Work Text:
Sharon leaned over the edge of the partition wall and crossed her arms. "How you doing?" she asked, "Do you have access to the stuff you need to do your job yet, or is IT still making you sit on your hands while they bounce tickets around like its the first time we've ever onboarded a new hire?"
Cady pursed her lips as she looked at the list of instructions again, half of them outdated and leading to dead links, and to the dozen or so access request emails in her outbox. "I think so?" she said. "I'm not sure. Yesterday I didn't have access to the list of things I don't have access to, but I think that I've at least requested everything?"
"Yeah, well," Sharon blew a lock of hair out of her face. "You'll find out when you come crashing in to some error message written by an intern who's never actually met a user before. But if you need help figuring out who to bug, just ask Gretchen." She jerked her head in the direction of the next pod over, where the only other woman in this developer section was standing at a desk facing a window.
She gave a little nod and forced a smile. "Okay. Cool, thanks."
Cady had never wanted to end up in a place like this. Nile was one of the three biggest tech companies in the world, a massive conglomerate that made everything from phones to fast fashion jeans to medical software. For Cady, computer science had just been the most obvious way to apply her math skills, to turn them into a job instead of spending her life in academia. But unlike her peers in college, she'd never seen the appeal of Big Tech, of spending all her time as one developer of thousands, churning out incremental updates to Corporate Cash-Cow 11: Office Deluxe Plus Advanced Edition.
That was why she'd only applied to start-ups, looking for jobs where she could do cool math and work on something she actually liked, where she'd actually matter, and where she'd actually know the people she was working with. Murmr had been a perfect fit for her. It was a small team working on a secure messaging app, which meant that she got to spend most of her time doing cryptography work, big juicy applied mathematics. She'd been able to file a couple of patents, write some white papers, go to some conferences. It had been a dream come true.
And then the founder sold the company to Nile with no warning, took an eight figure payout, and retired to Miami. Dick.
Cady scrolled down a little further in the instruction list, to the list of Getting Started tasks. Unlike the rest of the new hire guide, this part had clearly been updated recently. There was an extremely organized list of starter tasks that needed to get done, split by focus area, complete with links to the documentation and code she'd need to update. Hey, she could actually do that. She found one that seemed appealing and clicked.
'SSO_TKN_NEQL', the link popped up, along with a generic login page that Cady had seen about fifteen thousand times already.
"Okay," she muttered to herself. "That's the intern error, I guess." She wrote down the link and the error message on a post-it and walked over to Gretchen.
Gretchen was bouncing on her feet to whatever music was playing through her big, cat-ear headphones. She had three monitors, one of which was covered in code, another in her inbox and messaging apps, and the third had a half dozen browser windows open to her social media pages. It was the sort of thing Cady would have tried to hide under a bunch of other windows that would look like work, but Gretchen was standing with her back to the world and clearly not embarrassed. Her fingers danced across the keyboard, which was definitely not corporate issue: white and pink with loud, clacky mechanical keys. She'd decorated her desk, too. There were a few succulents, some fidget toys, a personal humidifier, and a bunch of pictures of her, mostly with two other girls. Just under her desk she had a little wire rack with a stuffed shark sitting in it.
Cady gently tapped her on the shoulder.
The brunette jumped about a foot. She turned around and blinked at Cady, eyes wide, and then pulled off her headphones. "Hi!"
"Hi," Cady said, waving awkwardly with her fingertips. "Um, sorry, Ms. Norbury said to come talk to you if I was still having access problems." Gretchen tilted her head in confusion, so Cady clarified, "Sharon, sorry."
"Oh! You're the new girl from the acquisition, right? Muttr?"
"It's Murmr," Cady said.
"Right. Totally. Like, welcome to Nile. It must be so exciting for you to be here, it's like, a dream come true, right?"
It would have been, for most of the guys Cady had gone to school with. For her, it was turning out to be as much of a nightmare as she expected. But she forced a smile. "Something like that." She shifted from foot to foot, feeling even more awkward than usual, and then held up her post-it. "I can't open JIRA."
"Oh." She took the post-it and glared at it. "Yeah. IT always takes, like, a week to get to these. Which is so dumb, because it takes five minutes if you know what to do."
Cady smiled hopefully. "And you know what to do?"
"Totally," Gretchen nodded with a smile. "I don't have access, though."
Of course she didn't. Cady was going to spend the next week pretending to work while waiting for someone, somewhere in this 40 floor building to click a button. Awesome.
Gretchen made a face. "Okay, uhh, we can get this taken care of." She turned to her computer and opened one of the four messaging apps, clicking on one of her contacts and typing, 'need ur help w sth @ dsk.' Then she clicked over to Instagram on her other monitor and opened her DMs, messaging someone, 'chk ur slack biatch <3.' With that, she turned back to Cady and gave her a broad smile. "So, are you new to Seattle?"
Cady nodded. "Yeah. Um, my boyfriend and I live in Chicago, but when the company got acquired I had to move here or quit. So… here I am."
"So unfair," Gretchen said, and seemed to actually mean it. "Like, there's literally no part of this job you couldn't do from there." And then she smiled warmly. "Except come poke me."
That made Cady laugh. "Yeah, sorry for startling you."
"It's okay," Gretchen said. "Just, next time… messaging apps exist?"
"I think I don't have access to those, either, yet," Cady admitted.
Gretchen pursed her lips. "Right, well— Oh! Gina!"
Cady turned to see a woman walk into the pod, and suddenly time had slowed to a crawl. The woman —Gina?— was probably the prettiest woman Cady had ever seen in real life. She was fit, long legs in snug jeans, a black, off-the shoulder top and a half-gold, half-pearl 'R' necklace danging on her chest. Blonde waves framed her perfect face, and her dark eyes settled on Cady as her glossy lips parted in surprise.
"Why don't I know you?" she asked, her voice bright.
"Oh," Cady stammered. "I'm new."
"This is Cady, she's from the new acquisition."
Gina crossed her arms and leaned back as her eyes surveyed Cady. "Shut up," she said.
"I didn't say anything," Cady protested quietly.
But the blonde ignored that and just looked her over again. "You're the one who wrote the isogenics white paper." It wasn't a question.
That made Cady blush. She'd put months of work into that project, and the paper had been the final proof that she'd really done something. Hard work, too; Aaron had complained non-stop about how many nights she'd spent obsessively working on proofs for it. But it was maybe the thing she was most proud of: real, new math that would make their encryption secure against the kind of powerful new snooping that the likes of the NSA were doing. Work that Sharon had told her Nile was 'almost definitely just gonna put in mothballs.'
"You read my paper?"
"Do I live under a rock? Of course I read your paper, it's like, half the reason we bought the company." Cady's chest swelled with pride at that, even if that meant that Nile had bought her work just to not use it. "I didn't understand a fucking word, but I'm sure it's really smart." And then she grinned, a big, winning smile that made Cady blush even more. She held out her hand. "I'm Regina George."
Cady shook it. Regina's hands were soft, her manicure was perfect, and it made Cady feel extremely aware of the fact that her own hands were chapped and her nails were half chewed down, and she really needed to get some moisturizer at her desk. "Cady Heron," she said. And then, laughing self-consciously, "But I guess you know that."
Regina grinned at her again. "Nice to meet you, Cady Heron." Then she tilted her head to look at Gretchen. "So, Gretch, what the fuck?"
Gretchen squeaked at that. "Oh, um, Cady still doesn't have access to JIRA. Or slack. Or teams. Or nchat." She looked at Cady. "Or IRC?"
"Oh, um, I didn't try—"
"Absolutely not," Regina interrupted. "No, we are not wasting a week of your time while IT play with their dicks. Come on, Cady." And she turned and strode off.
Cady gave Gretchen a grateful wave and scrambled to catch up as Regina power-walked to the elevator and got in, swiping her badge —she had a pink badge holder clipped to her belt, and even her washed out employee photo on the badge looked like a model— and pressing the button for the eighth floor.
Then her gaze flitted back to Cady, catching her staring, and she smirked as her eyes roamed up and down the shorter girl.
Workplace attire had never been a big concern for Cady. It almost never was in tech, and at Murmr some of the guys had shown up in graphic tees that were borderline offensive. Now she felt awkward, standing next to elegant, fashionable Regina in her own flannel and khakis. But Regina was still looking at her, so she looked back and asked, "What?"
Regina's eyes glinted. "You're, like, really pretty."
"Oh." Cady's brain had absolutely no idea how to process that. Regina thought she was pretty? Had she seen herself? Was Cady allowed to say that? Probably not. She wasn't sure what exactly Regina's job was, but she seemed important. "Thanks," she added. But Regina just hummed, and Cady felt like she needed to keep saying something, so she blurted, "I'd say you are too, but, um, I don't want to get HR complaints."
Regina arched a brow. "Are you going to report me to HR, Cady Heron?"
There was a playfulness in her tone, so Cady shrugged and said, "Maybe I should."
"Mm, no, you don't want to do that."
"I don't?"
Then there was something serious in Regina's eyes as she looked back at Cady. "Cady, you're new here, so I'm gonna help you learn how things work. HR don't work for you, they work for the company. Their job is to minimize lawsuits, not to help you. If you reported me, literally all they'd do is make sure you don't end up on any of the same projects that I do. And, since I'm a massive deal, that's, like, all the good projects. So you'd torpedo your career prospects and it wouldn't even make me stop thinking that you're pretty." She shot her a playful wink at that, and then said, "What you really want is a union, so you can actually action the creeps, but if Daddy Duvall asks, you didn't hear that from me."
"Oh." Ron Duvall was the founder and CEO of Nile, and like, a mega billionaire, but Cady had never heard him referred to as 'daddy' before. Based on Regina's tone, she got the sense it wasn't a term of endearment.
"Sorry," Regina said suddenly, her eyes averted. "I'm, like, passionate about that stuff. But obviously if I made you uncomfortable, I'm sorry, and I totally won't say anything like that again."
"Oh, no, I wasn't actually uncomfortable. I was goofing around." She smiled tightly. "Sometimes I don't come across how I mean to, but, I was— I thought we were bantering."
"Oh," Regina said. And then she grinned again. "Yeah, we were totally bantering."
It took about fifteen minutes to get things sorted out in IT, Regina smiling wolfishly at the poor guy behind the IT desk and refusing to leave until she personally watched him grant Cady access. Then she led Cady back to the elevators and punched the button for the second floor.
"Aren't we on twenty-four?"
"You are," Regina agreed. "It's gonna take like half an hour or something for the changes to go through. Grab a coffee with me?"
Coffee with Regina sounded like the best possible use of Cady's time, maybe even including outside of work, except that she was worried about disappearing from her desk for half the day and looking like a slacker.
Fortunately, Regina seemed to pick up on that immediately. She slipped her phone out of her back pocket and her thumb danced across the screen. "There, it's on your calendar. You're not playing hooky."
"What about you, don't you have stuff to do?"
Regina shrugged. "Twenty percent of my time is training and mentorship." And then she glanced over at Cady and smirked. "And you could use the mentorship."
Cady cringed. "Is it that obvious?"
"You're fine," Regina said, reassuringly.
The elevator doors opened to the second floor, which was mostly lunch restaurants and dining tables laid out under huge abstract sculptures that hung from the high ceiling. It was classy in a generically corporate way, spacious and clean and careful not to give a sense of anything except vaguely expensive. At 10:40, the place was mostly empty, only the coffee shop that Regina was striding towards showing any sign of use.
The barista, a dark haired woman with very bold make-up, rolled her eyes as Regina approached. "Regina. I didn't expect you so early or I would have laid out the garlic and crucifixes."
"Come on, Janis," Regina volleyed back, "we both know even if you watched me blood suck someone to death, it wouldn't be enough to make you believe in god."
"Touché. You're still the worst, though. What do you want?"
"Almond milk flat white, no spit, and," and she turned to Cady and raised a brow.
"Oh. Um, just black coffee. Also no spit, please."
Janis leaned onto the counter and smiled. "I'd never ruin coffee, Regina's just projecting because it's the sort of shitty thing she'd do. You want regular drip or like a big pretentious jerk-off aero distilled pour-over thing?"
Cady blinked, looking between Janis and Regina, but Regina seemed unbothered, checking her email on her phone and avoiding eye contact. "Whichever you'd recommend," she finally decided.
"Gotcha," Janis said. "Pretentious jerk-off it is. I mean, it's Seattle, if you're not gonna drink the douchebag coffee here, when will you?"
"Good point," Cady laughed.
Janis gestured to a badge reader next to the cash register as she started setting up her gear for the coffee. "You gotta badge so corporate knows that people actually come here and don't fire me."
Cady swiped her badge against the reader, and Janis glanced back as she worked on the coffee. "Nice to meet you…" Her eyes flicked to the screen by the card reader. "Caddy?"
"It's Cady."
"Yeah," Janis said, "I'm gonna call you Caddy." She busied herself with her Cady's coffee while Regina pointedly stared at her phone. A minute later, glancing up from what looked to Cady to be alchemy equipment that her coffee was brewing through, Janis said, "So, what life mistakes have you made that condemned you to be here with Regina?"
That still didn't get a response from Regina, so Cady figured it wasn't her place to defend her. "My start-up got bought and I got moved here. Regina's helping me get set up."
Janis gave Regina a meaningful look as Cady said that. "Is she, now?" A crank of a small brass valve set Cady's coffee gurgling down into the paper cup below. "Well, just so you know, Regina was a sorority girl, and you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts."
"Janis," Regina said, her voice tense with irritation.
But Janis just flipped her off and slid their cups over the counter. "One hot nut juice and a douchebag brew."
Regina grabbed her cup and led Cady over to a seating area near the windows where there were a couple of modern couches laid out around a coffee table. Beyond the glass, there was an extensive rooftop patio, but it was January and January in Seattle meant rain. So they grabbed seats on opposite sides of one of the couches.
"Was that more banter?" Cady asked.
"What, Janis? No, she for real hates my guts."
Cady made a face. "Why?" she asked, before considering that she probably shouldn't pry.
If it bothered Regina, though, she gave no sign. "We dated for a while and it didn't work out."
Huh. Regina was into women. There was no particular reason for that information to feel significant. Cady was straight, and in a long-term relationship with a guy she was almost definitely going to marry. She was a big ally, for sure, but that was all. But for some reason it felt significant.
Probably it was because the one good friend that had come with her from Murmr, Damian, was gay, too. And actually, Cady had always kind of got along better with gay people anyway. They just clicked, for some reason. So Regina being gay was a good sign that they'd be friends, she decided.
"So," Regina said as she settled back against the arm of the couch. "What's your deal?"
Cady sipped her fancy alchemy coffee, which tasted like regular coffee. "You basically know, right? We got bought, I had to move here to keep my job."
"And you hate it here," she said, matter-of-factly.
Was it that obvious? Cady blushed. "I never said that." She worried for a moment that Regina would get mad, would call her ungrateful, like some of her old coworkers had when she'd complained about the acquisition.
But Regina just grinned. "You described coming here as something that was, like, done to you." She leaned forward a little, conspiratorially. "You're allowed to hate it."
"Do you hate it?"
"No, but I'm a freak of nature," Regina said casually. "I thrive in an environment that incentivizes being an evil bitch with strong boundaries. You seem, like, super sweet and I can totally see this place being hell for you."
