Page 33 of Paradigm

They stared at one another for a long moment before Eline looked away from Arlowe’s intense eyes and stood up, dropping Arlowe’s hands when she did. Arlowe cleared her throat, and Eline looked around the room, taking in the desk with four monitors, two of them vertical and two horizontal, attached to a clearly enhanced setup underneath. The rest of the room was filled with all sorts of boxes from electronic equipment lying around.

“I’m going to get you in and let you take a look around while I make us drinks, but if I get back with a margarita on the rocks for you and you still haven’t found any errors, I get to steal the salt from the rim after all.”

Eline laughed a little and said, “Deal.”

Then, she watched Arlowe sit down at her desk and get to work, and in a way, it was just like old times when they’d used to work together side by side, mostly in silence, checking each other’s work for their shared class and taking breaks to hold one another in bed or go for walks around the city. It also wasn’t like old times, though, because they weren’t college students any longer. Arlowe was very much an adult who probably wore business suits to certain work meetings, had the power to fire someone for showing up drunk to work, and had her own at-home office with a pretty expensive setup. It made Eline feel like they’d been such kids back then, but they’d also been kids in love.

“Okay. Here you go. Obviously, don’t mess with anything. I don’t want you to accidentally push something into production.”

“I won’t,” she replied.

“I’ll be right back.”

Arlowe stood and walked out of the room, still smelling like orange and cinnamon mixed with the woods. Eline sat down in her chair, looked up at the left vertical monitor where Arlowe had left her the code she had worked on for some level of the game, and very quickly, she began laughing. In fact, when Arlowe returned from making them margaritas, she was still laughing.

“What?”

Arlowe handed her her drink and stared at the screen.

“The salt is all mine,” she replied, pointing with her free hand to the line of code where the issue started.

“What?” Arlowe asked.

“You don’t see it?”

“Oh, shit…” Arlowe said. “Can you–”

Eline stood up because she knew Arlowe would want to fix the error right away.

“If you had pushed that to the app, you would’ve had some pretty angry customers.”

“I can’t believe I missed that. The game would’ve timed out over and over again, and their scores wouldn’t have been saved.”

“Told you I’d find something,” she stated confidently before she took a sip of her drink.

“Yeah, you did. Except now this is a problem because I’ve got to fix it. This pushes in three days. QE was going to take a look at it tomorrow, but I’d rather fix it before that.”

“Want some help?” she asked.

“You want to help me fix it?”

“Why not? Got another computer I could use?”

“Do I have another computer? It’s like you don’t even know me anymore.” Arlowe chuckled before she stood up, found another laptop in the closet of the office, and handed it to her. “I’ll grab you a chair to sit on, too.”

“No need. I’m good here.” Eline sat down on the floor, opened the laptop, and added, “Where would you like me to start?”

CHAPTER 11

Arlowe woke up on the floor, and she had no idea how she’d gotten there at first until she looked around and remembered that she and Eline had been working on the code all night. She had slept on the floor of her office after one of the best nights of her life in a very long time, and when she looked up and saw Eline, her ex-girlfriend, sitting at her desk, still at work on something, she couldn’t believe that this was happening. Eline, with her long blonde hair over the back of Arlowe’s chair and still looking perfect, despite probably being up all night, was still here.

“Hey,” Arlowe said. “What time is it?”

“Oh, hi,” Eline replied, turning the chair around to face her. “It’s just after seven.”

“How long was I out?”

“You fell asleep around four, and I could tell you were tired, so I just let you sleep. I finished a couple of minutes ago and was just looking everything over one more time before I woke you up.”