Love on the Web Read online

  “That’s what I’m looking for,” Victor said. “I represent about fifty models, male and female. Each one has a stat sheet—measurements, what kind of assignments, et cetera. Right now I have all the information in an SQL server, and my assistant has to enter everything manually. I’d like the models to be able to put the information in themselves, which means the interface has to be very simple. I like the idea of rewarding them once they complete each section—the more data I have, the easier it is to match up the client and model.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “And we have a great artist on staff who can come up with cute little badges. Do you also keep track of how often they work, and how the clients react?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we could eventually incorporate that information too. Are you going to have an interface for the clients to use?”

  “Absolutely. I want a client to be able to pick up his phone and punch in a couple of criteria, and see who’s available.”

  I still wasn’t looking him in the eye. “Then we could include badges to indicate that a model has worked ten, twenty, fifty jobs, or gotten a certain number of positive reviews. Anything else you’d like to see?”

  “What else can you do?”

  I finally was able to look at Victor’s face, and what I saw there implied there was more to his request than programming. I felt my face flush and hoped Kaitlyn would pick up the ball. But she had been trained not to offer anything on her own, because she couldn’t speak geek, and half the stuff she came up with wasn’t possible with today’s technology.

  I looked down at the table so I wouldn’t be distracted by Victor’s perfect smile or his excellent cheekbones. “How about sending out push messages to your clients every time you sign up a new model? With photo and stats?”

  “That would be cool,” he said. “How much would that cost?”

  I looked up and felt a shiver of sexual desire. I’m sure Victor barely registered me, but he sure floated my boat. “I’m not really, I mean, I don’t...”

  “I’ll put together an estimate for you,” Kaitlyn said. “Any other ideas, Larry?”

  Beyond pulling down my pants and offering my ass to the client? “Uh, I’ll think about it.”

  “Great! Thanks so much for coming in, Larry. I’m sure once we have a contract in place, Victor will have a lot more questions.”

  That was my cue to leave, but I had a boner pushing against my crotch, and as soon as I stood up, it was going to point straight at the client. I grabbed a binder from the table next to me and stood up, holding it in front of me, and then stumbled my way out of the room. I was mortified.

  I hurried past Mila, Boris’s secretary, who doubled as the receptionist. She was on the phone, speaking rapid-fire Russian while touching up her black nail polish. She waved the hand holding the brush at me, and I nodded. She was tall and leggy, with jet-black hair and nails. When I wasn’t busy, I liked to go out to her desk and shoot the shit with her.

  Back at the cube farm, I saw that Dylan was already at his computer. He was as white-bread as I was, but had this obsession with rap culture. His shorts hung down on his ass, he had grills on his teeth, and he listened to rap music constantly. The walls of his cube were plastered with posters of rap stars. He had his headphones on and didn’t even notice me passing.

  The rest of the guys filtered in over the next half hour. I ate my sandwich at my desk, along with a bottle of iced tea from the machine in the building lobby. Around four o’clock, Mila made an announcement over the intercom. “All employees, please come to the conference room.”

  I got up and nudged Dylan, who hadn’t heard over the booming music through his headphones. “Meeting,” I said.

  Lilah, a petite Colombian who wore those short pants my mom called pedal pushers, stood up from her cube across from Dylan. With her fine features, ponytail, and eager attitude, she reminded me of an elf. Once Lilah was up, Dylan, Noah, and I followed, with Dominic at the tail end of our procession, as if Lilah were the Pied Piper of Hamelin and we were a bunch of rats.

  Dominic was the oldest of us, nearly thirty, a huge, big-bottomed guy with greasy dark hair, an Amish-style beard, and a perpetual scowl. That day he was wearing a triple-XL T-shirt that read I Love Coitus. I thought it was remarkable that such shirts were made in that size at all—and almost as remarkable that someone who so obviously did not get laid much would wear it. He had huge man boobs and always seemed to get bits of pizza in his Amish beard. Pretty gross. And he wondered why even fat girls didn’t want to date him.

  When we got to the conference room, Boris, Mila, and Kaitlyn were already there, along with Kevin, the final member of our programming team. He was the most normal-appearing of us, with all-American looks, but his mind was dark. He was always suggesting these weird things that apps can do, like spying on the kind of porn somebody likes and then e-mailing the employer. He was even skinnier than me, and he wore formfitting dress shirts to accentuate that.

  We crowded into the room, and then a moment later, Pharah, the Haitian accounting clerk, walked in. She had small, petite features that were right for her body, and she was pretty in an exotic way. She held a big sheet cake in her arms. “Happy Birthday, Noah!” she said.

  Our hygienically challenged coworker skulked in the corner as Boris led us in a Russian-accented version of the birthday song. Noah looked like he would have rather faded into the woodwork, but Boris forced him to blow out the candles.

  “We have a special present for you!” Mila crowed, handing him a shopping bag.

  He took the bag and pulled out a T-shirt that read Out of my mind. Be back shortly.

  “There’s more!” Pharah said.

  Noah reached into the bag again and brought out a can of deodorant and one of body spray, and then a bottle of laundry detergent.