Cady just shrugged, sinking into her seat and sipping at her coffee. "I mean, I don't really know if it is. I've only been here for a day and a half. It's just not where I wanted to be."
Regina leaned against the back of the couch, resting her head on one hand. "And where do you want to be?"
"Kinda where I was?" Cady made a face. "I liked being at a start-up and getting to do my math stuff. And, like, my boyfriend and my life are back in Chicago."
That made Regina's eyes narrow for a second, and she asked, "So why didn't you take the exit? They must have offered you severance or something when they bought the company."
Cady sighed and glared at the coffee in her cup. "The terms of the sale were that we only got paid for our stake in the company if we stay on for a year. Otherwise, it was just like two months salary. And we kinda need the money, so…" She shrugged.
Regina nodded. "You're here for your one plus one."
"Huh?"
She leaned forward a little. "Plenty of people hate it here and only come here because it looks so good on a resume. And, like, plenty more get here and find out they hate it and can't wait to leave. But if you don't stay at least a year, you have to pay back your signing bonus, which obviously blows. So you stay for one year and one day and then you bail. It happens all the time, we call it working your one plus one."
Cady blinked. "That's a thing?"
"Totally." Regina slid closer on the couch until her knee was touching Cady's, and looked intensely into her eyes. "I'm gonna make sure you have, like, the best one plus one. And then you can go back to your boyfriend in Chicago or whatever."
That look made Cady's cheeks flush again. "How come? I mean, I haven't done anything to deserve that."
Regina leaned against the couch back, still touching Cady at the knee. "How many other developers were there at Murmr?"
"Um, eleven. Twelve, if you count Nick, the founder, but it was like a year and a half since he actually did any coding."
"Mhm, and you just made the one messaging app, right?"
Cady blinked, not sure where this was going. "Yeah."
"And your big selling point was the encryption stuff?"
"Yeah."
"Mhm," Regina said, taking a moment to sip her drink. Then, looking dead into Cady's eyes, "And how many co-authors did you have on your paper, again?"
Cady blushed, and looked down into her coffee again. "None."
"Right," Regina said, unsurprised. "So, you had one killer feature, which you did basically all the work for yourself, and then twelve guys— All guys?" Cady nodded. "Twelve guys sitting around jerking off. And then when they sell the company, they have the audacity to tell you that you don't get paid unless you spend a year here? Fuck them."
"There was a lot of other stuff that had to get done—"
"Yeah, Cady, stuff that I could get a couple interns to do in a few months. I should know, we've made, like, eighty chat apps. Your 'math stuff'," there was a tease in her voice as she said it, "was the reason the company sold, and they fucked you over because they're greedy, exploitative dicks. And those same kind of dicks run this place, and because you're this… sweet, adorable little bunny rabbit, they're gonna spend the whole time you're here trying to take advantage and I will not stand for it."
It definitely had occurred to Cady that the terms of sale had been unfair (and, honestly, that not everyone at Murmr was pulling their weight) but everyone she'd talked to had told her that it was normal business. Aaron had told her she was being a drama queen about it. So to hear Regina lay it out like that made her feel sane in a way she hadn't since it happened. A knot formed in her throat, and she managed to croak out, "Thanks."
Regina caught the tone of voice and leaned forward, placing one perfectly manicured hand on top of Cady's knee. "I got you, baby. Also, this job might suck, but Seattle is awesome and I'm gonna show you such a good time. What part of the city are you living in?"
"Redmond?" Technically it wasn't even in Seattle, it was a suburb half an hour outside the city.
"What? Ew, why?"
"The rent is way cheaper."
"Yeah, because it's Redmond." Regina made a half-gagging face, and then held up a hand in surrender. "Whatever, we'll make it work."
Cady was about to defend her choice of apartment (even though she did have to admit the neighbourhood was extremely boring) when Regina's phone buzzed.
She scowled as she looked at it, and then gave Cady's knee one last squeeze. "Okay, I have to go do real work. But if you need anyone yelled at, you let me know, okay? Actually, give me your phone." Cady handed over her phone, and Regina quickly added her number. "That's my personal number. Don't message me about work stuff on it, but do message me if you need me to actually check my work stuff. That's what Gretch does."
And then she was off, heels clacking as she gave a little finger wave goodbye.
Cady nursed the rest of her coffee, feeling both comforted and more out of her depth than ever. Even Janis, the barista, seemed to be giving her a pitying look. But she finished her drink and made her way back to her desk.
But everything was finally working, and Cady could work. That, at least, she understood. The culture here might have been the farthest thing from what she was used to, but the math was the same everywhere.
And she noticed she had a meeting invite in her inbox from Regina, scheduled for 5pm a year from today. "Cady's GTFO Party." She smiled softly to herself and clicked 'Accept.'
She caught Damian on his way out and walked down with him to the parking garage. "How are you adjusting?" she asked.
He raised an eyebrow at her. "Girl, I am in sit and wait mode, and I am loving it. I can just do whatever I want and if anyone asks, excuse me, I do not have the permission." He pronounced 'permission' with a French accent. "Are you not in the same boat?"
"No, Regina took me down to IT to make them get all my stuff set up."
Damian paused mid step and turned to look at her. "Regina George?"
She blinked. "Um, yeah. What do you know about her?"
He held a hand over his heart. "Cady Heron she is the principal project manager for our entire organization, the almighty authority on who gets what projects, final say on design decisions, product direction, everything. And, more importantly, she is fabulous. I heard her hair is insured for ten thousand dollars. Did you not do any research?"
Of course she had, but this was all office politics stuff, which Cady hated. "I researched the actual stuff we work on?"
"Uh uh," Damian said, resuming his walk. "Cady, this is why you're not cut out for giant corporations. It's not what you know, baby, it's who you know."
"Okay, well, apparently I know Regina, so, I'm doing okay," she protested.
"Hm, true. Hotties do flock together. What's she like?"
Cady scrunched her nose as she thought. "She's intense. But she's really nice. Although—" she paused.
By now they had reached Damian's car, so he turned to her and raised an eyebrow again. "Yes?"
"After I told her about Murmr, she basically said it had just been me doing work and twelve guys…" she paused and dropped her voice awkwardly, "jerking off."
"Hm," Damian said. "Well I never saw any actual jerk-offery, but yes, it's tragic what we've lost."
Cady blinked. "You agree?"
He shrugged. "Every office job has the eighty percent of people who do twenty percent of the work, and the twenty percent of people who do eighty percent of the work. I aspire to always be part of the eighty percent. My primary value to any workplace is environmental. I improve the ambiance."
Which, honestly, explained a lot about their time together at Murmr. "I don't even know how I'd do that," she said.
"I know." Damian patted her head. "You're a twenty percenter. It's in your blood." He gasped. "Maybe that's why she found you. She can smell tryhard blood."
Cady laughed. "You're the second person today I've heard imply she's a vampire."
"Janis?"
Of course they'd met already. Cady nodded.
"Well, Cady, I wish you luck with all of that. I am going to enjoy my time of enforced laziness before I settle in to a bright future of regular laziness." And then he gave her a finger wave and got into his car.
There was one thing that was always worse than code that should work, but didn't: code that shouldn't work, but did. Cady was trying to update some security code, and the old code was so bad she'd started by just removing it entirely.
And everything still worked.
Hm.
She was leaning back at her desk, gnawing at one of her nails as she tried to reason through why things weren't more broken. And then she looked above her monitor, and directly into Regina's eyes.
She nearly startled out of her chair, and fumbled to take off her bulky, noise-cancelling headphones. "Hi," she squeaked.
"Hi," Regina said, looking entirely amused. "Is that your main form of nail care?"
Cady glanced down at her hands, which were in a worse state than usual. She only had the pinkies left that hadn't been chewed down to the skin. "It's a bad habit, I do it when I'm thinking."
"Well then right now they're a testament to how smart you are." And then she shot Cady one of her charming grins, which Cady had not yet developed any kind of resistance to. "What do you eat, besides nails?"
"Uh, anything? I'm not very picky. I usually get a sandwich at lunch, I guess."
"Cady," Regina said, and leaned a little further over the partition wall. "You gotta give me something to work with. We're taking you for dinner to celebrate your first week. What do you want?"
She blinked. "We?"
"Mhm, Gretchen, Karen, and I. You haven't met Karen yet but you'll like her. So what do you want?"
Back in Chicago, most of Cady's friends were really Aaron's friends. He was always popular, sporty and charming, and Cady had been lucky enough to be dragged along to bar nights with his beer league team and dinners with his old college friends. That had meant never having to actually choose what they were doing.
But something in the expectant look in Regina's eyes told her that her usual answer of "I'm good with whatever," wasn't going to cut it.
She bit her lip. "Well, you know the city. Why don't you show me some place you love?"
Regina blinked at that, and then her eyes brightened. "I can do that," she said. "Tomorrow after work?"
"Cool," Cady said, hoping her big grin didn't look too silly.
"See you then, pretty girl." And then she was off with a wave.
It took Cady more than a few minutes to get her brain back to debugging, but she was just about there when Jason wheeled his chair over from across the pod and kicked the bottom of her seat to get her attention. She suppressed a scowl as she took her headphones off. "Hm?"
"Sup," he said. "Is Regina bothering you?"
"Um… no, actually, she's been really nice."
He arched a brow at that. "Regina's not nice. She's a ball-busting bitch who's the bane of every dev's life on this floor." And then he leaned forward a little. "Like, probably she seems nice right now, because she doesn't need anything from you, yet. But as soon as she does, she's gonna be a colossal pain in the ass. Better if you learn how to deal with her early."
Cady kind of doubted that, but she also knew that it wasn't like Jason was going to listen to her if she disagreed. So she just tilted her head and played dumb. "Wow, okay, what do I do?"
That made him grin, and he scooted his chair a little closer. "Okay, first off, if she asks you for an estimate on how long something will take, double it, at least. Shit comes up sometimes, and she's a huge bitch if you miss your estimates. Don't reply to her emails until you absolutely have to. Usually, we just do it right before we leave for the day, and then you can deal with whatever she's PMSing about tomorrow. If you're on one of her projects, leave your messaging apps on Busy, so if she messages, you can get to it whenever and you have an excuse. Oh, and if you're working with another team, make sure you can always deflect to them if she comes to bug you about stuff. Let her be someone else's problem. Or Gretchen, if you can deflect to Gretchen, even better, because she's all whatever about Gretchen."
"All whatever?"
"Yeah, favouritism, nepotism, whatever." He rolled his eyes. "She's the one who got Gretchen hired."
Cady scowled at that. "Gretchen seems good at her job," she protested.
But Jason just made a face at that. "Sure, whatever. You're good your job." And then he shot her a smile that he probably thought was charming. "It's nice to have the real thing on the team." And then he wheeled away.
She felt frustration pool in her stomach. That kind of elitism always bothered her. Yeah, Gretchen mostly did front-end work, but that was real programming, too. Cady had dealt with enough bad front-end work to know that for sure. Ugh, whatever. She put her headphones back on and went back to work.
Apparently, the place they were going for dinner was directly uphill from the office, so even though it wasn't all that far, it felt like a long walk. Somehow, Regina and Gretchen did it in heels.
Karen caught Cady gawking at that, and fell back to walk beside her. "I don't know how they do it, either," she said. "I'd fall down the entire hill."
Cady laughed. "They're just special, I think."
And Karen replied with a dreamy sigh, looking over at Gretchen. "Mhm. So, you're new, where are you from?"
"Um, I used to live in Chicago. That's where my boyfriend is, still. But I actually grew up in Kenya."
That made Karen's eyes light up. "Have you ever touched a tiger?"
They chatted the rest of the walk. Regina was right, Cady did like Karen. She was… not intellectual, but she was friendly and warm and positive. Apparently she worked in recruiting, which, yeah, that made sense. But she was so easy to talk to, and interested in Cady in way that she was kind of not used to. It was nice. Honestly, it was really nice.
When they finally reached the top of the hill, Regina led them to a narrow stairwell up to the second floor of some plaza. Gretchen turned to grin at Cady, "You're gonna love this place, it's so fetch."
"Fetch?" Cady mouthed to Regina, who just rolled her eyes in a way that said not to ask.
The restaurant, if it could be called that, was packed. People crowded in around plastic tables in what looked like a reclaimed industrial loft. No sign of any waiters, just a tiny order window surrounded by menu posters along one wall and a counter with water cups and hot sauces along the other. And all of it bathed in the intoxicating scent of good tacos.
"Cady and I will grab a table," Regina directed. "Order for us." And then her eyes scanned the room.
There were definitely no available tables, and more than a few people were standing around and eating. But Regina looked unbothered, finally selecting a table of college boys to float over to.
It was remarkable watching her work, smiling and flirting just enough to get them to give up their table, without flirting enough to persuade them to hang around and try to shoot their shot. By the time they had settled in to the table, Gretchen and Karen were on their way back with a bucket of cerveza bottles and more tacos than Cady had ever seen in a single place before.
Gretchen slid Regina a cup as she sat down, something green that smelled strongly of tequila. Regina caught Cady looking and nodded toward the beer and explained, "I don't drink anything that has less than forty percent calories from alcohol."
They spent the evening asking Cady about everything: her past job, her life in Chicago, college, growing up in Kenya. It was weird, for her, being the center of attention. But the food was amazing, and the beer was making it easier to talk, and they were so friendly and seemed genuinely interested. Regina sat next to her, curled up on the little plastic chair, nursing her cocktail and grazing, and looking at Cady like she was the most fascinating thing in the world.
Honestly, the attention was kind of intoxicating, and before Cady knew it it was late, and she was a little bit drunk, and all the tacos were gone.
They stumbled out of the restaurant, and Karen turned to Cady with a big smile. "I'm gonna make sure Gretchen gets home okay," and she gave an overdramatic wink, "but it was so nice to meet you! We'll talk at work!"
Cady nodded and smiled, and then she felt Regina slip her arm into hers. "Walk me home?" Regina asked.
She blinked at Regina. "Is it—"
"Downhill," Regina promised, and Cady let out a sigh of relief. "And not that far, c'mon."
Then she led Cady back down the hill toward her place. It was dark, now, and not raining for once, but the city was still wet from the last rain. Actually, the sky had cleared, and from the top of the hill they could see all the city lights reflecting off the wet pavement, like descending into a cloud of artificial stars.
"I love it here," Regina said, softly. "I hope you can, too."
"So far it's pretty great," Cady admitted.
"Good." Regina was leaning a little on her, just a slight wobble in her legs after three margaritas and one and a half tacos. (Cady wasn't sure why she'd been watching her closely enough to know that, but she had been.) Her heels definitely weren't helping. After a few minutes, Regina turned to glance at her, her expression focused and kind of intense. "Can I ask you an inappropriately personal question?"
Cady laughed. "I think I've gotten a few of those tonight. Yeah, it's okay."
Despite that, it took a minute for Regina to finally phrase the question how she wanted it. "Do your friends in Chicago suck?"
When Cady gawked at that, she hastily added, "No offense."
"Is there a no offense way to take that?" she giggled.
"Well," Regina whined, and then sighed in exasperation. "Look, you can be awesome," she paused, squeezed Cady's arm, and said, "You are awesome— and still have friends that blow ass."
