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Tara huffed. “Low blow, Joyce.”

“You know I’m right, Patel.”

Tara set her bag down, rolling her shoulder a little. It must be heavy. He should have offered to take it.

“Are you still working on that integration?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Yes.” He grimaced. “At this point, I think we need to bring in an electrician—not an electrical engineer, an electrician—and have him walk the consultant docs through the basics so everyone gets back on the same page.”

“The cardiologists will be insulted.”

“The lead consulting cardiologist refers to himself as a plumber all the time, so I don’t think he’d mind. Now, the product development team.” Nathan mockingly tsked and shook his head, eyeing his product development team lead best friend. “They’re a bunch of prima donnas.”

“Ha! I don’t think so. Though from what you’ve said, you could have better people.”

“You sure you don’t want to jump over and work on cardiac implants?” Nathan could get her hired at his current company in a heartbeat.

Tara shook her head. “No, you know my heart, and more importantly most of my research and experience is in CGMs.”

“I remember that time you disassembled your roommate’s glucose sensor. If only I’d known I was witnessing history in the making.”

She shook her head at his teasing. “If I remember, you tried dissecting the app’s coding.”

“While your roommate tried to edge out of the room.”

“Probably so we wouldn’t mess with her new sensor.”

They shared a smile, this conversation not new, the story one that they’d both shared at various times.

Twenty years ago, they’d been in the same lab section for a bio-systems course in college. That alone might not have led to anything, but about halfway through the semester, they’d realized they lived in the same off-campus apartment building when they walked out of class together, only to park their bikes next to one another outside the apartment ten minutes later.

They quickly became study buddies, declaring one of the handful of study rooms on the ground floor of the apartment building as theirs, and defending it from all other interested parties with prejudice.

Nathan had always wanted to do something that married computer science and biology. Bioinformatic engineering fit the bill.

Tara had originally planned on going into biomedical tissue engineering. He vividly, and with a good amount of fascinated disgust, remembered the first time she’d explained how to 3D print a human ear.

Then her roommate nearly went into a diabetic coma, thanks to a faulty first-generation continuous glucose monitor that hadn’t alerted to her dropping blood sugar. Tara had realized something was wrong and force-fed her M&Ms while calling for help. Nathan had his head out of his apartment door at the sound of running footsteps, jerking back as paramedics with bulky bags jogged past.

Tara’s focus changed after that night, leading to, several months later, their attempt to reverse engineer both the hardware and software from her roommate’s old sensor.

“Do you realize we’ve been friends for twenty years?” she asked after a short, easy silence.

He whistled, though he’d just been thinking the same thing. “Yea, I guess we have.” They’d met when he was twenty, and he’d just turned forty.

Forty had once seemed so old, and yet here he was, feeling like he was still trying to figure it out.

Tara bent to pick up her bag once more. “We’d better go. I don’t want to be late for whatever this meeting is.”

They didn’t look at each other, the mention of the meeting a little too close to acknowledging where they were, and why they were here.

Once they passed through the foyer into the club proper, they became strangers by choice and necessity.

Nate and Tara had more in common than shared memories and experiences, thanks to the long-standing friendship. More even than the fact that they were both biomedical engineers could account for.

Nathan and Tara were both serious BDSM players, and they’d never once acknowledged the other’s existence in the club.

“I’m working next weekend,” Nathan said as he picked up his own bag, carefully not looking at her.

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