Page 32 of Debugging Love

She stops mid-spin, looks around for a chair, finds none except the one I just offered, and then grudgingly heads my way. She’s stuck with me again. How will she manage?

Danni. Danni. Danni.

I thump my temple to stop the skipping. Where am I going to see her next? At the grocery store? In the locker room at the gym? In my shower?

A tingle shoots through my body at the thought of water droplets sliding down her silky hair. I look out the window and focus on a barge floating in the harbor, counting the shipping containers until the tingling subsides.

While I’m counting, Danni slides into the chair across from me. She leans against the window and points her knees at Bruce’s table.

“What about you, Lance?” Bruce asks.

“Chance.”

“Where did you come from?”

“India,” I answer.

“I knowthat. I mean, where did you work last?”

“Oh. Circular Solutions.”

Bruce’s palm thunks to the table. “Is that for real?”

“The name?” I take a swig of Sprite. “Yep.”

“Circular Solutions. What kind of name is that? Infinite Loop?”

The waitress stops by to take Danni’s drink order. Her beverage of choice is water on the rocks with lemon.

“Basically,” I say. “Management spent most of their time running in circles.”

“Is it a Chai house?”

“A little bit of everything.”

“I’d hate to see their code with a corporate vision like that.”

“You would. You really would. I’m glad to be out of there. A little sad to leave Austin. I liked the vibe down there, but it’s nice here too.”

“A guy needs a new town to conquer now and then,” Danni quips with an eye roll.

I’m the one who should be rolling my eyes at her. Miss This-is-America-We-Have-Dryers-for-That. Yet here I am. The one trying to be civil. “That was a joke.”

Danni acts like she doesn’t hear me. She squints across three tables and nods at a conversation I know she can’t hear. In the meantime, Bruce has turned his attention to Heng, asking him where he came from, to which Heng answers, “Laos.”

“Are we just going to sit here and not talk like we did on the boat?” I ask.

Danni turns her head to give me her full attention. “We don’t look at each other and we don’t talk to each other.”

“Oh yeah. The no-lookie, no-talkie rule.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“You have to set up my dev environment tomorrow. Are we going to mime the process with blindfolds on?”

Twitchy-eye makes another appearance.

I did that.

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