Cady laughed and slipped her arm around Regina to help steady her in a way that was less of a clutch. It wasn't until after she'd done it that she realized it was, maybe, over the line. But actually, Regina seemed entirely unbothered by it. If anything, she was grateful for the extra help. Plus, the night was chilly, and suddenly Regina was warm against her side, and, oh, it was nice. She smelled nice, too, which wasn't really a reason to support her that way, but it was an added perk. "Why do you ask?"
Regina pursed her lips, clearly trying to pick her phrasing a little better than she had. "Sometimes you act like you've never been asked for your opinion before."
Then Regina looked away self-consciously. It was so different from the way she was at work, where she was commanding and powerful and completely in control. Now, she was almost bashful, and careful not to offend. Alcohol had her face flushed, pink cheeks matching pink lipstick and her pink coat.
Pretty.
Cady wasn't sure she wanted to answer, and Regina wasn't pressing, so she let herself enjoy the walk for a little. The city sights, her pleasant buzz, and the warmth of Regina had her in a blissful comfort. Finally, though, she felt like she wanted to share. "I met most of my friends through Aaron," she admitted. "And they're kind of…"
"Guys?"
Cady laughed. "Yeah."
"Hm," she said. Then she smiled and looked back at Cady again. The way she was leaning, their faces were so close that Cady could smell the tequila on her breath. "Well, I think you're interesting," she said. "You're like a martian."
"Martian?" Cady gasped in mock offense.
But Regina just smiled. "Mhm. In a cute way, though." Then, before Cady could say anything else, she nodded to the apartment building beside them. "This is me."
"Oh," Cady said, and looked up. It was a nice building, a fancy apartment high-rise, and the location—
"Isn't this like, six blocks from work?"
"Mhm," Regina nodded. "I can, like, totally see my apartment from my desk."
"The perfect location for the workaholic," Cady teased.
Regina shrugged, not denying it. She slipped out of Cady's grasp and stepped over toward the doors. For a moment, she fumbled with her keys, looking back at Cady. Then she just smiled and said, "Thanks for walking with me."
Cady smiled back, feeling like she was supposed to do something, but not exactly sure what. "Thanks for inviting me," she said. "It was kinda the best. Maybe we can do it again, some time?"
"Obviously," Regina said with an eye roll. "I promised you the best one plus one, loser." She jingled her keys one more time, and then turned. "G'night, Cads."
The nickname made Cady's face flush. "Good night, Gina," she replied. Then she headed home.
The first few months passed mostly like that. Cady would spend her days at work slowly getting up to speed on her projects and trying to feel useful. Her team was mostly great. Gretchen was friendly and helpful, Kevin seemed super smart, Tim had a really impressive range of experiences, and Jason was also on the team.
But her nights and weekends were what made it all bearable. She and Aaron would have calls in the evenings when he had time, at least once a week, and he'd tell her all about what was going on back home. It did make her miss it, sometimes. It was weird to have her life on hold, like this.
Except it didn't really feel like her life was on hold. Because Regina was making good on her promise of showing Cady a good time. Sometimes, when she was really busy, that would just mean a lunch trip to some weird corner of the city she'd never seen. A Korean buffet hidden in the basement of a mall that blew Cady's mind, or an Italian hole in the wall that only opened for six hours a week, and which Regina had paid someone to stand in line for them for.
When Regina had time, though, she'd really take Cady out. Bars and restaurants, museums and music shows, shopping at some of the coolest and weirdest stores that Cady had ever been to. Even just strolling through the markets, with Regina pointing out what was tourist bullshit and what was actually amazing. Usually they'd have at least one of Gretchen and Karen with them, but even if neither of them had time, Regina would make time for Cady.
And always with a watchful eye on her, seeing what she liked and what bored her, learning bit by bit what made Cady tick. It was kind of flattering. At the very least, it made up for what work lacked.
Cady was pretty sure she was getting assigned the worst bugfixes on purpose. She'd done a little checking on what Kevin and Jason were working on, and they were dream bugs: clear error messages, great logs, obvious first places to look. Cady could knock out half a dozen of those in a day and leave feeling accomplished.
Instead, she was on her fifth hour of trying to get this specific bug to even happen before she could have any idea if she'd fixed it. Which is probably why it had taken her so long to notice the flashing notifications on her work chat. Sighing in frustration, she opened it to check.
Shane: do u have a sec 2 chat 2day?
Shane: ill come by
Shane: ok u seem pretty zoned in so ill wait for u 2 check ur ims
Shane: but don't freak out but im staring at u
She furrowed her brow, and then another message came in.
Shane: 2 ur left
She turned and startled. Leaning against her pod wall was a giant of a man, thick stubble and sandy blond hair, his dress shirt rolled up to show off his enormous forearms, which were crossed in front of him and rested on the wall. He gave her a warm, easy smile, and said, "Sup."
Cady squeaked. "Hi. I'm guessing Shane?"
He reached out one of those tree trunk arms to offer a handshake. "Shane Oman."
She shook it, and as soon as she released the shake, he went in for a follow-up fist bump, which she barely managed to meet correctly.
"Nice," he said, admiringly. "I didn't wanna break your concentration but I'd love to talk to you for a sec. Now good?"
Cady glanced back to her screen, where her latest attempt at reproducing the bug was floundering. "A break would be great, actually."
"Sick," he replied. "Let's go grab doughnuts, I can expense them."
She grabbed her coat, and they walked together to the elevator, and Cady felt absolutely tiny next to him. She was also not above noticing that Shane was, by far, the best looking guy she'd met so far at Nile. Tall, buff, well-dressed, and well-groomed, which was absolutely not a given in Cady's line of work. He even smelled good, which was also very much not a given. She made an effort not to stare.
"So, Gina tells me you really know your shit," he said, grinning at her.
"Oh, you work with Regina?"
He blinked at that and then laughed. "Oh, yeah, right. I'm the PM for the new back-end. Gi's like, my boss. I mean she's not technically my manager, but she's the boss, y'know?"
Cady nodded. "Are all the PMs hot?" And then she couldn't believe she'd actually said that.
But Shane just grinned bigger at that. "Like, not all of us, but it definitely helps. Half the job is hassling people to do things, and people are way more willing to do stuff for a hottie. Obviously, you'd know."
She would? Cady blinked, but before she could ask, Shane said, "I get to pick who I want on the project, and Gi says I should snap you up before you end up assigned to something boring." The elevator doors opened, and Shane headed for the front door. "You're like a big math nerd, right?"
Cady had to hustle to keep up with the length of Shane's strides. "Um, yeah, mostly cryptography stuff."
He made a face, popping an umbrella as they stepped out into the rain and holding it over Cady. "Like monkey pictures?"
That made her giggle, and she blushed a little at the fact that Shane was entirely out of the umbrella and seemingly unbothered by the rain misting down on him. "No, I never did cryptocurrency or NFTs, I think they're kinda stupid, even if some of the math is cool. I did encryption for chat messages." Then she added, "You can get under the umbrella too, if you want."
"Nah," he replied. "I'm Sea-town born and raised, this doesn't even count as rain for me. Plus it's just there," and he pointed across the street to some hipster, industrial looking doughnut shop. "Weems tried to explain the whole monkey pictures thing to me, said I was missing out on the chance to make bank, but I didn't get it. Like, I can still just download the pictures? What's the point?"
"No, you get it," Cady said, "it's just stupid."
They rushed across the street and into the doughnut shop. Cady grabbed a couple of leather chairs near the window, watching water run down the glass until Shane got back with a half dozen doughnuts and a couple of coffees. "Black drip, yeah?"
She blinked and nodded. "Did I say that?"
"Gi," he replied simply. "She remembers everything. Least, for the people she thinks are worth remembering."
Cady's stomach warmed even before she sipped the coffee. "What's up with her? People keep telling me she's mean and scary, but she seems really nice."
Shane laughed at that, a big, warm thing. "She's like, really motivated. And firm. And she doesn't take any shit, even from people who really expect her to. Which like, given her results, everyone would be chill with if she was a dude. Marc B's an asshole to basically everyone all the time, but he's also, like, a genius, so everyone just deals with it. And Gi's not half as bad as him."
"Huh. So you're a feminist, Shane?"
He glanced up from the box of doughnuts, where he'd just selected a crueller. "Duh, Cady. It's 2025. You're either with women or against them, and I am on the side of women. They're kind of the best."
Cady scooped a glazed doughnut onto a napkin. "Well, on behalf of women, we're glad to have you."
"Awesome," he nodded.
It took about half an hour (and two and a half doughnuts) for Shane to finish pitching the project to Cady, although he really didn't need to bother. Cady was just about ready to accept anything to get out of bug fixing, and Shane had plenty of interesting math work for her to do. He didn't understand any of it, but he did understand that there was math, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Soon, he'd sent off the email to move her onto his project, and they were boxing up the leftover doughnuts.
"Can I ask you another question about Regina?"
He grinned. "You're interested, huh?"
Cady felt herself blush. "Not, like, interested interested. I'm straight. And I have a boyfriend. But she is interesting, I guess."
"She totally is," he agreed. "There's just something about kinda messed up hotties. And, as we've already agreed, she's super hot."
That certainly didn't help her blush. "She is," Cady admitted.
"What's your question?" he asked, before trying to shoot the bag of their garbage into the trash can across the store like a basketball. When it missed, he rushed over to grab it and shove it in with a, "Self ally-oop!"
Cady laughed again and caught up with him. "Why does she work here? She seems really cynical about it, but then she's also, like, a workaholic."
Shane scrunched his brow at that. "Probably she'd say something about there being no ethical employment under capitalism, y'know?"
"That's not actually the saying."
"I kinda think she just likes how good she is at it. Like, she came here from Alpha five years ago, and I guess she'd been going nowhere there. I dunno, she doesn't really talk about it, except that it sucked a lot of ass. But here, she's already a principal. She basically runs shit. So, even if she hates the system, she knows the system, she can make it do what she wants it to do." He shrugged, and gave another big smile. "Plus, she has little projects to ease her conscience. Like you."
Cady blinked at that. "I'm her project?"
"In a good way," he said. "Like, she really insisted that I get you out of maintenance hell and on to something you'd like. They wanted to keep you in getting started mode for a few more months, but she says you're way too smart for that." Then he winked at her and said, "She's got another quarter of design reviews before her project starts coding, otherwise she'd probably have called dibs on you herself."
She wondered for a moment if Regina actually would turn out to be a terror if she was on one of her projects, but she had a hard time picturing her being anything less than fair.
"Do you like working here?" she asked as they started the brief walk back to the office.
Shane thought about that for a moment. "I like the people, y'know? Not everyone. A lot of management are douchebags, and lowkey some devs, too, but I think you kinda find your bros, and then it's you versus."
Cady nodded. "And Regina is your bro?"
"Oh, Gi's totally my bro." He nudged her with his elbow. "And now you are, too."
Work was actually not the worst.
It was still basically all the things Cady had worried it would be. She spent most of her time doing boring work on projects that were a tiny part of a tiny part of something enormous. Well, that and attending status meetings, reporting on her boring work to like five different people. Sharon would try to get her excited by telling her how many people were using the stuff she was coding, which Cady guessed worked for some people. For Cady, though, it just made her contributions seem even smaller. Thanks to Cady, sixty million people could see their error messages in 200 milliseconds instead of 500. Truly, she was changing the world.
But actually spending time at work was mostly about the people she was spending it with, and she was finding she really liked that. She liked doing planning meetings with Shane, where he was curious, and enthusiastic, and aggressively supportive in a way that Cady kind of didn't know what to do with. Nobody had ever cheerled for Cady so hard, and she would almost have thought he was making fun of her if Shane seemed capable of being disingenuous, but he really didn't. She liked going down to grab coffee with Damian. He and Janis had clicked basically immediately, and Cady loved nursing a black coffee and just listening to them. It was her own little show, they were both so much in a way that she found so charming. She liked gossiping with Gretchen. She seemed to know basically everything about everyone, and Cady was a nice person, but she also kind of lived for the drama. Especially when Karen would swing by and they'd really get going. They were adorable together.
And Cady liked Regina. She liked Regina a lot, actually.
They still weren't working together. From what she could gather, Regina was entangled in a massive web of planning meetings and design documents and various three letter acronyms that kept her working long hours despite not actually producing any observable result. But it was all clearly very important, because every time Regina showed up on their floor, it set Sharon and the other managers into borderline panic mode.
Which was funny, because most of the time when she showed up, she was just there to talk to Cady. It gave Cady kind of a little rush, to see all the important people go scattering because Regina had showed up to ask if Cady was free for dinner on Friday. And, for Regina, she made sure she was.
They were definitely friends now. They were really good friends, actually. Cady had mostly had work friends and Aaron friends up until now, and you didn't really meet people like Regina George in tech start ups or beer league football. So it was strange how natural their rapport felt. Regina was touchy, too. Like, not as in irritable (sometimes she was irritable, but rarely at Cady), but as in she liked to touch. Casual touches, or hand holds, or hugs. Probably ninety percent of the non-mom, non-boyfriend hugs Cady had ever received had happened since she started at Nile.
And some people might have speculated that that had something to do with Regina being a lesbian, but she'd always prioritized Cady's comfort. Cady felt safe with Regina. Close. Far closer than the five months she'd known her would imply.
She was up on Regina's floor for once, representing her team in a big metrics review. Those meetings terrified her, sitting at the end of the table defending her work to a bunch of vaguely hostile executives, most of them facelessly dialed in to the meeting. She'd told Regina that it felt like meeting with NERV, which had led to her trying to explain the plot of Evangelion to her while she looked at Cady like she was watching a squirrel tapdance. (Gretchen had gotten the reference and laughed, at least.)
Any time she was up here, she'd pass by Regina's office afterwards, which she was almost never in. But today, for once, she was.
Regina had a big pink couch in her office, plus a little bar (she'd told Cady the entire industry ran on alcoholism, which Cady was finding to be less of a joke than she'd hoped.) Her walls were covered in pictures of Regina with people, mostly Gretchen, Karen, and Shane. Although as she stepped in, Cady was surprised to see that several pictures of her had made it onto the walls. There was one prominently placed selfie that Karen had taken the first time they'd taken Cady to dinner at the taco place, Regina's chin rested on top of Cady's head as Gretchen and Karen squeezed in on her from either side. Cady was blushing so hard she looked like a cherry.
"Am I interrupting?" she asked.
Regina's desk was covered in papers, forms, and maps, for some reason. She glanced up and said, "Yeah, but I could use the disruption. What's up?"
Cady shrugged. "Just reporting on the human intrumentality project."
For a second, Regina blinked, then she laughed. "Right, that anime. Nerd."
"Mhm," Cady replied, hiding a little blush. Honestly, she still wasn't used to people remembering the stuff she said when she was infodumping about some nerd thing. "What's with the maps? Treasure hunt?"
The papers shifted as Regina leaned forward on her desk a little more, hands running over her face. "I'm on the planning committee for pride for the company. Well, I'm basically running it, because otherwise it won't get done."
Cady blinked at that and tilted her head. "Huh. Wouldn't have expected that."
That made Regina shoot her a look. "Well, Cady, there's something you should know about me." She exhaled and tensed, then fanned her eyes like she was about to make a big confession. "I'm actually a lesbian."