  Mila, Pharah, and Kaitlyn couldn’t stop laughing. I thought the joke was mean, and Noah clearly didn’t appreciate it. He took the T-shirt and left the rest of the stuff on the conference room table and walked out.

  “Some people can’t take a joke,” Mila said.

  3 – Let Me Drive

  Nobody said anything to Noah when we filed back into the cube farm. Five o’clock came, and the office girls and Boris left. Lilah hung around for an extra hour or so, rendering some complicated animations, then took off. At eight, the five of us guys ordered a couple of pizzas and switched over to playing Counter-Strike, an online game in which players joined a team of either terrorists or counter-terrorists and then tried to shoot the crap out of one another while completing missions.

  Dominic was always our team leader. Noah was the best strategist; he was always calling out commands to us, which Dylan couldn’t hear because of his headphones. Since my cube was next to Dylan’s, I was in charge of getting him to pay attention to the messages by kicking his chair.

  Kevin was the best shooter. With that dark shadow underneath the all-American exterior, he got into the whole killing thing. I wasn’t that into Counter-Strike, but usually I didn’t have anything else to do, so I stuck around. The guys often used me as a sacrifice to draw out the opponents. I’d get killed and then surf online until the next round.

  Not porn, though. Boris was pretty strict about that. And besides, I didn’t think anybody at work knew I was gay, and I didn’t want to out myself. Not that I was afraid of getting bullied or fired or anything—I thought it was my business.

  Noah startled me out of my reverie. “Get your ass in the game, Treetops!” he shouted over the top of the cube.

  That’s the nickname I chose for the game. I mean, hey, why not embrace my height? Though I wasn’t going back to Jolly Gay Giant. I shot a couple of terrorists; then, at Dominic’s direction, I jumped out into the middle of a field to draw enemy fire so the rest of the guys could wipe them out.

  My character splattered into a pile of guts and guns, and I sat back to wait for the next round. Noah was playing with a real ferocity, killing everyone in his path, even
those characters who didn’t appear to be enemies. There weren’t many female avatars playing, but he shot down every one of them. Nobody on our team said anything to him, though.

  My cell phone rang, and I looked down at the display. Not someone in my address book. I thought it was a wrong number and almost didn’t answer, but what the hell, I was sitting there doing nothing.

  “Larry? It’s Julian Argento. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  It was obvious he could hear the rat-a-tat of computer weapons going off in the background. “Just fooling around at work,” I said.

  “Oh, well, then I won’t bother you.”

  “No bother,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m over near where you live, and I thought I could stop by and show you what my previous programmer did. But if you’re busy...”

  “I can be home in about half an hour. You want to meet me there?”

  I was psyched. He had found out where I lived, obviously from Gavin, and this was a booty call. If I were the one calling, I probably would have said, Want to fuck? But Julian was a whole lot smoother than I was.

  “That would be great,” he said. “See you then.”

  I hung up, and my dick pronged as I thought of Julian and getting him naked.

  “Woo-hoo! Larry’s got a booty call!” Kevin said.

  Shit, I hadn’t realized anyone was listening to me. But when I looked at the screen, I saw that Kevin’s character was dead too. “Gotta run!” I said, and I jumped up and scampered out of the office before anybody could question me.

  I didn’t bother waiting for the elevator; I ran down the stairs two at a time and burst out into the lobby. Through the glass front I saw a bus approaching, and I hotfooted it outside and jumped on.

  When I first moved into the apartment, I thought I’d ride my bike to work. Even though I was a Florida native, after the first couple of days I realized I had been naïve about that. Though I rode everywhere as a kid growing up in Homestead, and all around the FU campus, I always wore T-shirts and shorts and never worried about getting sweaty. Wearing dress clothes to work, and having to look neat and presentable in the office, was a whole different story.

  There was a bus stop right in front of our building, and after I bought a bus pass I could catch one of the modified fuel-saving models and ride almost all the way to work, rolling in still fresh and clean.

  That evening, it took about twenty minutes to get home, during which I fidgeted so much on the bus I was sure I looked like some kind of tweaker. Manny was home and lounging in the living room. He was Cuban and his skin tanned to the color of light coffee. His hair was black with a gentle curl, and he had a pretty-boy look, with long eyelashes and a delicate mouth. He was in love with his boss, a handsome older dude, but his boss was still working out a complicated divorce, so Manny couldn’t see him after work too often.

  There was a stack of used glasses on the coffee table, and somebody had brought home the Miami Herald and then scattered the sections over the sofa. “Can’t you clean up after yourself?” I asked.

  “What crawled up your butt?” Manny asked as I gathered the papers.

  “Julian’s coming over. I don’t want him to think we live in a pigsty.”

  “Julian who?” Manny asked.

  “A guy I met through Gavin last night at Java Joe’s. Some kind of computer entrepreneur.”

  “Why is he coming over here?”

  “Duh. Why do you think he’s coming over here at ten o’clock on a Friday night?” I dropped the paper in the trash and the glasses in the sink. “You’re the one who always says I could snare a cute guy if I tried. Well, I tried.”

  The phone rang, and I picked it up. “Send him up,” I said without even waiting for the guard to speak. Then I hung up and raced around the living room tidying up, which Manny thought was very funny. He retreated to his bedroom when Julian rang the doorbell.

