She took a sip. “This is amazing. The coffee shop sounded so cute, with all those little furballs running around. I hoped that place would help you relax. It’s weird your allergies flared up because all the breeds of cats they have there don’t shed and are all hypoallergenic.” She took another sip. “Thanks for the coffee! It’ll help fuel my late-afternoon push.”
Was that a panic attack then? A side effect from massive sleep deprivation? Maybe a psychosomatic episode? This had never happened before. Could I really harm my own body so brutally? I walked back to my desk, with less clomping and more of a light meandering step, contemplating what had happened to me at the café.
Maybe these harassers, haters, one-star reviewers, trolls, whatever you called those assholes, not only messed with my head, but they now made me susceptible to physical harm, too. They’d tried to wear me down for months. And damn it, it was finally working.
THAT EVENING, CANDACE and I accompanied Jane to a wedding cake tasting appointment. Normally this would be something the bride and groom did together, but her fiancé had recently diagnosed himself with a gluten intolerance, so she asked her bridesmaids to fill in. And who was I to say no to free cake?
Miraculously on time for once, Candace came out of the bathroom, pulling back her long brown locks with a hair tie. “I’m almost ready,” she said.
“This isn’t one of those hot dog or pie eating competitions, where pulling your hair back might be an advantage,” I joked, elbowing her lightly in the arm.
She giggled. “I know; it’s more that I want to be able to see everything. Pregnancy has made my hair grow faster and thicker.”
We took our seats at the restaurant holding the tasting, flanking Jane from both sides. Just as we pulled our napkins onto our laps, a petite, older Asian woman with a kimono and perfect hair bun brought in bento boxes with three compartments of cake samples.
She said only three words. “Yuzu. Lavender. Chamomile.”
For cake? Gross. Yuck. Ugh.
Jane read my mind. “I know this isn’t chocolate, but give it a try,” she whispered from behind her napkin.
So try I did. A small bite of all three of them.
Jane asked, “What do you think?”
Truthfully? “They’re okay,” I answered with a wince.
“Be honest,” Jane begged.
“Honestly, they taste like spa lotion.” Her face fell a little, so I added, “But really fancy spa lotion. Maybe you go in this direction but also get a crowd-pleaser dessert, too?”
Candace jumped in. “Can I have yours then?” I looked over and she had polished off all three of her minicakes. She swapped boxes with me and finished mine, too. “Final trimester,” she muttered with a mouth full of whipped icing.
A tiny elderly woman dressed in head-to-toe black swooped away our bento boxes. Our cake hostess pulled open the curtain from the kitchen and brought us three more cake samples. Rosewater Honeycomb, Orange Blossom Twist, and Coconut Cream Chiffon. Great, more spa lotion. And the coconut one smelled like sunscreen.
My phone buzzed twice in a row and I looked at Jane for permission to check it. She nodded.
Two messages from Nolan. One saying, Here are final versions of the newsletter and website, for your records. I’m pushing the website developer to do two versions that we can A/B test. The next message was images of all the things Nolan had been working on.
Jane leaned over to read my screen. “Wow, those look really good.” Looking up at my face, she added, “I haven’t seen your face light up like this in a long time, and I don’t think it’s just the photos. You’d think I’d invited you to a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake tasting instead.”
I didn’t hide too much from my girlfriends, but there were things I kept tight to my chest, like my dream job of being a radio DJ. My inexplicable love of Crocs clogs. And my desire for a relationship with an MBA intern that was not destined to be.
Jane continued. “You’re blushing, lady.” She looked over at Candace. “Maybe she’s going to be walking down the aisle next!”
With a hard shove, I pushed my bento box halfway across the table. “He’s just a friend. Nothing’s going to happen between us. Plus, he’s looking for a job, in case you have any leads.”
Candace pulled my bento over to her and finished all my untouched samples. “That’s too bad,” she said with cake-filled chipmunk cheeks.