"Ha ha," Cady deadpanned as she flopped down onto Regina's couch. "I mean I didn't expect you to be into rainbow capitalism. Figured you'd have some big speech about it being fake and performative."
"Ah," Regina replied. She picked up one of the papers and sunk back into her office chair. "I mean, it is. But it's also heartfelt and meaningful. It can be both."
"How?"
Regina thought about that for a second. Then she said, "I guess, like, the reason that companies like this can be as shitty as they are is that nobody feels like they're responsible for their decisions, right? Everyone's just doing what their boss is saying they have to, all the way up to the CEO, who gets to say that he's just doing what the shareholders demand. So everyone can say, like, 'Oh, I totally want to do the the ethical thing, but it's not up to me,' and pretend like its not their fault that we're crushing small businesses or gutting privacy or turning the internet into slop."
That thought churned Cady's stomach, but she nodded.
"But that works both ways. Like, if you want to do something that doesn't suck, you can, you just have to appeal to the nebulous needs of the shareholders." Regina stood up and walked over to join Cady on the couch. "So, yeah, we get the company to pay for all this pride stuff because it's shallow, performative marketing. But if suddenly it wasn't profitable to do that, it wouldn't make any of us less gay. If corporate said no to paying for pride, Damian and I wouldn't start being straight, and Gretch wouldn't detransition, you know?" She shrugged. "Like it's performative, but also, everyone involved is sincere and authentic and really cares.
"Maybe that's just what I tell myself, though, I dunno. But I had such a hard time when I was a teenager, because I just couldn't imagine what my life could actually look like if I was out. And I feel like seeing a bunch of burnouts with shitty corporate jobs marching in a pride parade can show other little girls that they can be gay and have the same sort of miserable life as everyone else, y'know?"
Cady nodded a little, and reached out to give Regina's knee a comforting squeeze. If they hadn't been in the office, she'd probably have pulled her into a hug, but it felt like there were rules of office decorum to be respected.
Then something clicked. "Wait, Gretchen is trans?"
Regina made a face. "The Ikea shark didn't clue you in?"
"Blåhaj is trans?"
"So I am told," Regina said.
"Cool," Cady replied. But then she furrowed her brow as something else clicked. "Oh my god."
Regina was looking at her nervously now. "Is it cool, Cady?"
"Yeah, it's great, sorry, it's just, uh," she paused. "Something Jason Weems said."
Tension filled the air, and Regina raised an eyebrow.
"Early on, when I started here, he was talking about me and Gretchen. And he said, like, that it was nice to have the real thing on the team. And I thought he was just being elitist, because Gretchen does so much web dev. But now I think maybe he meant…" she trailed off.
Regina was stone-faced. Then, levelly, "I'm gonna ruin his fucking life."
"Should we go to HR? That's an HR violation, right?"
"No, Cady," Regina snarled. "He'll just deny it, best case scenario nothing happens, worst case, it'd be Alpha all over again."
Alpha. Regina's last job. Cady moved a little closer, so their legs were touching, and reached out to hold Regina's wrist. "What happened at Alpha?"
The contact made Regina visibly relax a little, though she was clearly still deeply angry. She exhaled slowly. Cady remembered Shane telling her that Regina didn't talk about it, but it felt like the moment to ask. And for her, Regina opened up.
"Everyone thinks Alpha is so great because it doesn't have a hierarchy, or whatever," she started.
And, yeah, that was what Cady had heard. Of all the tech giants, Alpha was the one developers really wanted to work for. It was the company where you could work on your passion, spend a chunk of your time on your own projects, where you didn't have to report to a million managers. Alpha was The Good One.
"Well, it turns out, if you have a bunch of people together, they form hierarchies. That's just how people work. So when you don't have formal hierarchies, then you have informal, invisible ones. Little cliques that run things. It's not like you can code a giant project on your own, right?"
The hand Cady wasn't holding was clenching and unclenching, and Regina shook her head like some objectionable memory was forcing itself into her head.
"And, like, I'm fucking good at cliques. I ran my high school, okay? But it's different when there's one woman for every ten men, and your job is telling people what to do. I had to fight to get on projects, and when I did, they'd just ignore me half the time. I had one dev on my project, a real Jason Weems, who wasn't doing any of the work he was supposed to and just dicking around on his side projects. And when I called him out, he called me a 'joyless cunt' in front of everyone."
Cady inhaled sharply, and gave Regina's wrist a soft squeeze.
"I had the same thought you did, go to HR. And that's how I learned the hard way what HR actually does." She shook her head. "They gave him a verbal warning, not even a written one, and moved him off my project. And then I got a reputation for being 'sensitive' and it was impossible to get people on my teams. So I had to sit through performance reviews where I got chewed out for my stuff not getting finished. I figured I was getting managed out of the company, so I bailed before they could fire me, and came here."
"Is it any better?" Cady asked.
Regina shrugged. "I can still get work done here if people think I'm a bitch, I guess. Plus I brought some friends in. And every now and then I get surprised by someone awesome showing up." And she gave Cady a little grin.
Cady blushed. "Well, don't say that, you're gonna make me feel like I have to stay."
"Oh, absolutely not," Regina laughed. "You're getting your ass out of here as soon as you can." Then, a smaller grin, softer, more vulnerable. "Doesn't mean I can't enjoy you while you're here."
"Can I hug you?" Cady asked.
Regina spread her arms, and Cady crawled the rest of the distance across the couch and hugged her tight. "So, what are you gonna do about Jason?" she asked as Regina held her.
She felt the air of Regina's huff against her ear. "I just… I didn't want Gretch to have to deal with this kind of shit. Like I'm supposed to have some weight to throw around, and I can't even keep assholes from saying shit like that about her? Ugh. I'll talk to her, she's the aggrieved party, anyway. But if that creep thinks I'm a bitch now, he's gonna learn what a bitch I really can be."
Cady gave her a squeeze. "Good."
The answer that Gretchen gave was to not do anything, unless the opportunity came up naturally. She was used to it, she said, which kind of broke Cady's heart. Still, she made a point to tell Gretchen that she was in her corner if she ever needed it.
Cady was used to going to pride with Damian back in Chicago, and he wasn't planning to march, so she got to go with him here, as well. ("I am not the type of gay who marches, I am the type of gay who luxuriates," he had declared.) She cheered extra hard for her friends, though, and Regina shot her a wink as they passed. Regina had had her corporate-issue pride t-shirt hemmed to show off a little tummy, and she was in short shorts, with a little lesbian pride flag on one cheek. Somehow she looked even more stunning than usual, and there were definitely plenty of women who noticed. It gave Cady a little rush that she was the only one Regina winked at, though.
They invited her to come with them to the parties after the parade, and she found herself really wanting to go. But it felt like she wasn't allowed, like she'd be a straight girl inserting herself into places that weren't for her. Plus, the couple of times girls had flirted with Regina in front of Cady, she'd seemed a little awkward about it, and she didn't want to, like, ruin pride for Regina. So she went home, instead, and spent the night liking her friends' Instagram posts.
It felt wrong, somehow. She felt left out. But she'd been invited, and she'd had good reasons for not going. There was no reason to feel hurt about it. She just… did.
The pope was visiting the city.
It wasn't the sort of thing that Cady would normally care about. She wasn't really religious, definitely not catholic, and she wasn't all that into celebrities. Unfortunately, she had to care, because the visit had shut down the bridge she normally took home, and now the traffic on the other bridge was backed up for hours. She'd planned to leave before it got bad, except that Kevin had pulled her into a design discussion at four, and it had gotten really interesting, and she nerded out sometimes, okay? So she'd lost track of time.
Now it was eight, and she was sitting at her desk halfheartedly working between checking the traffic on her phone. According to the latest, if she left now, she'd get home a little after midnight. Great.
She had just started to consider biting the bullet and starting the drive when she saw Regina walking toward her with a scowl on her face.
"I happen to know for a fact that you were here at 8:30 this morning, and you are absolutely not allowed to crunch for a schema migration. Go home, Cady."
Cady made a face. "No fair, you were here at 8:30, too, this is hypocrisy."
"Yeah, well, I'm a burnout lifer. You're leaving before your first performance review." She stepped past the partition wall and into the pod, and sat on the edge of Cady's desk. Once she'd settled into place, she reached out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Cady's ear, looking into her eyes. "They'll take everything you're willing to give, and they won't even say thank you. Don't give them more than they're paying for, okay?"
The casual intimacy made Cady's stomach feel light, sent a soft smile across her face. "Okay." Then she exhaled slowly. "Honestly, I'm just procrastinating driving home. The bridge is shut down for the popemobile, so it's gonna take forever."
Regina seemed to consider that for a moment, pursing her lips. When she spoke, it was without her usual air of unshakable confidence. "You could crash at my place. Y'know, if you want."
Cady blushed. "I couldn't impose."
"I offered, so that means it's an invitation, not an imposition, Cads. You're allowed to take things that are offered."
It still felt like an imposition. But the idea of driving four hours out to the suburbs just to sleep and then immediately come back sucked enough to make Cady seriously consider it. And Regina looked so genuine, her soft eyes focused on Cady, uncertainly awaiting her response.
"Okay," she decided. "Thanks."
"Yes," Regina whispered as she slipped off the desk. "I am the queen of forcing work-life balance on other people."
Cady laughed. "And yet your own work-life balance is…?"
"First of all, rude." Regina smirked as she headed for the elevators. "Second, that's, like, the point, Cads. I give to others what I cannot have myself. It's like a Greek tragedy or something."
The elevator doors slid shut, and Cady leaned against the wall. "You totally could, though. You just might have to find it somewhere else."
Regina rolled her eyes. "Whatever, this place would fall apart without me."
"Yeah, but do they pay you extra for that?"
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at Cady. "How dare you use my words against me." But her tone was playful. "And they do pay me a lot."
In contrast to her four hour drive home, the walk to Regina's apartment took a little less than ten minutes. The concierge greeted Regina warmly and handed off a sizable stack of packages, which Regina managed to pin under her chin as she unlocked her door.
"Shoes by the door," she said as she stepped into the apartment.
Cady had expected something grand. It was clearly an upscale building, even aside from the location, and anyway, Regina was a woman of expensive taste. But it was actually a little smaller than Cady's apartment. There was an open central space, split into a living area with a plush couch and a giant comfy chair around a TV, and a dining space that Regina had clearly set up for entertaining but that was now covered in package boxes. The kitchen was open concept, shiny steel appliances that looked basically unused, and a fancy blender and coffee maker that both looked very used. It was as beautifully decorated as she would have expected from Regina, modern and classy, but surprisingly warm. The walls were almost completely covered, every space occupied with either packed bookshelves or vibrant, expressive art.
The art drew her eye first. The rest of the place seemed very Regina, but the art wasn't at all her style, Cady thought. It was assertive, almost aggressive. Some of it was paintings, but others were textile, and some were partway between, tactile, mixed media pieces.
The packages were deposited on the dining table, next to the existing stack of packages in various states of openness. Then Regina flopped into her massive armchair, letting Cady look as she pulled out her phone. "All I have is meal shakes, and I'm not gonna inflict that on you. What do you want to order?"
"Surprise me," Cady said, half listening as she moved between art pieces. Then, before Regina could needle her for her indecision, "Are these all the same artist?"
Regina gave an odd little squeak at that, and then said, "Um, yeah, they are."
Cady glanced back at her. "Anyone I would have heard of?"
"Mhm," Regina said. Then, almost shyly, "Janis 'Imi'ike."
Her jaw dropped. "Like, Janis the barista?"
"Like, Janis the artist," Regina said, clearly a bit more harshly that she intended. She cringed at herself and said, "But, yeah, my ex Janis. She left all this when she moved out. Said it, like, belonged to our shared space. And… it's really good, so I kept it."
Looking at it again, Cady could sort of see that. The pieces almost seemed to flow into one another, like they'd been made to tell a story together. "I didn't know she's an artist."
"Mhm." Regina stared at her phone. But then, after a moment, she put it down and looked at Cady more earnestly. "It's kinda why we broke up. I was always pushing her to quit her barista job and do her art full time. Y'know, because I always have to tell everyone what to do." She made a face. "She said I made art feel like work."
Cady walked back toward her and sat on the arm of the chair. "Aaron always says I should come work at one of these tech giants. It's more stable and the pay is better. He was pretty excited when we got bought, except for the part where I had to move."
Regina looked up at her, pulling her legs up onto the chair to face Cady directly. "But you hate it here."
"I don't completely hate it," Cady protested.
Regina just nudged her with a toe. "You hate all the parts that are your job. You just like me."
"And Shane and Gretchen and Karen!" She giggled. "But yeah, kinda."
"Well, that's stupid. He's stupid. You spend, like, a third of your life at your job, you absolutely cannot spend it doing something you don't like."
Cady looked down at Regina, curled up in the soft cushioning of her chair, nose scrunched in irritation at Aaron, and felt a surge of affection. "I think maybe you can, if you like the people you're doing it with enough."
As she said that, Regina reached out a hand, and when Cady took it, she tugged her down into the chair. Cady squeaked as she fell into the cushioning, and Regina was sunken in enough that Cady naturally rolled into her side. She threw a hand out to grab the chair back and pull herself up, but only really enough to not be half on top of Regina. Instead, they were lightly pressed together, side to side, with Cady's head on Regina's shoulder. Then the phone was being shoved into her hands, open to the order page for some Mediterranean restaurant.
Once she took it, Regina's fingertips slid into Cady's hair, and she ruffled it lightly. "Or," she said, voice soft, "you could do something you love with people you love."
Cady punched in her order. "Unfortunately that usually pays shit."
"Hm, true," Regina said.
They chatted like that, tangled up in each other on the chair, Regina's fingers stroking through Cady's hair, until the food arrived. Then Regina cleared away enough packages for them to eat at the table.
"None of these are Nile packages," Cady observed as she scooped what was left of her rice into a little pile.
"Ew, no," Regina frowned. She speared her fork through some salad and into a piece of chicken with a sudden surge of aggression. "This is basically all clothes, and I'd never wear our stuff. It's all sweatshop polyester, it's totally gross and exploitative. These are all from local designers." Then she frowned again. "Or, well, a bunch of them used to be local but got priced out of the city, which is another delightful side effect of our wonderful employer."
Cady nodded. "Yeah, the rent here is crazy. Actually, what do you pay for this place?"
"You really don't want to know," Regina laughed. "Like it's worth it, but the number is actually horrifying." Then she sighed, idly poking at what was left of her salad. "A lot of these places I used to walk to when I first moved here. These cute, eclectic little boutiques. And now I just bulk order and then send back the stuff that doesn't fit right. Like, don't get me wrong, I'm still in love with this city. I just wish I could have shown it to you back when it was still weirder."
"Weirder?"
"Yeah," she said, and then grinned. "Like you, you little martian." And she punctuated it by poking Cady in the nose.
Cady stuck her tongue out. "Well then I'll just have to be weird enough to make up for it."
That pushed the irritation out of Regina's face, and she gave a big smile, warm and genuine. "Definitely." Then she stretched and stood from the table, tossing the last scraps of her salad back into the delivery bag, and starting to gather the garbage. "Okay, I've gotta start my skincare routine if I'm gonna be up on time tomorrow. C'mon."
