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Graham scrubbed his face. He must’ve heard enough of the conversation to understand. “Do you want a beer or something?”
“Yeah.”
Graham stepped around the corner, and returned with two cans of Asahai.
He handed me one, and sank into a battered easy chair as he opened the other.
I pressed the chilled aluminum to my knuckles. I was an idiotic fucking brute. “Is the Japanese beer a fanboy thing, or do you really have a taste for it?” I kept my tone light. Easy conversation might take the edge off as much as the drink.
“Both. Started off as look at me—I’m drinking Japanese beer. Turned out I like it.” Graham took a long swallow.
Watching him, it was easy to see why Luna was physically attracted to him. He was an elegant balance of formality and fun; a walking contradiction who was fascinating to observe and talk to. It was subtle and sexy.
“First time you knew you were sunk when it came to Luna.” Graham met my gaze.
“If we’re playing that game, I automatically lose, because you’ve known her longer.” Though really, we’d both lost.
Graham shook his head. “We’re not playing anything. I want to know when you first looked at her and realized you couldn’t walk away.”
“I don’t think it was a single moment.” Dozens flashed through my mind as I traipsed through the last few years of knowing her. “I was doing wiring at the shelter Violet works at—upgrading the cable for internet—and this cute redhead was volunteering that day.” My first thought when I’d met Luna was about how young she looked. My second, which seemed deeply irrational at the time, was it doesn’t matter as long as she’s an adult. “She was shy, but the instant we started talking tech, she opened up. By the time I realized I’d fallen for her, months later, well… I’d fallen for her.”
I couldn’t help my smile at the memories, despite the bitter ache in my chest. “This entire thing with Luna was one long, slow burn that flashed hot at the end, and now she’s gone. It’s not right.”
“I know what you mean,” Graham said.
“What’s your moment?”
“It was my first time teaching sophomore programming, and this girl—woman? She was too young for me to be looking either way—walked in on Day One. She was wearing a green sweater as a dress, knee high socks, and Converse, and she owned it like no one’s business. Even if she’d been older, while it hadn’t been long since I was a student, I wasn’t one anymore. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had this presence, and I had no idea how no one else noticed. And then she started challenging the lesson plan.”
The easy conversation was a pleasant distraction. Focusing on how we fell for Luna? Not so much. I needed a different topic. “This idea you came up with, the planned viral concept, how did you get into teaching that?”
“I have an eye for seeing patterns in the data,” Graham said. “If I pursue the research, I pick up even more, but just watching trends in different industries, I notice things. I had to know if I could reproduce what I saw, so I made it part of my thesis. When I moved into teaching, I had the support of my old teacher to try it first as a small class project, and then to put it on the curriculum.”
He made it sound like a simple nothing, but he’d been teaching the kind of things most marketers would gnaw their right arm off know.
“You could’ve taken that anywhere,” I said. “You could be working for any of these tech giants and be at the top of the ladder.”
“So could you.”
“But I know why I chose not to. Why did you?” So many people didn’t understand my decision. Judith was far from the only one who called me nuts for getting out of the industry.
“I already told you, I like the teaching. There’s a unique level of satisfaction in showing someone how to do something, and seeing them make it their own. Watching as they grow a concept into more than it would’ve been if it had stayed mine alone. I like being part of that process.”
Graham was so sincere with his reply. The longer he talked, the more I understood why Luna was drawn to him. My attraction ran along a different vein, but the two of them had that same thirst for discovery and sharing what they’d found.
“What did you do at Cord?” Graham asked.
I was surprised he didn’t already know. “You’ve stalked me to the moon and back, you tell me.”
“It’s not stalking if I can type your name into a search engine and find it on the first page.” He winced.
Because he knew he was wrong. “That’s a technicality and you know it. Besides, my marriage to Judith isn’t easy to find.”
We didn’t go out of our way to hide it, but the records weren’t part of this everything digitized era. And Graham had known about her from the moment he showed up on Luna’s doorstep, or he wouldn’t have tried to use her name to trip me up.
Graham’s wince became a cringe. “All right, so there was a little bit of… stalkerish behavior. I was worried about Luna.” He worked his jaw. “And jealous,” he said quietly. “But I found a lot of conflicting information about your job, and I never found a solid definition of what an Entropy Engineer is. Is that like a game physics thing?”
“Not quite. My job was to adapt. If they needed Quality Assurance, I did QA. Or coding. Or site design. Or networking. I never touched art or story”—those were Jordan and Chloe’s babies from Day One—“but if it was tech related, I did it.”
