Page 33 of The Bet
“You dress different than I expected,” she says finally.
“Should I have worn a suit?”
She shakes her head. “No. It’s just—I thought maybe you’d look like a CEO. This is…” She gestures at my open shirt, the blazer, the jeans. “You look like you belong here, like this is home, not like you’re trying to impress anyone.”
“That’s because I’m not,” I say, and it’s true. “Impressing people is a young man’s game.”
She tilts her head, as if weighing that, then leans in just a little. “So what do older men want?”
I smile, slow, and let the silence stretch. “Older men want what they can’t have,” I say, and I don’t look away. The connection between us is electric.
The wine arrives, breaking the moment, and the waiter pours just enough to fog the bottom of her glass. I taste mine, nod, and let him finish the job. Andie sips, then nods, approving. “That’s really good,” she says.
I run my thumb around the rim of my glass, watching her over the edge. “Do you want to ask me how this all started? The board seats, the money, the rest?”
She shrugs, but her eyes are sharp now, alert. “I assume you weren’t born in a suit. Did you always want to be wealthy, or did it just happen to you?”
I laugh, not expecting that. “Neither, really. I wanted to be in control. Money is just a way to keep score.”
She drinks, then props her chin on her hand. “So how did it begin?”
“Fan Day,” I say, and watch for her reaction.
She blinks. “The betting site? That’s you?”
“That’s me,” I say. “I started it in a Century College dorm room, except it wasn’t a prediction site back then. I was failing out of my science requirement, but I could code, so I made a site that was like an on-line poker room for a bunch of my friends. Then, I morphed it to let my friends bet on Vikings games without going to jail. By my junior year, I was running a book for the entire conference. So I was lucky - I got into electronic sports betting from the very beginning.”
She whistles, low. “And now you’re buying Super Bowl commercials? With that movie star?”
I snort. “That’s the actor they hired, but yeah. I wrote every line in those scripts. They kept most of the jokes.”
She grins, and I feel the line between us get shorter, like a drawbridge lowering.
“Don’t get me wrong because it hasn’t been easy. My company was nothing for the first ten years. I worked three jobs—waiter, temp data entry, overnight shifts at a warehouse—just to keep the servers online. But then this angel investor out of Chicago cold-called me, said he liked my ‘moxie’ or something. He flew me out for a meeting, put a check for fifty grand on the table, told me to take it or leave it.”
“Did you take it?”
“I would have done it for five,” I say. “But I played hardball, pretended I had a line of investors around the block. It was bullshit, of course, but he bought it.”
“Did you ever meet him again?”
“Once. At the IPO. He wore the same suit, and cried into a twenty-dollar martini.”
She laughs, and the sound gets under my skin in a way I can’t name.
I go on: “Once we went public, everything changed. Overnight, it went from a nothing to a machine that everyone knew of. They brought in compliance, HR, a layer of lawyers thicker than my arm. I didn’t mind. That was the point—building something that could run without me.”
She nods, as if she understands more than she lets on.
The waiter brings the bread and a tiny dish of salt, then vanishes. I break a piece and offer it to her, and she takes it, fingers brushing mine. A little spark. It’s not lost on her.
She sets the bread down. “So is that what the Board of Visitors wanted? Your money, or your name? Or did they want a spot in the Super Bowl commercial?”
I give her a look, part amused, part impressed. “All three, probably. The Dean called it ‘an opportunity to give back to the place that made you,’ but what they want is donors who can show up on short notice and write a letter for the website. They call me when they need a check, or when they need someone to tell a story about how Century isn’t just for trust fund kids.”
“Is it?”
“Not when I went there,” I say. “And not for you, either, it seems. How’s that catering job going?”