She headed into the bedroom, which was almost entirely filled by a big pink king bed. Off to the side there was a vanity and walk-in closet. Regina headed into the closet and emerged with an oversized tee and some sleep shorts for Cady.
"I'll use the bathroom while you get changed. Whichever side of the bed you want is fine with me."
Cady went pale. Well, even paler than usual. "Oh. Do you want— I can just sleep on the couch, or—"
Regina arched a brow. "I mean, obviously I'm not gonna force you into my bed if you don't want to, Cady, but the bed's huge and way comfier." Then, a little less confidently, "You know I'm not gonna perv on you or anything, right?"
And yeah, Cady was sure of that. Regina was a flirt, but she absolutely wasn't the type to try to take advantage. The problem was Cady. She was a cuddler. It wasn't even her fault, really, it was just something she did in her sleep. But even in the heat of the summer, even when their air condition had broken, Aaron would wake up with Cady wrapped around him. He complained about it a lot, but she literally couldn't help it. And the idea of Regina waking up to find herself the meat in a Cady burrito was mortifying.
But now she could tell that if she decided to sleep on the couch, Regina would think it was because Cady thought she was a creep. And given how much Regina was going out of her way to make Cady comfortable, that felt shitty too.
Maybe if she slept right at the edge of the bed? Her sleeping self could only cover so much ground, surely, and Regina was right that the bed was huge. Anyway, Regina was pretty touchy anyway. They'd literally just been cuddling on the chair half an hour ago. What was the worst that could happen?
"Bed it is," she croaked.
The next morning, Cady woke to the smell of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, and a soft tapping on her hand.
"Cads."
She groaned and tried to bury herself deeper into the covers, her face burrowing further into the sweet smelling softness in front of her.
Regina chuckled softly. "Cads, you gotta let me go, babe."
Cady opened her eyes. The smell she was enjoying, she realized, was Regina's shampoo. Her face was buried in Regina's hair, both arms and one leg wrapped around the other woman like she was trying to shimmy up her like a tree.
She disentangled herself as quickly as she could and crawled back toward the other side of the bed. Her face was crimson, she knew, and she wanted to crawl under the bed and die. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry."
But Regina just laughed. "It's okay."
Cady groaned, hiding her face in the pillows. "Please tell me I wasn't like that very long."
No response. She peeked out to see the soft, pitying look Regina was giving her. "How long?"
"I kinda had to skip my morning run because I couldn't get out from under you." Cady made a sound of ultimate despair, and Regina laughed again, bright and easy. "Hey, don't worry, it was worth it. Most action I've gotten in months." And then she winked and headed into her walk-in.
Cady blushed deeply as she tried to curl up into nothingness. "I always do that. I really try not to, I know it's annoying, but it's just— I'm asleep, so—"
"Why would it be annoying?" Regina interrupted.
"Um, I mean I guess because it's really warm, and I get in the way, and—"
"It's cozy." Regina emerged with a few hangers in each hand. One set she slung over her shoulder, the other she set down at the foot of the bed. "And you're, like, tiny. You're not that warm. Plus, if I really needed you moved, I could've moved you. You were just, like, too cute to disturb." She tensed her brows in confusion. "Seriously, I have no idea why anyone sharing a bed with you wouldn't want you as close as possible."
Cady bit her lip, her self-consciousness giving way to a full body tingle. "Well, not everybody feels the same way."
"Huh," Regina said, but let that go for once. "Well, I slept like a baby. We have good bed chem."
"Bed chem?"
Regina just rolled her eyes. "I'll send you a link later. I'm gonna shower and get dressed. Then you can shower after." She nodded to the clothes on the bed. "Those are for you, y'know, in case you don't wanna show up to work in the same clothes as yesterday." Then she grinned. "Or do, and let people talk."
The idea of people talking, of suspecting something was happening with her and Regina, made Cady feel weird. Not bad, really. She wasn't sure exactly what. It was a little thrilling, actually, if only because Regina was clearly so far out of her league. But also, it wasn't like she wanted it to get back to Aaron, innocent though it was. So she took the clothes —not her style, but probably as dressed down as Regina ever got— and felt oddly excited about it for the rest of the day. Just a bit of elegant, gorgeous Regina clinging to her wherever she went.
There really wasn't much to do in Redmond, and Cady was coming into the city every weekend anyway. And the drive out was tedious, and plus, it was bad for the environment, and Cady really cared about that sort of thing.
So, it just made sense to crash at Regina's place. A lot.
At first, it was only when Cady happened to be working late enough to be there when Regina left. Her hours were flexible, and a lot of the people on her new project didn't even get in until 10, so if Cady was showing up at 10 and leaving at 7 (which just happened to be around when Regina left, most days), that was just practical. Whenever Regina was heading out she'd check Cady's desk, and if she was there, she'd chat and flirt and eventually extend the offer. And Cady would pretend that she really couldn't impose and put up some token resistance.
Then they'd end up at some restaurant, or at Regina's big driftwood dining table over takeout, and then they'd be curled up together in Regina's armchair watching trash TV or chatting, and then they'd wake up in Regina's bed with Cady giving her absolutely no personal space.
They got better at it. Regina learned how to slip out of Cady's grasp without waking her, so that she could still make her morning run. Then Cady would wake to Regina, sweaty in a sports bra and spandex shorts, trying to grab her outfit without waking Cady. Or sometimes in just a towel, slipping into the walk-in to get dressed. And she definitely didn't look any more than was both heterosexual and appropriate.
Regina freed up some space in her closet for Cady, just to avoid her needing to steal so many of her clothes. Cady picked a few things to bring over from her place: comfy pyjamas, some work clothes, a few nicer dresses, in case she stayed over on a Friday and they had weekend plans, and some of her better sets of underwear (to avoid Regina's judgment of the worse sets, obviously.) It wasn't that much, really.
It was only once or twice a week, anyway. Three times, tops.
Then management had bumped up the deadline on Cady's project and she went into crunch mode, working 14 hour days. Regina bitched endlessly about her doing uncompensated overtime, but even she agreed that Cady would be screwing her teammates over if she didn't do it. Still, she insisted that if Cady was going to be spending that much time at work, there was no way she was wasting time commuting.
So for a couple of weeks, she lived at Regina's full time. She'd wake in the morning to breakfast waiting for her in the kitchen: coffee and a chocolatine from the French bakery downstairs, even if Regina was still out on her run when Cady left. She'd come home late at night (home? She didn't overthink that idea) and message Regina to get let in, grab some of whatever dinner Regina had ready, and crash straight into bed.
By the middle of the second week, Regina just gave her the spare key so she could come and go as she pleased. Cady gave Regina hers, too, just so Regina could go grab a few more of her clothes. Temporarily, obviously. It was weird to think of Regina out in her bland little suburb apartment, especially without Cady there, but it wasn't like there was much in terms of boundaries between them, anymore.
Well into the third week of crunch, the end was finally in sight. Cady's teammates were halfway ragged, a pall of death hanging over their pod that their coworkers knew better than to disturb. But Cady was oddly finding it not that bad. Part of it was that she had always worked best in crisis mode. She'd struggle to motivate herself without external pressure, but a big scary deadline would kick her brain into overdrive. But another part was that she couldn't remember a time she'd felt more taken care of.
She'd really gotten dug in to one of the last big tasks, found that perfect brain-off flow state where she could just code, and stayed at the office until well past midnight. Finally, she'd managed to send out a massive code review that Kevin could deal with in the morning, and drowsily made the walk back to Regina's place.
Her stomach was groaning by the time she got in, a reminder that she hadn't actually found the time to eat since the morning, so she padded quietly into the kitchen in the hopes that Regina had left some takeout in the microwave. Instead, she found a folded piece of paper sitting under the stove light.
"Know you miss real food. Check the fridge. -R"
Cady blinked and opened the fridge. For as long as she'd been staying over, Regina's fridge had contained nothing but beer (for guests), meal shakes, and a half dozen different bottles of hot sauce. All those were still there, politely shoved to the side, but the rest was fully stocked. She realized as she looked that Regina must have checked the fridge at her apartment, she'd gotten all the same brands Cady usually got. There were even a few containers of cut up fruits and vegetables. Not precut, she noted, and for a moment pictured Regina actually in the kitchen doing food prep. For her.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and made herself a parfait, and it was the best thing she'd eaten in ages.
Just as she was finishing changing into her pyjamas, she heard Regina's voice from the bed, soft and thick with sleep. "Cads?"
"It's me, Gi," she replied softly.
Regina responded with a little, 'mmph,' and then her hand snaked out from under the covers, fumbling around looking for Cady. As soon as she got her phone plugged in, Cady crawled over the bed toward the arm, and let Regina pull her down against herself. "Too cold without my backpack," she whined, wrapping Cady's arm around her tummy.
Cady blushed. True, they'd end up in this position pretty much every night, but they'd never started the night in it, and it felt different. Still, she snuggled up to Regina's back, slipped her other arm around her. The city lights shone through the window, letting Cady see a few little freckles on Regina's shoulder where her oversized tee had slipped down. Without thinking, she planted a soft kiss on one of them.
A sigh slipped out of Regina, and she squeezed Cady's hand.
"Thank you for the groceries," Cady whispered.
Regina wiggled back against her, settling into position. If she'd been more awake, she'd have had something witty to say, teasing or flirting. But she was only just barely conscious, so instead, she said, "Want you to feel at home."
Cady squeezed her gently. "I do."
Shane took them out to celebrate making the deadline. He'd chosen some giant, three-story arcade/bar, given the bartender his company credit card, and told them all to show Daddy Duvall no mercy. They weren't getting paid for the extra hours, they might as well get something.
Cady wasn't all that much of a gamer. Well, that wasn't quite true. She tended to get really, obsessively into one game at a time. When she really got fixated, it would get to the point where she'd basically do nothing else with her free time, and "free time" would gradually expand as a concept until either her fixation bubble burst or it got to be a problem. The last time it had happened, she had been a hundred hours or so into trying to beat Bloodborne without getting hit before Aaron had stepped in to put a stop to it.
A few cocktails and she didn't know how many rounds in, she was realizing she could definitely get obsessed with Beat Saber.
"Damn, Golf Bird," Kevin said, as she finished a round. "You've got rhythm. You ever think about rap?"
She lifted the VR headset and blinked as her eyes adjusted, feeling a little awkward about the sweat dribbling down her head. "Like, in general, or me doing it?"
"Talkin' bout dropping some bars," he answered.
"Aren't I kinda… white?"
Kevin nodded appreciatively. "Valid." And then he headed off to where most of the team was gathered. They were bunched around a pair of DDR dance pads where they'd been playing winner-stays matches. Based on the flush on Gretchen's cheeks and the fact that she'd actually put her hair up, it had been quite a few rounds since she'd been out. Right now she was up against Damian, who had more or less abandoned hitting the actual notes in favour of interpretive dance.
She thought warmly of Shane saying you just had to find your bros, and she couldn't deny that this was a pretty good set of them.
Floating at the edge of a group like this had always been more natural for Cady, but she knew it could come across as her not being social if she wasn't careful. So she hung up the headset and went to watch the competition with the rest of the team.
Shane pulled her into a side hug as she got there and ruffled her hair. "Yo! Lady Cady. You having fun?"
"Mhm." She nudged Shane with her elbow. "It almost makes up for the last month of no free time."
He laughed. "Don't let Gi hear you say that or she'll bust out the U-word and we'll all get sent to corporate re-education camp." Then he titled his head and said, "Yo, speaking of."
Cady turned to see Regina cresting the stairs, turning nerdy heads in a black skirt and a ruched pink tank top, her designer tote (laptop bags were fugly, she'd told Cady) draped over one elbow. She was unbelievably pretty, as always. Honestly, even more so than usual, because after a long day at the office her hair and makeup were just a bit less perfect and a bit more human. As much fun as she was having, Cady still felt the impulse to head back to Regina's apartment with her now, swap the fashion for sweats, and curl up on the chair together.
She was still staring a bit when Shane grabbed Regina in a bear hug, lifted her up, and spun her around. "Gi! You made it!"
Regina squeaked and laughed and swatted him. "Jesus! Put me down!" She rolled her eyes as she got her feet back and smiled at Shane. "Yes, I came. I have to show up and congratulate people when you do a good job, or you people start thinking I'm just bitchy for fun."
"I mean, you do have fun with it."
"Shane," she said with a glare. "Anyway, I can't stay that long, I've got QBRs to prep for."
"Dude, lame, already?" he said, seeming genuinely deflated. "Is Rapp—"
"Punting everything to me? Duh." She tensed for a second and then pinched the bridge of her nose. "Can we not talk about it? It's a celebration, bitches." She glanced back toward the rest of the group.
Cady realized she'd been both eavesdropping and staring, but Regina just grinned as she caught her. She walked over and immediately started straightening out Cady's still VR-messed hair.
"I didn't know you were coming," Cady said.
"Well, I've seen first hand how hard you've all been working," Regina replied with a wink. Her thumb brushed along Cady's cheek where a little bead of sweat had been about to trickle down.
"Yeah," Cady said, immediately feeling like she was definitely failing at this interaction. What was up with her? She talked to Regina literally all the time, had basically been her roommate for the last month. Actually, that was part of it, since for the length of the crunch they'd mostly been like ships passing in the night. Regina had been present, and the signs of her presence had been all around, caring and comforting and supportive. But it wasn't like they'd had the time to sit just be in each other's company, like they had before, and she realized she'd really missed her.
It was also that tonight, she happened to look particularly pretty —sexy, actually, not that Cady was into women, but objectively, she was almost unreasonably hot— and put together and Regina, and Cady was kind of drunk and sweaty and had been wearing a full helmet for God-knows-how-long and her hair probably looked crazy.
When that was all Cady said, Regina laughed again and stepped a half step closer. "I'm assuming from how drunk you are, you're not driving tonight, so I get you at mine?" Her voice was soft as she said it. She seemed comfortable with how often Cady was staying over, but she also clearly didn't feel the need to advertise it to their coworkers.
Cady nodded, and then, still feeling a little awkward, added, "If that's okay?"
Regina scrunched her nose at her. "You literally have the keys, Cads, you're always welcome."
That made Cady smile, a little bashful, but she felt a nagging insecurity. Because she was always welcome, that was obvious, but she was also just Regina's work friend who kinda slept at her place, sometimes, and seeing Regina like this, out of the office and getting open stares, was reminding her that Regina George was a hot commodity. "What about like… if you have, y'know, company?"
There was a little shift in Regina's expression, a slight pursing of the lips and tensing of the brow, but Cady couldn't quite read it. Then she just shook her head and chuckled. "Well, I'm not gonna be bringing random hook-ups home any time soon, so you'll have a little notice. But you really don't have to worry." Then she winked. "Worst case scenario, I'll leave a sock on the door, babe."
"Oh," Cady said. "Okay." God, she wished she were less drunk.
Regina picked up on that, too. "I'm gonna leave some pedialyte out for you, you need to hydrate before bed." She glanced over to the group and added, "Don't let Shane goad you into overdoing it just because the company's paying."
"I won't," she promised, sounding soft and a little overly sincere.
It got another chuckle out of Regina. "Okay, good. I've got to go mingle, but I'll see you later tonight, pretty girl."
