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Amber removed her headphones. “Shit, you’re not going to try to kiss me again, are you?”
I almost tripped over my own feet. Amber winced.
“Sorry. When I’m uncomfortable, my defense mechanism is to make jokes.”
“Please don’t,” I said with a weak chuckle. “It’s too awkward already.”
She pointed a finger at me and said, “No. Too awkward would be me telling you that you’re a good kisser.” She gave a start, like she suddenly realized the words that had come out of her mouth. Her fair cheeks reddened, and she said, “There I go making jokes again. What’s up?”
“The Dogecoin side-chain,” I said. “It’s good, like all the others, but you forgot to account for the hyper-inflationary nature.”
She cocked her head in thought. Then sucked in her breath. “Shit. It’s the variables I used, isn’t it?”
“You used a long integer,” I confirmed. “Which would normally be plenty long enough. But considering how much Dogecoin is out there, it’s possible that we will have users with a balance that exceeds the maximum integer value.”
“Thatwould suck,” she groaned. “I’ll swap it out with a larger variable.”
“It’s more than just a find-and-replace,” I said, opening my laptop on her desk and crowding around the side. “Changing it means totally redoing these two functions…”
Amber didn’t react defensively, the way a lot of programmers would have. She nodded along and began taking notes on how she wanted to fix the issue. Truly listening to what I was saying and then making a plan to resolve it.
Only when I was done, and she gave me that warm smile again, did I remember that this was the girl I had spent all night thinking about kissing. I thanked her for the help, then quickly returned to my office. Long after I sat at my desk, my heart pounded in my chest like it was trying to escape. Being around Amber was thrilling in a way that shocked me.
If only she wasn’t my employee.
Melinda came upstairs to retrieve Amber for the next round of interviews with potential hires. Around eleven, she came back up, pausing in my doorway.
“We have two really good candidates,” she said. “Melinda is going to send them to you and Owen for the final approval, but I think we should hire them. Today.”
“That’s great to hear,” I said.
Amber lingered. I was terrified she was going to bring up the kiss again—what kind of person joked about their embarrassing moments?—but then she said, “Your point about the Dogecoin side-chain this morning has me rethinking some of the tasks of the roadmap. Do you mind if I run some stuff by you? Just for my own sanity’s sake?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, seizing on the opportunity to be around her some more. “Uh, your place or mine?”
I cringed at the stupid—and inappropriate—joke, but she smiled and said, “Your office is nicer. I’ll grab my laptop.”
For the next half hour, we weren’t two people who had kissed the day before. We were two computer programmers putting our heads together to solve a series of technical problems. When I came up short, she quickly thought of a solution. Then when she got stumped about a way to proceed, I explained the next step we should take. It was a skilled discussion, with lots of back-and-forth, like a choreographed dance that we had both mastered.
And little by little, my anxiety at being around her faded. My pulse even returned to an almost-normal eighty beats per minute.
Amber was brilliant, I could see. Far more than I thought she was originally. She saw things in ways I didn’t, and our perspectives were complimentary in a manner that left me feeling even more confident about the future of the company and the specific expansion roadmap.
We ordered pho noodles for lunch and ate them in my office while discussing the last few items on the roadmap.
“Okay, here’s a question for you,” I said. “Star Wars, or Star Trek?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “How do you know I care about either? Just because I’m a coder nerd, I must be into one of the big space franchises?”
I blinked. “Well, I didn’t mean to assume, but—”
“I’m just messing with you,” she said with a laugh. “Star Trek. No contest.”
“Really? That easy, huh?”
She slurped down a noodle and bobbed her head. “Star Trek is unique and imaginative. Not like the boring bullshit from George Lucas.”
“Please elaborate,” I said.
