Page 84 of Just Past Two

Dee’s mouth opened in a comical little O and her eyebrows shot up again. “Oh my god, it’s just a sex thing, isn’t it? You’ve got a booty call.”

Silas blushed and shook his head, but the Pepsi was much harder to swallow than he’d thought, and he almost choked. When he could breathe again, he rushed to correct her. “It’s not a booty call, all right? Please don’t call it that. In fact, if you can never use the word ‘booty’ around me again, except perhaps when discussing pirates, that would be great.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever. I think it’s great for you to be getting some action. You’re too wound up. You need to relax. I’ve been saying that to you for years.” Dee shook her head while biting off the corner of a tortilla chip. “Too wound up.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Silas felt bewildered and knew it must have showed on his face. “I’ve been working at Wayscorp for years. Now everyone thinks I’m working too hard? I’m fine.” Granted, he’d been struggling to sleep for the past few months, and he had been putting in many more hours on this project than the last one, but that was because it was a much more demanding task.

Dee shrugged. “I’ve known you for a long time, Silas, and you always get into situations like this where you’re too deep into work to even come up for air. Then your project ends and you mope around for a couple of weeks, but then you’re back in it again. It’s not sustainable.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Silas had to take deep breaths to calm himself, feeling as angry as when he had driven home from Wayscorp earlier that day, and he was aware enough to know that he was being irrational. Even so, he couldn’t use logic to push the anger away. It surprised him and frightened him. He didn’t generally have strong emotional reactions, and here he was having the same one twice in one day. Maybe there was something to what others were saying about him. He wasn’t an irrational man, regardless of how this anger might be making him feel. If other people thought he was too engrossed in his work, then maybe he was . . . only he had no idea how to change that. How did you stop caring about something? If he didn’t have work, what did he have?

They sat in silence for a few minutes. If there had been food in front of them, they could have each distracted themselves by eating, but instead they just stared awkwardly at the table before Silas felt cowed enough to speak. “I’m sorry. Maybe you’re right. My project manager talked to me today at work—”

Dee interrupted him. “Maybe you should start by taking weekends off like a normal person.”

Silas waved his hand, dismissing the comment. “That’s not the point. I work on Saturdays. Lots of people do.” Well, maybe not at Wayscorp, but surely people did work on weekends. “Anyway, Elliot is concerned about my work habits, and that I haven’t been myself lately. He’s worried about me burning out, and I’m concerned that he’s going to say something to Maria.” Maria Baez, department head, was a no-nonsense woman, and a bad mark in his file now might end his future career. “I don’t know any other way to be, though. How am I supposed to work less hard at a job that I feel demands my full attention?” The more he thought about it, the more the situation felt hopeless and overwhelming.

Dee nodded in sympathy. “I get it. But maybe this Elliot guy is right. Take the rest of this weekend to relax. Go see a movie. Call up your fuck buddy.”

“Would you please not call him that, either?” Silas looked off to the kitchen, praying their waitress would come back soon with the food. “And I already saw him today. I’m seeing him next week. We’re building a wheelchair for his cat.”

Dee raised her eyebrows. “You’re doing what?”

Silas spent the rest of the time until the food came explaining the situation with Matthew, Zuul, and the adaptive technology. Then the food came, which was every bit as good as Dee had promised. By the time dinner was over, he felt a little bit better, and maybe like he could relax this weekend after all.

If only Silas had any idea what the word “relax” looked like.

The end of the weekend was always a disappointment, but Matthew didn’t really mind going into work on Monday morning. He never did. Deviating from his normal routine a bit, he swung by the Brass Buckle on the way to work to get a cup of coffee rather than bringing one from home, and that delicious hot caffeinated wonder carried him all the way through his morning programming tasks. He finished his work on the Orion expansion pretty quickly, but rather than screwing around like he normally did until lunchtime, he dug into Endgame instead. Once he had a sense of the project, the coding became satisfying rather than tedious. He’d forgotten the enjoyment of really digging into a difficult task. Once his own part of the early-stage beta programming was under way, he started looking at the rest of the team’s unfinished coding sections, and then started working his way through those as well.

He ran into Isabel in the break room while on a stretch break. “Hey, you.”

She looked up from the coffee she was pouring. He occasionally dipped into the company coffeepot, but thanks to Silas, he was starting to become more of a coffee snob. The thought made him smile.

Isabel raised her mug in salute. “Hey, yourself. How was your weekend?”

“Fantastic.” He smiled. “How about yours?”

“Pretty good.” Isabel took a sip of coffee, grimaced, and started to doctor it up with some milk and sugar. “I’m looking forward to DiceCon. It’s coming up fast, isn’t it?”

“End of next week.” Matthew was going to have to meet with the rest of the team soon to make plans for that trip. He wasn’t in charge, but he had attended more times than anyone else. In fact, it would probably be best for him to gather everyone today, because once they all got into their week’s work, he would have a difficult time dragging everyone away. He would have a difficult time dragging himself away, too. “You think you can spare some time today to talk about big-picture DiceCon plans, actually? I’d rather get this under way now instead of waiting until next week, and I was going to talk to Will about meeting today.”

“Sure, no problem.” Isabel nodded. “Are you actually taking point on something?”

Matthew put a hand to his heart, mock-affronted, but her comment stung more than he expected. “Hey, now, I’m a model employee. I’ve even been working on all the Endgame programming.”

“Fucking finally.” Isabel exhaled. “We’re way behind on that.”

“It’s not like we need it for DiceCon. The trailer’s done, right?” Matthew shrugged. “We have the trailer and the art, and we’ll sign people up for open beta based on that.”

“I know.” Isabel took her mug in both hands. “I just want it all to be perfect. Hey, whatever happened with that guy you were telling us about? The uptight one? He ever call back?”

Matthew poured himself some water from the Brita in the fridge. “He didn’t call, but we ran into each other, and we’ve seen each other a few times since then.” He tried to make it sound casual. “No big deal. Nothing serious.”

Isabel smiled. “Oh yeah? Nothing serious, but you’ve seen him a couple of times already?”

Matthew gave a long-suffering sigh. “Yeah, nothing serious. I told you, the guy is seriously uptight. But he’s also got a work ethic that completely blows me away.” He hesitated on sharing the next bit, but Isabel was his closest friend here, and he wanted her advice. “He’s an engineer who works on creating equipment for the disabled. It’s amazing work even though it stresses him out like crazy. But, I don’t know . . . it sort of makes me feel like I’m not doing enough with my life. Like I missed out on something somewhere along the line. I feel like I’m just coasting instead of really putting my all into it.” He looked down into his glass. “That’s kind of why I’m working on the extra Endgame stuff.”

Isabel blew a long breath of air between her pursed lips. “Phew. That’s heavy talk for a Monday morning, Matthew. I was just trying to get some more coffee into my face so I could work on this project.” She let out a little laugh.