Page 124 of Debugging Love

“I walk better than I run, but if I practiced, I could run a marathon.”

She frowns at me.

“What? It was a good metaphor.” My grip on the binder relaxes and she takes the opportunity to pull it out of my hands.

“I’ll stick to coding for now. It’s a form of writing for an audience of one. Or more, depending on how many servers it’s deployed to over the course of its lifetime. So what about you? Do you have any dreams?”

Her voice goes funny on the last sentence. “Why did you say it like that?”

“I’m all alone. I’m rolling a big donut,” she says in a different, much goofier voice, “and this snake wearing a vest…” When I fail to comment, she says, “Pee Wee Herman?”

I shake my head.

“Pee Wee’s Big Adventure?”

My face says nope.

“You haven’t seen it?” she says incredulously.

“No. That one was never on my radar.”

“My sister and I watched it on VHS over and over when we were kids. I have the entire movie memorized.”

“You guys must have been really bored.”

“We have to watch it sometime.”

I don’t argue because sitting on a couch next to Danni, possibly holding hands, possibly snuggling would be worth watching the dumbest movie on the planet.

“Well do you?” Danni asks.

“I forget where we were going with this.”

“I told you my dumb dream, now you have to tell me yours.”

“I don’t have any dumb dreams. They’re all smart.”

“Well, tell me one of your smart dreams, then.”

I rest my elbow on my knee while I ponder her request. I dream of sitting on a couch next to Danni while watchinga movie. I dream about running my hand through her silky hair and kissing her for hours. Last night I dreamed that Dadi arranged our marriage.

“I’ve thought about starting an IT consulting business.”

“I guess that is pretty smart,” Danni says after a slight hesitation.

“You think so?”

“You could make a lot of money doing that.”

“Yeah…well, I’d have to tell my dad I don’t want to work for the family business and that might not go over so well.”

She asks me about Dad’s business. I give her a brief history of BTI Capital, explaining that he wants me to keep the family dream alive. But it’s not my dream.

“So you’d go back to India to work with him?”

“That’s what he wants.”

Danni rests her chin on her hand and looks down at the carpet. I can’t read her expression from this angle. And then, she makes an abrupt shift. “We should probably get back to work.”

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