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Graham sank into his seat, but not before I caught his smirk. “In reality? I suck at Street Fighter. For the purposes of this analogy? Yes. I know how to lay out a web of the kind of genuine, interconnected links that search engines love. Every time someone searches for Luna’s name, whether they want to know about the stuff we got in trouble for or see pictures of her sucking cock, our good results pop up first.”
Was my face bright red? It had to be. Especially since I was fantasizing about Graham taking pictures while I sucked Oz’s cock. Geez. “No one’s searching for my name like that.” My voice came out thicker than I intended.
“He’s right.” Oz nodded at my phone. “Look for yourself.”
I pulled up a search app and typed my name in. There it was—Luna Murphy suck cock plain as day in the auto-complete suggestions. “Why…? Never mind.” I was a woman in tech who just became a minor celebrity. It was tempting to see what kind of results the phrase returned, but I swiped away.
Another email came in, and I couldn’t help but glance at the message from another company I’d sent my resume to yesterday. We’re sorry to inform you...
My heart sank at another rejection, and I set my phone aside. “So… SEO. Click throughs. How do we make it happen?”
The waitress returned with three full coffee cups, two silver pots, and a bowl full of plain and flavored creamers.
“Keywords are great, but on a really simplistic level, other people talking about you, using those keywords, is the best. That’s where your friends come in.” Graham grabbed three French vanilla and dumped them into his coffee. “They’re going to give us the kind of web that most companies pay huge money to build, with their existing networks.”
I went straight for the sugar. Plain cream. “They’re not my friends. I barely know them.”
“I suspect you’ve left an impression. Oz has connections too, if he’s willing to use them.”
“Without question.” Oz might look like a black coffee kind of guy, but he loaded up on as much sugar as I did.
Graham wrote out more notes on his pad. “You were at Rinslet when they were Cord. You know the original gang. Jordan has a huge fanbase.”
Oz nodded. “I do and he does.”
“Judith—”
“No.” Oz clipped the word off. He exhaled slowly, nostrils flared. “This isn’t her area of expertise.”
I was asking him about that reaction later for sure.
“Why are you doing this, Oz?” Graham asked. “You were just a friend two nights ago, and now you’re all in, for whatever Luna needs.”
I downed my coffee too fast, ignoring that it scalded the roof of my mouth. I was going to need the extra energy if the tension between the two of them kept up.
Oz refilled my cup. “Fucking her didn’t flip a switch. I was all-in before, too. Why did you show up this morning?”
“This is my fault. I need to make it right.” Graham dropped his pen with a soft clatter.
Say what? “How could you possibly arrive at that conclusion?”
“When you hit my classroom, I was in my second year as a full-time professor, and my bosses were watching me very closely. I—” Graham sighed. “I was sleeping with the Dean of Computer Science’s son when I was a TA.”
“Imagine that.” Enter Oz: Deadpan mode.
Graham shot him a glare. “He wasn’t my student, but when we broke up, it brought a lot of extra scrutiny down on me. And then I met Luna.” He turned to me. “And the first time I heard you dive into a topic you were passionate about, I knew I was fucked. Tiff had been a good friend—I thought—for a long time. I asked her to act as a kind of buffer. She wasn’t supposed to fuck you. Especially not the way she did.”
That was a lot to process. “I had no idea you knew her. You never said… Why didn’t you ever tell me the two of you were friends?”
“Biggest reason, I was trying to keep my distance from you. I had no idea who she really was.”
“And you never looked into her.” Oz’s yeah, right, was implied.
Graham shook his head. “That wasn’t something I did with my friends. Especially in those days. Do you?”
I did. It had taken a lot of restraint on my part to not go full stalker on Oz. I came close a few times, but as long as I didn’t have to crack any databases to get the information, it was considered public, and fair game, right? Sigh. Yeah, okay, I may have crossed a line or two.
But I wasn’t in the habit of doing things like that when I started college, and while I didn’t like that Graham never told me he knew Tiff, his reasons made sense
