Page 5 of Mimosa

“Okay, I can admit that.”

Everyone laughed and Taran sat down while his pretty face reddened like an apple. “Look,” Mims said. “He’s red! For Cosmo!”

The men all had nicknames for drinks, but those names also corresponded to a color. It was easier for Murphy to keep track of their employee folders if they all had a separate color, and that went so far as to their rooms. Eazy was an interior decorator, and he’d matched their colors to their separate rooms in the two apartments they had built for the bartenders.

Mims’s room had orange accents, an orange comforter and rugs, and he hadn’t liked it at first, but it had grown on him. Now orange was his favorite color.

Abs pinched Taran’s cheek after getting up and running around the table. Before Taran could squeal about it, Abs was already back in his seat, next to his huge best friend, Goldie.

“You all are terrible.”

Cosmo came back into the secret room and handed the folder to Mims, who got up and asked, “Is the rest of this done?”

“Should be for now,” Taran said.

“Let the man go get with his pookie,” Hippy said. “Mims, work your magic.”

“I’ll have info in just a bit.”

In front of a computer monitor was the one place in the world that Mims felt in control. The rest of his world felt like he washolding onto a palm tree in the middle of a hurricane. His hands slipped, threatening to blow him far from anything he knew.

It was like that when he was just a kid, too. His family was all about money, possessions, status. He was the first and only child of seven that was born in America. Maybe that was why he didn’t understand his family like his siblings had. They’d twisted themselves into knots to make their father happy. One smile from their father made them so happy. They strived to do more to attain more of those simple, tight smiles.

Ali, however, had never made his father smile. Perhaps the old man had known what his son was long before anyone else. Long before Ali had confessed his love of men instead of women.

He was only sixteen when it happened, but he was asked to leave his parents’ home that very day. He made money to live by hacking banks and big stores, but he was caught and sent to juvy.

It was when he came out, scared, broke and ready to find a way to die, that he met his old crew. He worked with them until he was twenty-two and Murphy was introduced to him.

That had changed his life. No more living in a studio apartment with ten other hackers, spending his days playing video games they’d pirated. He had a real life, real friends, and a way to use his skills to make his new family prosper.

He pulled up the names of those on Taran’s list and started a search to find out everything there was to find on them. Even if they’d paid to have their names scrubbed from the internet, he had ways of getting around that. The internet is forever, no matter how much anyone could pay to have their lives taken off of it.

None of them had bothered, he found. They didn’t have the need, not with the small things they were mentioned in on pages such as society pages and art lover’s lists. Nothing big and certainly nothing to indicate if any of them had bought the piece.

He did a deeper dive and discovered that two had social media accounts and three had well known CPAs.

Smiling as he started to go into the CPAs, he felt at home.

Oh, the entire pub made him feel that way, but no matter where he’d ever been, a computer had been there, welcoming him into its world.

Yes, it could be a small world, letting someone in Japan have intimate and long conversations with someone from Sweden, but really, it was much bigger. It was as big and wide as anyone could need it to be.

And no matter how big it was, it was a cozy nook for Mims. The relaxing clicking of the keys, the hum of the monitor, the colors, lights, pages of every color. Mims knew the names of all the fonts, how to tell if a picture or page was AI made.

Haze sat next to him, smiling over in his way. “Hey, babe.”

“I’m not even close to done yet.”

“I don’t care about that. You’ll find it. I just like watching you get into your groove. You’ve felt out of sorts lately.”

“I’m always out of sorts when I’m not in front of a screen,” he whispered, like it was a secret.

“Well, my friend, if you could marry a screen, I’d be your best man.”

“I might figure out a way to do that,” he said, laughing. “Now, go get Daiq before Abs does. I want some cat time tonight.”

“Sure, babe. I’ll have Goldie keep Abs busy and I’ll run up and get him.”

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