Cady stared after her for a few moments. Regina made her way into the group, all bright smiles and warm congratulations. Gretchen tried to talk her into playing a round, and Regina just pointed at her ridiculous heels and made an adorable pouty face.
"Hmm," Damian said, loudly, from directly behind Cady.
She startled and looked over at him. "What?"
"Hmm," he repeated, louder and longer.
"Regina?" she blinked. "We were chatting, we're friends."
"And do you look at all of your friends like this?" Damian asked, before tilting his head back and batting his eyelashes coquettishly.
Cady frowned. "I was not looking at her like that."
"Uh huh," he said. "You have been spending an awful lot of time together."
"Yeah, because I don't have a lot of friends here. And you've been off… busy!"
"Enjoying the fruits of one of America's great gaybourhoods, yes," he agreed.
"Yeah, and so, Gina and I hang out, sometimes. It's just— It's normal." She scowled at him, feeling very defensive about this line of inquiry.
Damian raised a suspicious eyebrow. "And does she know it's just normal? Because while you were doing this," he did the coquette eyelashes again, "she was doing a whole-ass Rihanna smoulder," and he punctuated it with narrowed eyes, furrowed brows, and his lips pouted in a kiss.
Cady folded her arms and glared. "Yes," she insisted. "She knows I'm straight, and she's not into me like that, and anyway, it's not even like I stay over that much—"
"Stay over?" Damian exclaimed, scandalized.
She shushed him immediately, before anyone else could notice. "I didn't— That wasn't—"
Damian pulled her between a couple of arcade machines and lowered his voice. "Are you having sleepovers with Regina, Cady Heron?"
Her face was getting hot, and she stared at her feet. "Her place is just really close to work, okay? So sometimes she lets me crash. Like, lately, when we're slammed."
"Uh huh," he said. "Like she lets all the devs use her guest room?" She focused harder on her feet, and Damian waited for a moment and then said, "Cady, tell me she has a guest room."
"She has… a really big bed…"
"Cady Heron!" Damian hissed.
"I know how it sounds!" she whined. "But it's seriously not a big deal, we're just really close. She takes care of me, and it's honestly really nice, Damian."
"Mhm." Damian sounded deeply unconvinced. "Well, first of all, you know that I am not Aaron's biggest defender, but he is in my top ten… deciles of cis het men, and I'm not sure he'd approve of you sharing a bed with the city's hottest lesbian."
Cady huffed. "Well, it was his idea to go long distance, and—"
"Uh buh buh buh." Damian held up a hand until Cady stopped talking. "Second, and more importantly, even if you are as straight as you say —present evidence very much to the contrary— she is not and if you are not careful that girl is going to catch feelings."
"Come on, Damian," she said. "Regina is not going to catch feelings for me. Like you said, she's the city's hottest lesbian. I'm the second hottest woman on our dev team, and we only have two women."
Damian shook his head and crossed himself. "Beyoncé, save us from straight women." Then for a moment he just tapped his foot and mouthed counting to ten. When he finished, he looked back to her. "Okay, spill, how fabulous is her apartment?"
And Cady spilled.
The worst part of the job was being on-call. Every five weeks, Cady would have to spend a week as the team on-call, spending all of her time responding to issues. Every issue that came in had a severity from 1 to 5. Severity 5 meant "ignore this unless you're bored off your ass." Severity 3 meant "spend all your time at work on this, but you can still go home at night." Severity 2 or 1 meant she got paged and had to drop everything until the problem was fixed, no matter when or where.
She even had to carry an honest-to-goodness pager, like it was the 90s, and she had to have some backup pager app on her phone that made a godawful siren noise if she ever got paged. Anything she didn't deal with in an hour meant her manager would also get paged, which was so mortifying a concept that Cady couldn't even consider it.
It seemed so stupid. Doctors carried pagers because their patients might be dying. Cady carried a pager because people might not be able to load their friends list.
(There was also, she was told, an event worse than getting paged, where the CEO would forward someone an email about some issue with just a "?" as the body. Then their entire management chain would freak out until they had addressed the issue to Duvall's satisfaction. Cady had never seen one of these, but from what she'd heard, Regina had gotten caught up in a couple of ? emails, and they were nightmares.)
She'd gotten through her first few on-calls without ever getting paged, but by the time summer rolled around that had changed. Now she was used to getting a couple of pages per on-call, and the instant panic they created was becoming a little more familiar. But all her previous pages had happened during the day, never later than maybe eight in the evening.
Until the siren wail of her phone woke her at three in the morning.
She'd been buried deep in Regina's covers, her head on Regina's back and their legs tangled together, so if the sound hadn't woken Regina, the feeling of Cady suddenly skittering off of her would have.
"Sorry!" she hissed as she staggered over to her phone to acknowledge the page and stop the alarm. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry!"
Regina pushed herself up on the bed, her hair frizzed out slightly and her eyes cloudy with sleep, but she smiled. "Not my first page, Cads, it's fine."
Cady rushed out into the living room, grabbing her laptop and sitting down at the dining room table to connect to work and figure out what was going on. Then she was digging in to logs from different systems, trying to piece together what, exactly, the crisis was.
Vaguely, she was aware of Regina padding around the apartment as she stared at her laptop screen. Then, after she didn't know how long, Regina set a fresh cup of coffee down beside her.
"Oh my god, thank you," Cady breathed, cupping the mug in both hands to take a sip. "I am so fucked, for real."
Regina blinked. "What's wrong?"
"It's alarming on the failure rate for sending gifs," she said. "Like… crazy high." She pointed at a graph. "But it works fine for me, and there's nothing in the logs that indicates anything should be happening. Like it looks normal."
The tension in her gut was unbearable, and while the coffee was helping her focus, it was not helping her nerves. But then she felt Regina's fingertips running up her neck, her nails gently stroking at her nape, as she leaned over her shoulder to look. "Can I?" she asked, her breath against the shell of Cady's ear.
Suddenly, the tension in Cady's gut was different, which she might have had time to unpack if she didn't need to get this issue resolved in the next half hour to avoid her manager getting paged and her getting in shit. Instead, she just nodded. "Sure."
Regina reached an arm around her to take the mouse and start to look at the data. Cady found herself leaning back just a little, Regina's warmth pressed against her soothing her frayed nerves. Even with the sudden panic, she was still exhausted, and now that she was surrounded by Regina's scent, it would have been so easy to fall back asleep.
"This failure rate is weird," Regina said, suddenly. "Like, 75% exactly? On the dot? When does that ever happen? Could be a bug in the metrics."
"Yeah, I thought that, but Sharon says it's never the metrics."
"It never is, until it is," Regina replied. "I know the team who owns this, and it should still be daytime for them. Let me ping their on-call." And then she was going to get her own laptop.
"I'm not supposed to escalate without evidence," Cady said nervously.
"You're not," Regina replied, "I am." And then she shot Cady a wink.
Not ten minutes later, Regina had gotten a reply back from the Bengaluru team confirming the bug was on their end. A false alarm. Cady added the information to the ticket and closed it with fifteen minutes to spare.
"You saved my life," Cady muttered.
"Oh, please," Regina said, closing her laptop. "All that would have happened is that Sharon would've paged metrics and been twice as mad at them. You would've been fine."
"I would've died," Cady insisted, "for sure."
Regina just shook her head and laughed. "I'm gonna die if we don't get back to bed, c'mon." And then she was crawling back into bed and beckoning Cady, and she was happy to take the invitation. She wriggled under the covers, curled up to Regina's back, and let herself slip back into pleasant dreams.
The next day at the office she was lost in her headphones working on her on-call issues when Sharon came over to her desk. "Hey, Cady, sorry about that page last night."
Cady slipped off her headphones and nodded. "Yeah, that was a weird one."
"Mhm," Sharon nodded. "Well, you handled it. Great work. But, uh, listen. You need to follow the right chain of escalation on those things, okay? Just because you know Regina doesn't mean you can page her on things."
"Oh, I didn't—"
Cady stopped herself. She wanted to say, "Oh, I didn't page her," but then she would have to explain why Regina was awake and involved with a page that had nothing to do with her at three AM. And somehow, explaining that they'd been in bed together (in a completely normal and platonic, if extremely cuddly, way) felt weird.
"—realize," she finished.
Sharon pursed her lips like she found that answer unsatisfactory. "Well, now you know," she said.
Slipping back into her headphones, Cady tried to suppress the blush on her cheeks. Not that she had anything to be embarrassed about. Still, maybe it was better for this to stay her little secret.
Cady didn't end up giving Regina her key back. There was no rush, after all, and since Regina had filled her fridge up for her, Cady kind of had an obligation to make sure that food didn't go to waste.
With the rush work done on her project, she had a little more time, anyway. So one evening, she slipped out of work at five, went back to Regina's apartment, and started cooking.
Regina's kitchen was kind of a disaster. Cady guessed that she'd probably cooked in it twice, ever. She had all the things that comprised a kitchen, good cookware and knives, but laid out without any practical consideration at all. Fortunately, Regina's disinterest meant that Cady felt at liberty to re-arrange things as she went, to put things where they obviously should go.
Back in Chicago, Cady had cooked all the time. She and Aaron weren't the type to splurge on eating out every night, and he wasn't much of a cook. Of course, most of her recipes weren't the sort of thing Regina would go for. Cady had observed how Regina's meal choices were diet-conscious to a degree that, frankly, made her worry a little. But then she thought of some of the dishes she'd eaten as a kid back in Kenya, and she'd started to get some ideas.
It was a couple of hours before Cady heard the door open.
"Whatever you ordered smells amazing," Regina called as she kicked off her shoes and headed in.
Cady was waiting when she came around the corner, wearing Regina's (probably never before used) apron and standing in front of the stove. "I cooked, actually," she said, suddenly feeling a little shy. "It's maharagwe, which is a bean and coconut soup I used to eat growing up." She'd made chapatis, too, but she didn't expect Regina to eat bread, so she didn't mention it.
Regina blinked, completely disarmed for a moment. Then she walked a little closer and leaned over the counter to peer into the kitchen. "What's in it?" she asked, clearly trying to sound more curious than cautious.
But Cady had prepared for that, too. She opened her phone and pressed a few keys. "Just sent you the ingredients and the nutritional info." She'd made a spreadsheet and carefully weighed everything as she went, even, enjoying the math and data end of things a little more than she was ready to admit.
The message beeped on Regina's phone, and she opened it. For a second, she just stared, and Cady worried that something was wrong. Then she realized Regina was blushing. "Cool," she said, finally, and then gave Cady a little smile. "Let's eat?"
Cady nodded and started getting everything plated. She gestured to the chapati as she filled Regina's bowl, and she considered it for a second before shaking her head. Otherwise, she just leaned against the counter and watched. It gave Cady a spark of happiness, how clearly surprised Regina was, and how easy and domestic it all felt.
Just as she was carrying the bowls to the table, she heard Regina's voice behind her, quiet but clear. "Careful with my heart, Cady Heron."
She glanced back at her, not even really sure she'd heard it. But Regina just smiled and joined her at the table.
Gretchen had insisted they go bar hopping. Secretly, she'd told Cady that Regina needed to blow off some steam, and she'd never do it for herself, so they had to trick her into it. But somehow, Regina had still ended up planning the night. Probably, Regina had a hard time not planning things.
It had been going great when two bars in, Gretchen had gotten paged. She'd been sticking to mocktails, so it wasn't like she was wasted for it, but it did mean she needed to duck out. Karen decided to go with her for moral support. Whatever that meant.
Cady really didn't mind, anyway. She was more than happy to wander from bar to bar, keeping Regina entertained and her mind off of work. Really, Cady was very good at distracting Regina.
The third bar they went to was a moody little cocktail bar full of the sort of very cool people that Cady had a hard time imagining having jobs. It felt like they just existed for the purpose of filling cool venues, like they spawned in when the bar opened. Regina looked cool enough to be at the bar, in her halter top and leather pants, her hair in some kind of updo that Cady didn't understand even though she'd watched Regina do it. By contrast, Cady didn't feel like much in her tanktop and shorts, but Regina had assured her that she looked "cute as fuck," so she went with it.
The armchair they found themselves in was smaller than Regina's, but by this point they were so good at fitting in to one another that it hardly mattered. Cady's legs were draped over Regina's thighs, Regina's hand rested on Cady's lower back while the other held her drink. Casual and comfortable. Cady was well in to a rant about the worldbuilding in the show she was watching, which she was sure Regina didn't care at all about, but she was listening with that warm, amused look that said she was just enjoying listening to Cady talk.
"Excuse me, ladies."
A guy was hovering nearby, and Cady was immediately struck with a flash of irritation that she was going to have to watch yet another idiot try to pick up Regina. Then she got a better look at him. He was hot, lean and fit in a v-neck t-shirt that was a size too small, carefully groomed stubble and a lot of ear piercings. In other words, not interested in picking up girls. Instead, he was pointing to the smaller metal chair that comprised the other half of their sitting area. The one they had pointedly ignored in favour of climbing into the armchair together.
"Is it okay if we borrow this?"
"Be my guest," Regina said, her voice just a little alcohol slurred.
The guy grinned and said, "Thank you," in a sing-song tone, and then, as he was taking the chair, "You two are a cute couple!"
They giggled. Given their position, they couldn't really argue with the assumption.
But it did get Cady thinking. "How come I've never seen you hit on girls?"
Regina rolled her eyes and sipped her drink. "I'm in a bit of a dry spell, Cads."
Cady made a face. "But why? You're so hot and you're charming and easy to talk to, and you make a lot of money which isn't important to everyone but it definitely doesn't hurt. There's no way it's hard for you to get dates."
"I work too much," Regina offered half-heartedly.
But Cady just nudged her side. "You work a lot, but we hang out more than I've ever hung out with someone I'm not dating. You totally have time to date."
Regina gasped in mock offense. "You wanna give up your me time?"
"I really don't," Cady said, smiling at her in a way that was very fond and even more drunk. "But I'd get it. You've got needs."
That made Regina grin wickedly. "You thinking about my needs, Cads?" Her fingers dug softly into Cady's back to punctuate the tease. "What about your needs, hm? We've gotta get your boyfriend out here for a conjugal." Then she scrunched her nose. "But at your place in Redmond. You are not doing that in our apartment."
Cady blushed and hid her face against Regina's shoulder. "I can take care of my own needs."
"Not a rousing review for Aare-bear," Regina laughed. She nuzzled the top of Cady's head, and after a moment of thought, said, "When, though? We've kind of been glued together." Then she gasped, and Cady tried to shrink even smaller, as though she wasn't half in Regina's lap anyway. "Cady Heron, have you masturbated in my apartment?"
"Maybe," Cady muttered.
She could feel Regina's smirk against her head, delighted and predatory. Her voice dropped even lower. "Have you masturbated in my bed?"
Cady gave a miserable squeak. For a second, she was sure Regina was going to banish her from her apartment forever.
Then, "That's hot."
Arousal flushed through Cady's body at the low, gravelly tone of Regina's voice, and she decided that actually it clearly had been too long since she'd had sex. At least it had been too long to be talking about sex with Regina, the hottest woman she'd ever met and possibly the hottest woman in the world, while pressed up against her so she could feel the softness of her body and smell the warm aroma of her perfume.