  I didn’t know how to greet Julian when I opened the door. A handshake seemed too formal for a guy I was about to have sex with. But did I know him well enough to kiss him? I didn’t think so.

  He solved the problem by sticking out his hand for me to shake. I should have known right then that we had different expectations for the evening—but tie me up and call me Six-Gun Sally, the TV cowgirl, I was in a whole other place.

  Our living room was twice the size of a dorm room at FU, with sliding glass doors out to a big balcony that overlooks Biscayne Bay and the lights of downtown Miami. “Wow,” Julian said, looking around.

  I walked over to the balcony and motioned him to follow me. It was warm and humid, but there was a nice breeze coming off the bay. “You’re never going to be able to move to Silicon Valley,” Julian said, shaking his head.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause you could never duplicate this lifestyle there.” He waved his hand to encompass the view. “The ocean, the sunshine, all the cute guys on South Beach.” He raised an eyebrow. “Now you see why I moved here?”

  “I guess. I grew up here, so it’s all I know.”

  I turned to kiss him, with that gorgeous view as a backdrop, but he was already on his way back into the apartment, and all I could do was follow. He sat down at the dining room table and opened his laptop.

  While it warmed up, he asked, “You grew up in Miami?”

  We were going to talk first. Okay. I’d have to manage. I told him about growing up in Homestead, the southernmost city on the US mainland. And though he looked fascinated, I realized he really had only come over to show me his project. Another false start, I thought, but it made sense. Julian was too cute and too sexy, and he could have his pick of gorgeous guys on South Beach.

  “How did you get into programming?” he asked, as I slumped backward in defeat.

  “I got my first computer right around the time my body started to change. My folks were clueless about them, but everyone said that a kid ought to have one. I’ve been this tall since I hit puberty, so I got a lot of teasing when I was a teenager, and the computer became my friend and my refuge.”

  I kept expecting to blossom like the boys I saw in gym class, with hair under their arms and bushy patches at their crotches. But all I got were a few stray hairs in my pits and a scrubby bit around my dick.

  “I started playing online games and then wanted to design my own levels. I took a programming course in ninth grade and learned the basics of C++. I got myself some books after that and kept going with HTML and Java. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was building websites for friends and neighborhood businesses.”

  “Very impressive,” Julian said.

  I shrugged. “I majored in computer science at FU and got the chance to learn a lot of cool stuff. By the time I was a senior, app development for mobile phones was getting hot, and I taught myself how to build an app, which I entered into a contest at a hackathon.”

  I looked at him. “You know what one of those is, right?”

  “Please. I lived in Silicon Valley. Computer guys got together like that everywhere, from the coffee shops to the gyms.”

  “So this guy, Boris, was one of the judges, and he offered me a job at his company, AppWorks, which creates apps for corporate clients. They send push messages about sales or new products. They have animated games for company mascots, all that kind of stuff.”

  Julian’s computer was ready by then, and I sat next to him to look at the site he was developing. It wasn’t open to the public yet—password protected, with none of the front-end work done.

  He wore this lemon-scented cologne, and he sat so close to me that I was almost dizzy. I had to focus on the computer or else I thought I might come in my shorts. “Scoot over and let me drive,” I said. I took over the keyboard and started typing in commands, viewing the source code. Julian watched me.

  I sat back. “The guy you had knew what he was doing,” I said. “The basic framework is there. But you still have a long way to go.”

  “That’s where I’m hoping you can
help,” he said. “Do you think you can finish this?”

  I shook my head. “There’s too much work. You’re talking at least a week of steady programming. After that, you’d need to set up some demo accounts, get people to try it out for you, then fix whatever errors come up. It’s a big job.”

  “I can make it worth your while,” he said.

  “Julian, I may be horny, but I’m not going to bust my hump for a blowjob. No offense.”

  He looked at me for a second, his eyes wide, and then he laughed. “I was talking about paying you,” he said.

  Holy crap, I thought. Could I have embarrassed myself any worse?

  Julian didn’t seem to care about my faux pas. “I have some investment capital already, so I can pay you pretty well,” he continued. “At least as much as you’re making now, if not more.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I started my first real job a couple of months ago. I can’t quit for some pie-in-the-sky start-up.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. But you must have some free time. And maybe there are, I don’t know, some routines you could contract out?”

  “You mean like hire some dude in Mumbai to write them?”

  “If that’s what it takes. I can’t do that myself, because I don’t have a clue what’s still missing.” He reached out and took my hand, and my dick pressed against my pants.

  “Please, Larry? At least help me get moving again. My dad and my uncles have loaned me the start-up capital, and in order to pay them back, I need something to show potential investors so I can move on to the next round of financing. I’m well aware that this is not the most original idea, and I’m scared somebody is going to beat me to the market.”

  I looked into those deep, dark eyes, and I knew I couldn’t refuse him. And though I worked long hours, I also wasted a lot of time playing video games with the guys at work and hanging out at Java Joe’s with Gavin. I could squeeze in some time for Julian.

  “All right,” I said. “I can at least get things going for you.”