Jane pensively tapped her lower lip with her index finger. “We have a strategic analyst position opening up at my company. If you don’t have any feelings for him”—she paused to take a quick drink of water—“then I can email you the job description that you can pass on to him. But the job is in New York, so he’d have to relocate.”
My stomach sank as soon as she said the words “New York.” This job was perfect for Nolan, but it was over two thousand miles away.
Before I could ask any more questions about the open position, the hostess reentered the room with one more sample. “Chef’s special, custom-made for you, dear.” Hibiscus-cardamom sponge cake with lychee puree on the side.
Jane took an eager first bite. “This is it.” I hadn’t even tasted it, but it’s not like Jane and I saw eye to eye on any of this anyway. I passed my small plate over to Candace, which she gladly accepted.
The bride-to-be announced to the hostess, “Yes, we’ll take this one, and I’d like to add a Belgian chocolate accompanying cake, too, for my guests who want something more”—she searched for the right word—“familiar.” She smiled at me and squeezed my hand. For the first time ever, I’d convinced Jane to change her mind about something. Life achievement unlocked.
Chapter Twenty
Asher moved to a different floor so he could be closer to his development team. Au revoir, bro! I didn’t hold my breath, though, because I knew that any day I might have to share the office with someone else, or something else, like those stupid Kaizen Five life-size cutouts again. But I appreciated the temporary reprieve.
Thanks to the team putting in extra hours in the evenings and on weekends, with just two months left before the big launch, we were still on track for our release. My tight-knit incubator team had found our stride after a bumpy start. Processes became more streamlined, the designers worked well with the engineers, and Kedra the receptionist (moonlighting as our production coordinator with Nolan’s assistance) had done a great job with keeping our tasks organized and on schedule.
Every morning I brought doughnuts to our daily team meeting. The engineers usually dove in first, taking the chocolate glazed with custard filling, our designers went for the seasonal flavors, so after a few days of collecting doughnut data I could predict the crowd’s favorites. No one would have to consume second-tier doughnut calories. Not under my watch!
Kedra hooked up her laptop to the overhead projector. Even the people closest to the front of the room squinted at the hundreds of tasks listed in our production schedule. She zoomed in and we could see all the to-dos on the horizon.
I dunked my doughnut into my coffee. “We still need to make sure this game can run on all operating systems on all common phones.” Mmmmm, coffee doughnut.
Kat said, “We just started testing on different devices, and to get the constant frame rate throughout the game experience, we need to sacrifice some visual effects.” She saw me eating the sugar glaze I’d picked off my napkin. “Hey, don’t eat too many doughnuts, Melody. You don’t want diabetes someday. Sorry, being overprotective mama bear.”
I laughed. “Okay, no more doughnuts for me. At least not today. If I needed to justify to the press why the stripper characters were say, shirtless ninety percent of the time, could I say that we had to limit our clothing options to improve performance? It would reduce texture memory and polygon count, right?”
Xin, the engineer intern, nodded furiously. “Yes! Yes!” That’s all he said, but that was enough for me.
I walked up to the screen and pointed out the upcoming milestones, trying to avoid the blinding light of the projector beam. “Once we get the game running with a consistent frame rate, we’ll have the alpha version ready for the team to tinker with. Wait . . . do we actually have any testers for our game, or did Ian steal those, too?”
Kat shrugged. “I have friends in that department. We’ll find someone. They like doughnuts too.”
The other developer intern, also named Xin (maybe our technical recruiter liked people named Xin?), asked, “Can you approve which size you want?”
“Which size? What do you mean?”
He pointed to his laptop and toggled between three screens. Each had the same female lead character, with different boob sizes.
Xin number two said, “You want small, medium, or large? I can also make . . . bigger.”
On screen three he typed in some commands and the character’s breasts inflated from B cups to DDD.
My mouth fell open and I gasped. “Please stop!” The breasts were now so big they covered her face.
Xin number two turned to look at Xin number one. “This is too big. She cannot breathe.”
Death by boob suffocation. “Let’s go with medium,” I said definitively.