"Next bar!" she declared, hopping out of the chair a little too eagerly and wobbling on her feet.
Regina stayed where she was, looking Cady over slowly as she tilted her glass to her glossy lips and downed the rest of her cocktail. "Let's go."
The next bar was loud, which Cady figured was Regina showing some mercy and giving Cady a reprieve from further talking until she could somehow get her foot out of her mouth. It was down in a basement, music blasting out of a jukebox, covered floor-to-ceiling (including the entire ceiling) with records and band posters. There were also, to Cady's delight, a bunch of pinball machines lining the walls.
Cady eyed the pinball machines covetously, but even this late into the night, the place was packed and none were free. Her longing gaze didn't escape Regina's notice, however.
She leaned close to be heard over the music, her boozy breath hot against Cady's ear. "Grab us some drinks and I'll get you a machine."
By the time Cady had grabbed the cocktails, Regina had sweet talked a couple of guys into giving up their machine. Her first couple of plays went badly, her alcohol-inhibited reaction times resulting in quick losses. But Regina seemingly had an endless supply of quarters in her purse.
"Did you prep for this?" Cady shouted over the music.
Regina shrugged with a coy grin.
A few games in, Cady found her stride, and then before she knew it she was chasing high scores. Regina just lingered by the machine, watching her with amusement and leveraging the occasional come-on to keep their drinks topped up. Gradually, the bar disappeared as Cady got in the zone, driving her score higher and higher toward the machine's record. Then a slight mistake killed her game within striking distance, and she groaned.
"One more?" she asked Regina. "I'm, like, so close."
Regina's brows arched at that and she laughed softly. "They're closing in, like, ten minutes, baby, you'll get it next time."
Cady blinked, having completely lost track of how long she'd been playing. "What time is it?"
"Time for breakfast," Regina answered, and took her by the arm.
They plunked down into a booth in a diner and Regina waved for a waitress. For a brief moment, Cady felt a little self-conscious about how drunk she still felt, until she realized the front of the menu read, "Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929," and she figured Regina had picked the right spot.
The waitress approached and narrowed her eyes at the booth. She was a tall woman, covered in tattoos and piercings and a perpetually annoyed expression. "Regina," she said as she arrived at the table. "Hadn't seen you in so long I assumed you'd been hit by a bus and delivered the city's lesbians from perdition."
Regina gave a plastic smile. "Sorry to disappoint, Em. Still kicking."
Em glanced over at Cady. "And is this the latest victim?"
"No," Regina said before Cady could respond. "This is Cady, she suffers from a tragic affliction."
"Straight?"
"Incurable," Regina confirmed.
Em snorted at that. "Okay. So, cheese fries for God's punishment upon gay girls, and Miss Spaghetti will have what?"
Cady blinked at Regina and mouthed, "Spaghetti?" Regina's eyes widened in an expression that meant she really didn't want to explain. "Waffles," Cady decided, and Em strode off.
"Banter or ex?" Cady asked.
"Banter," Regina said. "Although they're kinda like that with everyone, here. It's part of the selling point."
Cady blinked. "Being mean?"
Regina leaned back in the booth and smirked. "Cady, if you don't see the appeal of hot women being mean to you, why are we even friends?"
"You're not mean to me," Cady replied, and then blushed as she saw the smirk that put on Regina's face. "Why are you God's punishment on gay girls?"
"You're really curious about my love life, tonight," Regina poked back.
Cady nodded. "I guess it's the one part of you I feel like I don't know about."
Regina blinked at that, and drummed her fingernails against the tabletop for a moment. "I dated a lot when I first moved here," she said, finally. "And I'm… hard to date." She shrugged. "I ended up here a lot, because it's so close, and the staff got a front row seat to some dates that ended badly."
In all the bar hopping, Cady had lost her sense of direction, but now that she thought about it, they were only a couple of blocks from Regina's apartment. "Why are you hard to date?"
She could tell Regina was getting tired of the questions, but she was also still drunk enough to keep talking. "I just… I have a hard time letting people in, and most of the time, I don't like the other girl as much as she likes me."
Before Cady could follow up, the food arrived along with some much needed coffee. They ate in comfortable silence, and Cady felt immensely grateful for the way the food started to soak up some of the booze in her stomach. She looked over at Regina. Her makeup was a little smudged, now, and her hair a little out of place, and she was shovelling cheese fries into her mouth with a blissful expression. Normally, Regina ate salads or stir fries, or grazed lightly on richer food if they were all sharing dishes. Cady was surprised to learn that Regina could eat.
She wasn't lying when she said she had a hard time letting people in, Cady thought. But Cady was in, was getting to see the Regina very few people ever did. And the thought made her happy.
Regina glanced over at her, catching her staring. "What?"
"You're really beautiful," Cady replied, honestly.
"Oh," Regina said, and her cheeks flushed.
Then Cady turned her attention back to her waffles. By the time her plate was clean, she felt like she just might be sobered up enough to sleep, and she could see the sunrise peeking through the diner windows.
When she glanced over, Regina was giving her an odd look, a little warm, a little melancholic. Finally, she said, "It wouldn't be fair," in a voice so soft Cady almost didn't hear it.
She blinked. "What wouldn't be?"
"You asked before why I wasn't dating. It wouldn't be fair."
"To who?" Cady teased, "The girls who have to compete with you?"
But Regina bit her lip and looked away, a little blush on her cheeks. "To the girls I was dating. It wouldn't be fair to start seeing someone when I'm hung up on someone else."
That was a more vulnerable admission than Cady had expected. Regina was so… Regina that it was hard to imagine her pining over someone. Then she thought about how Regina's apartment was still covered wall-to-wall in her ex's art. "Is it Janis?"
Regina startled at that, looked back at Cady with that look she did when she thought she was being a martian. But after a moment, when she decided that Cady was being serious, she said, "No, Cady, it's not Janis."
The way she was staring at Cady was almost pained, and probably a more sober Cady would have been willing and able to acknowledge why that was. But she was drunk, and comfortable, and sleepy, so she just turned her eyes back to her coffee and hoped that the moment would pass.
After a moment, Regina exhaled and said, "Okay, let's get home and sleep this off."
She paid the bill and they walked the few blocks back to Regina's apartment, the dawn sun filtering through the buildings around them. Cady could see Regina stealing a few glances at her, so she gave her a warm, sleepy smile, and after a moment's hesitation Regina smiled back.
Before they'd headed out for the night, Regina had set out pedialyte and aspirin for both of them, and now she was very insistent that Cady hydrate properly before going to bed. They passed each other, back and forth, as they took turns washing their faces, doing their skin care, and changing into their pyjamas.
Eventually, Cady climbed into bed. Regina was sitting on her side of the bed already, legs pulled up to her chest, the warm light of daybreak making her hair glow and her bare skin look angelic. But there was a sadness in her eyes as she met Cady's gaze.
Between the food, the coffee, and the pedialyte, Cady had sobered up enough to know that she needed to say something. She hesitated for probably too long before finally asking, "Did I say something wrong?"
Regina winced. "Cads…"
Cady sighed softly. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
A moment passed, Regina waiting nervously to see if Cady would say anything else. But when it became clear that that was all she had, she nodded. "Me too." She rolled onto her side to go to sleep. "G'night, Cady."
Despite her exhaustion, Cady lay awake for a long time, watching the reflection of the sun rising in the windows of the next building over. She knew Regina wasn't asleep either from her breathing, and she wanted to say something to comfort her. She wanted to roll over and wrap her arms around her, stroke her hair, kiss the freckles on her shoulders.
But all of that would just make it worse. Because she did, after all, understand what Regina had been saying.
She wondered if it wouldn't be better just to roll over and really apologize, to admit that she'd been caught up in how good everything felt and had been careless with Regina's feelings. To tell her that she loved her, of course she did, she just couldn't love her the way Regina wanted.
But she didn't, because she couldn't quiet the little voice in the back of her head that wouldn't stop telling her that maybe she could. Maybe she already did.
Cady was trying to focus on work, at least a little bit. She had less than four months to go until her year was done, and she could quit and move back to Chicago. It was absolutely what she wanted, and it wasn't filling her stomach with a queasy, wrong feeling at all. Well, maybe a little. But only because she'd miss her friends.
Of course, the thought had occurred to her that maybe she didn't need to miss her friends. Tech work was easy to do remotely, and even if Nile didn't want to let her work from Chicago, there was no reason whatever start-up she joined couldn't have people in both Chicago and Seattle.
Regina had even suggested she consider founding her own start-up. "Since you're gonna be the one doing all the work, anyway." It felt kind of scary, but also exciting. Cady had never really been the type to do that, to take the lead and be in charge. But watching Regina had somehow made it feel more possible. Plus, when she finally got her Murmr payoff, she'd be able to afford it, at least for a little bit. (Assuming she could talk Aaron into letting her use the money for that, that was.)
When she'd brought up the idea with Gretchen, she'd been so excited for Cady. And when Cady had asked if Gretchen would consider joining her at a start-up, she'd said yes. It'd have to be the right idea, the right project. But she was open to it.
It started to feel kind of real.
As mid-October rolled around, she was starting to think about what projects she could get excited about, and about how she could make it all work. And she knew who she really wanted with her when she tried.
They were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, feet intertwined, each on their own laptop. Regina's face was scrunched in irritation, her nails tapping at the keys in the way that let Cady know she was writing an email someone was going to be very unhappy to receive.
Cady slipped off her headphones, and waited for the familiar sight of Regina rage-clicking 'send' before she gently nudged her calf with her toe.
Regina looked up and tapped her airpod silent.
"Would you ever think about coming with us?"
She blinked. "Where?"
"The start-up," Cady said. "You know how to design, coordinate, you're amazing at breaking work down. I know it's not your thing normally, but I think you could really help."
For a second, her face was impassive. Then she frowned, her tongue sticking in her cheek as she turned her gaze back to her laptop screen. "I wouldn't be good at a place like that. I'm, like, adapted to this shitty environment."
"An extremophile," Cady said. But then she nudged her again. "I don't think that's true, though. You wouldn't have like five teams to juggle, but your skills would still transfer—"
"It's not a good idea, Cads," she replied, her tone surprisingly final.
Cady frowned, lowering her laptop screen half way to look at her. "You're not even considering it, Gina."
"I've considered it."
"When?"
Regina lowered her own laptop screen, finally looking Cady in the eyes. Her brow was tense, but her expression was still soft. "Cady, drop it, please."
It felt strange that she was so insistent on this, and Cady couldn't help but feel defensive. "Do you not want to work with me?"
She stared for a second. "Cady."
Cady closed her laptop entirely and pulled herself upright, tucking her legs under herself. "What?" she said. "You said a bunch of nice stuff about me at work, but we've never actually directly worked together, right? And now you can't even consider—"
"Cady, be serious," Regina interrupted. "This," and she gestured between the two of them, "only works because it's temporary. We're only friends because you're leaving after a year."
She felt her face flush and her stomach sink. "What are you talking about?" A lump was forming in her throat, and she tried to swallow it down. This was the first she'd heard about their friendship being on a time limit. "Do you not like me?"
Regina sighed in irritation. "Can you just not be completely dense for once?"
"Well, if you would just explain to me—"
"I like you too much, Cady, you know that." She finally closed her laptop and curled herself into a tighter sit. Her gaze was soft, and she didn't quite meet Cady's eyes. "And I can deal, and behave, and put my heart on hold for a year, because if I only get you for a year, then I want all I can get of it. And then after that you go back to Chicago, and Aaron, and I get to move on. Okay? But I can't… I can't keep torturing myself indefinitely."
It was strange to have it out so openly, this thing that had been simmering between them for so long. But somehow Cady had always expected that they'd get past it, that Regina would meet someone better and move on, or realize how silly it was for her to have a crush on someone like Cady. It hadn't even occurred to her that it could cost her their friendship.
The thought made her stomach churn, frustration welling up inside her before she could get it under control. "So… what, you don't want me in your life if you can't fuck me?"
Then Regina's eyes snapped to hers, and her face paled. For a second her jaw fell slack, confusion and hurt clear on her face. Then she got herself together. Regina was always so put together. "Okay," she said, voice soft. "You're hurt. That's… fair." She was half gritting her teeth to say it. She slipped off the couch and headed to the kitchen. "I think maybe we should spend some time apart. Clearly we've been overdoing it."
"Clearly," Cady hissed. Regina was obviously wounded, and she felt sick and guilty about it. But it was her own fault for reducing their friendship —the best friendship Cady had ever had— to this. So it all came up as bitterness, and Cady couldn't stop it. "I guess I got confused and thought we were friends." She strode over to her bag near the door and crammed her laptop into it. "Now I know better, so, you can spend your time on someone who will put out."
Regina hunched over the sink, filling a glass with water. She tilted it back, chugging a few gulps before pulling back and letting out a quavering exhale. "Are you done?" she asked. "Feel better?"
"Fuck you, Regina." She stormed over to the kitchen, a deep impulse to make Regina feel just as bad as her welling up inside. It was clear that Regina was trying to hold it together, and somehow that made it worse, made her more desperate to get a reaction. She slammed her spare key down on the counter top. "You want an endpoint for this? You got it."
There was a soft clink as Regina put her glass down on the counter. She pursed her lips and walked over to the little console table near the door, picked Cady's spare key out of the key dish, and walked over to her. Eyes watery and averted, she held out the key for Cady.
Cady hated her for it. If Regina would just blow up, if she'd just fight Cady back, hurt her back, they could get it all out in the open and somehow it would turn out okay, she was sure. Instead, her reflex to hurt meant she was now looking at something final. She should apologize, she knew. She should patch this up. It wasn't like she was innocent, she knew she'd given Regina plenty of mixed signals, that she'd been all too willing to enjoy being the object of Regina's crush without worrying about her feelings.
But that was too hard to say, and she was too angry, and Regina wouldn't fucking look at her. So she took the key.
The second the door closed behind her, she could hear Regina release the ragged, choked sob, and whatever self-righteous fury she'd felt gave way to profound remorse. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was go hug her, apologize, and work everything out. But the door was closed, and she didn't have the key anymore. So she went home.
Work was actually the worst.
Every day Cady drove in from her stupid, boring Redmond apartment to sit at her desk and do pointless, boring work on projects that she didn't care about. Her friends were still there, but except for Damian they were all really Regina's friends, and Regina got them in the break up. Gretchen still spoke to her, they even kept floating ideas about the start-up, but it felt abstract now, and Cady kind of doubted she was going to actually follow through on it. Shane was still warm and friendly, he was just… busy. She saw him with Regina a lot. Those were really the only times she saw Regina.
The Murmr app was finally being worked on again, but only because the company was planning on shutting it down for good, and needed to make a few last changes to get it ready. Worse, Cady didn't even get to be the one making those changes. Sharon had given the work to Jason Weems, of all people.
Without Regina to invite her to things, Cady stopped having weekend plans. Damian was busy, and anyway, driving in to the city felt wrong, somehow. The one time she'd come in to go to the market, she'd found herself walking home to Regina's apartment, halfway there before she realized the mistake and trudged back to her car.
She tried to start calling Aaron in the nights, but just because her social calendar was suddenly open, it didn't mean his was. They managed a couple dull, awkward calls where she didn't really have much to say before they stopped trying. She started volunteering to cover people's on-call rotations just to have something to fill her out of work time with.
