies of computer gaming to make customers feel benefited by their interactions with your company,” I said. “For example, if you want customers to fill out a series of questionnaires, we arrange rewards for each level. Those might be a funny animation, a badge, even a coupon or a discount.”