They couldn't even work Thanksgiving out. Thanksgiving had never been a big holiday for Cady, her family didn't celebrate it when she was growing up in Kenya and so they'd never gotten into the habit after moving back. It mattered to Aaron, though. His family hosted a big dinner, and Cady had gone every year since they'd been together. This year, though, with Cady in such a funk, it had taken her a while to get around to planning her trip back, especially with Aaron being slow to reply with details. By the time she'd gone to book her flight, it was only a few weeks out, and the cost of a ticket was ridiculous. Aaron had been a little huffy, but hadn't pushed back too much before saying that it was better to just save the money and see each other at Christmas.
She was moping about it at her desk when she received a meeting invite. From Regina. She sat up.
'Friendsgiving - Saturday 2pm @ Regina's Apartment'
For a moment, she felt lighter than she had in a month. Regina had heard she was going to be alone, and she was reaching out. Then she fell back into resentment. Cady had been alone for the last month, while Regina had been surrounded by friends. It was Regina's fault they were fighting to begin with, because she put her crush ahead of their friendship. And then all she could manage to apologize was a meeting invite? She couldn't even come down here and talk to Cady? Fuck her.
Cady hit 'Decline.'
She spent Thanksgiving covering Kevin's on-call.
Just after Thanksgiving, she had another call with Aaron. It had been hard to schedule, but Cady was lonely, and she just wanted to talk to him.
He had his phone set up in the garage so he could talk while he did his weightlifting for the day. And honestly, Cady did appreciate the view, but she kind of wanted his full attention. As it was, he seemed distracted by more than just his workout.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, finally.
He reracked the bar for his bench press and wiped the sweat away with a towel. "I've been thinking," he said. "This start-up thing you've been talking about. I don't think it's a good idea."
She furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?"
"I mean it's risky and you're not really a risk taker. This job has been good for you, Cady. It's, like, stable. Reliable. Structured. That's the kind of environment you thrive in." He started to adjust the weight for his next set. "Now that you've got this on your resume, maybe you can find a real job back here instead of doing start-up stuff."
That made her scowl. "Start-up stuff is real work, Aaron. My work made Murmr worth eight figures."
He rolled his eyes. "You were one person out of like twenty, Cady."
"Thirteen," she protested. "And if you paid attention to what I do, you'd know—"
"I'm not saying you're not a good coder," he interrupted. "I'm just saying, you should get something stable. There's plenty of good companies here. Don't waste your payout on trying to do some start-up thing, that's not you."
Cady clenched her jaw. "How do you know it's not me? I've never tried it."
"And I've never tried ballet, but I know it's not for me, Cady. Come on, I'm not being mean, I just know you."
"I'm not really sure you do."
He glanced at her and made a face. "Don't be dramatic, come on. I just don't want you to waste our money on some weird idea you picked up while you were away. We already have plans for what we're doing with it."
Our money. The thought sent a spike of frustration through her. It had been her work at Murmr, which Aaron was still downplaying, and her time here at Nile that was getting them that money. Now Aaron was planning how to spend it while he enjoyed their life in Chicago. A life that Cady was increasingly unsure she even wanted to go back to.
"What if I stayed her a little longer?" she said. "Since you think this job is so good for me."
He was about to unrack the bar as she said it, and he stopped and rolled his eyes at her again. "Can we not fight? I'm just giving you advice."
"And I'm trying to take that advice," she snapped.
"Okay," he sighed. "You're kind of being a bitch, Cady."
The words hit her hard, and all at once it put everything into perspective. The way that she'd felt like she was a burden on Aaron every time she'd asked for his attention. The way her friends here had made her feel seen and interesting in a way that was new and exciting and depressingly unfamiliar. The way Regina had made her feel cared for like she never had before, even though she'd had a real partner for years. She deserved more.
"Aaron, if you can't support me in what I want to do, then maybe this isn't working out."
His face shifted from irritation to anger, and he glared at the phone. "Are you serious?"
"I'm serious that I think my partner should support me," she said.
"I'd support you if you were making good decisions," he spat. "But you know what, you're right. One thing long distance has made really clear is that I don't actually miss you that much. Maybe we should take a break."
Her heart dropped into her stomach. She'd expected an apology, or at least an argument. She certainly hadn't expected Aaron to just give up on them. But somehow she wasn't that surprised. Maybe she had known that this was over. Maybe it had been over for a long time.
"No need," she replied, finally. "I think we're done, Aaron."
"Cady," he drawled, like he was scolding a child.
"Goodbye," she said, and ended the call.
It was a couple of days later that Gretchen came over to her desk and leaned over the pod wall. "Hey," she said, and pursed her lips. "Cady, I heard about your boyfriend, I'm so sorry."
It was a little surprising that she'd heard. Cady had only told Damian, although Damian wasn't exactly a vault when it came to secrets. Still, she definitely hadn't expected him to talk to Gretchen. Since when did they talk?
Cady looked up at her, searched her expression for a moment. They really hadn't spoken all that much since she and Regina had their big fight, but she seemed authentic, and honestly, Cady needed the companionship. "Thanks," she said. "I'll get over it. You know, eventually." She forced a smile. "I thought we were going to get married, but, I guess not."
Gretchen nodded. "Well, Karen and I wanna take you out tonight. We can have a couple of drinks, and you can tell us everything that sucked about him, okay? Our treat."
Which sounded like a great idea, except for one thing. "Just you and Karen?" Cady asked.
The question didn't seem to catch Gretchen off-guard. Instead, she replied, "Unless there's someone else you want us to invite?"
That was an open door. If she asked for Regina, would Regina come? Did she even want to see Regina right now? Stupid question, she wanted to see Regina more than anything else in the world, she just didn't think it was a good idea. Plus, her feelings were still hurt, and she still wanted Regina to come to her first.
"That sounds great," she replied, and Gretchen nodded.
They wound up at a bar a short walk from work, and Cady was a drink and a half in before she realized it was the same bar that Regina and her had been mistaken for a couple in back in September. The thought made her chug the rest of her drink and order another.
Karen was great at getting her to open up, gently prodding at Cady's anecdotes about Aaron for details. Before she knew it, she was quite drunk and going on about how boring Aaron's friends were, and how great Gretchen and Karen were, and how stupid football is.
"I didn't even like going," she said, waving her glass. "Even though some of the guys were hot. But like, they've got so much padding on, you can't even tell if they're hot. Like, at least the girlfriends of baseball players get to look at butts, you know?"
"Totally," Gretchen agreed. "Well, you're single now, you can look at all the butts you want."
Cady nodded seriously, looking Gretchen in the eyes. "Gretch. I'm gonna look at so many butts." She sipped her drink. "And I'm not gonna hang out with any of his dumb friends. You're my friends, and, like, you're actually my friends, not my boyfriend's friends. You, like, look out for me even when we're not talking that much." She paused for a moment and furrowed her brow. "How'd you even know we broke up?"
"Oh," Karen said, and Gretchen was suddenly waving at her to shut up. But of course, Karen didn't notice. "Regina told us."
"Karen!" Gretchen hissed. Then she turned to Cady, "You cannot tell her that we told you that she told us to take you out to celebrate getting rid of your lame boyfriend, okay?" She sat rigid. "We're sworn to secrecy."
Cady blinked, and felt her face starting to get warm. "Right," she said. "I won't tell her... that."
But Regina had wanted to make sure she had friends with her for this. Despite their fight, she really did still care. And, yeah, of course she was happy Cady wasn't with Aaron anymore. Wait, did this change things between them? She felt herself blushing harder at the thought. She was single, right?
"Maybe I should talk to her, though," she said.
"You should!" Karen gasped.
"When you're sober," Gretchen added with a warning tone.
Cady shook her head. "I can express myself perfectly fine right now. I can talk to her." She reached for her phone.
Gretchen snatched it from her hand. "Cady," she said, "Gina's still kind of sensitive, and maybe you don't want to say the wrong thing. We really want you two to talk again—"
"She's sulking about you all the time!" Karen rolled her eyes.
"Right," Gretchen said through clenched teeth. "Anyway, we'd love for you to talk, but, it just needs to be done carefully, okay?"
Cady frowned. But she could tell Gretchen wasn't going to give her phone back until she agreed. "Okay," she conceded. "I'll grab an uber home, sleep it off, and I can talk to her tomorrow, okay?"
"Good," Gretchen replied, nodding in relief. They grabbed the bill and stayed and watched until Cady called a cab and got in.
Of course, they had no idea that Cady had called the cab to take her the ten blocks to Regina's apartment.
The concierge recognized Cady immediately and let her in. "Forget your keys?" he asked.
"Mhm," Cady slurred. "Been out and left 'em somewhere, but I'll get 'em tomorrow. Thanks." She made her way up to Regina's apartment, and before she could think better of it she started knocking.
It took a few moments for Regina to come to the door, and she opened it with a scowl. When she saw Cady, that faded into a nervous tension. "It's late, Cady."
"I know," Cady said. "But you work late, so, if I want you to be home, I have to come late, so, it's your fault."
That tipped Regina off that Cady had been drinking. She opened the door the rest of the way, just dressed in casual sweats and with her hair up. "Come in." She turned and headed for the kitchen.
Cady followed, kicking off her shoes by the door. It felt weird to be here again, even though it had basically been home for so long. She took a moment to look around, like it would be different somehow. Changed by her absence.
She felt a hand gently touch her upper arm, and then Regina was there pushing a glass of water into her hand. "You're gonna be hungover," she chided.
"I had water at the bar," Cady said defensively. "I can take care of myself, you know."
Regina stared at her for a second. "Okay." She gave a slow, measured exhale. "Why are you here, Cady?"
"Cuz I wanna talk to you, and you're avoiding me." She scowled and rage-sipped her water.
"You ended our friendship, Cady, remember?" She sighed and walked over to the couch, sitting with her legs pulled tight, back to one of the arms.
"Yeah, but I didn't want to," Cady protested. "You just…" She made another face and took the opposite side of the couch. Slowly, the indignation left her and she deflated. "You hurt my feelings, and I wanted to hurt yours. I'm sorry."
Regina nodded. "Well, you did." She turned her focus to her sweatpants, picking lightly at some fuzz.
Cady sipped at her water as she tried to figure out the right thing to say to make everything better. It felt like there must be something, but she'd kind of expected the 'I'm sorry' to do it and wasn't sure how to proceed now. Finally, she settled on, "You heard about Aaron."
Another nod. Regina had progressed to picking fuzz off her sock, now. "I'm sorry, Cady. That really sucks, he's an asshole and you deserve better." Her voice was flat, measured, distant, but not insincere.
The distance was eating at Cady. Emotionally and physically. She scooched a little closer on the couch. "Is it bad if I'm a little relieved? We had this whole life, and I liked it, but we'd been together since high school, and being here…" She sighed and took a long drink. "Not this last month, this last month sucked a lot. But the rest of the time, it was so nice and exciting and different, and I just feel like… I don't even know what I like, you know? I've just been doing the obvious thing in front of me forever. And if I was just gonna go back to my old life, then I'd never figure out, like, me."
That got Regina to finally look up at her. Her face was still tense, but her expression softened. "If I was dating your boyfriend and we broke up, I'd be relieved too."
Cady laughed. "Yeah, but you're super gay."
"I am aware, Cady." She rolled her eyes and grinned.
That seemed to let some of the tension out, so Cady put her cup down and wiggled closer again. She smiled at Regina, soft and hopeful. "I honestly don't know if he even liked me very much. There's like so many things I did he didn't like. I don't really know what he did like."
Regina smirked. "He's a guy. I can guess."
Then it was Cady's turn to roll her eyes. "The sex wasn't even that good, I was like, more consistent solo. Like, my rate of orgasms didn't really go down when we went long distance."
"Leave it to you to track the metrics for it," Regina teased. She was smiling now, relaxing a little back into her spot.
Cady lifted her feet up and bumped her knee against Regina's. It was the kind of casual touch that she would have taken completely for granted just weeks ago, and now it felt like bridging a huge gap. "What gets measured gets managed, Gi."
The soft laugh that escaped Regina's chest was basically musical. She bumped her knee back. "So your orgasms get managed?"
"Sadly, no," Cady declared, and slumped a little onto her side, so she was almost side to side with Regina. Their legs were just touching now, but there was still space between them otherwise. Not forcing the sort of cuddles that they used to have. "But if I had actually tracked it, maybe." She gasped. "I could make a spreadsheet."
"You could make, like, a whole dashboard," Regina said. She still made no move toward Cady, but she wasn't retreating either. Her posture was comfortable, easy and relaxed, letting Cady into her space again. "Graphs, issue lists. You could set up some alarms so if your rate of getting off ever falls too low, your partner gets paged."
"Oh my god," Cady laughed. "A severity-1 'fuck me' event."
"All hands on deck," Regina winked.
And that wink… that wink was trouble. Because Cady had been missing Regina for weeks, and now she was drunk, and they were close, and Cady was single, and Regina was still the prettiest girl that Cady had ever seen, and Cady knew Regina wanted her. So that wink was giving her feelings. She tried to hide her blush and sunk further down on the couch, side to side with Regina now. "Fuck me like Duvall is waiting on a status update," she quipped.
"Oh god," Regina laughed. "Like you're not cumming and he sends one of those emails with just a question mark."
"Do you think he sends emails like that to his wife?" She tilted her head to look over at Regina. She'd already taken her makeup off, so it was just her, soft and pretty and comfortable, a few blonde strands loose from her bun framing her face. "Like the milk got put back in the fridge empty and she just get a question mark email?"
Regina glanced back and smirked, wiggling to get comfortable, settling in closer to Cady. "He's divorced. He's actually, like, the most divorced a man has ever been. Blazing new trails of divorcedness."
"Hm, we finally have something in common."
Regina scrunched her nose up at that, still looking at Cady fondly. "You're not divorced, Cads. You're free."
"Yeah." Cady smiled. "Free to figure myself out."
"Exactly," Regina said, and poked her nose.
Then Cady's hand was toying with the bottom of Regina's sweatshirt, and she looked over at her. Her lips looked so soft and pink, her eyes warm and focused on her. All at once, she missed her touch so much she couldn't stand it. "You could, maybe, help me figure myself out?" She offered as she started to lean in.
Regina bolted out of the couch so fast that Cady fell onto her stomach. "Cady, what the fuck?"
Cady blinked in confusion, trying to pull herself into a more dignified position. "But… you want me," she blurted, suddenly wishing she was very much less drunk.
"And you thought you'd cash that in for a rebound fuck? Jesus Christ, Cady." Regina was wide-eyed, now, looking at Cady like she'd just stabbed her.
Embarrassment flushed through Cady's body. "I just thought…" It felt unfair, and she didn't want to feel like this, and she was drunk enough that her mouth was moving on its own. "I never said it was just a rebound fuck. What do you want, Gina? You're mad at me when you're not allowed to fuck me, and now you're mad at me when you are?"
Regina's face paled, and she folded her arms tightly across her chest. "Leave, Cady."
"Just explain to me—"
"Get out!" Regina screamed.
Cady blinked at her, tried to swallow the lump in her throat. But the way Regina was shaking in place, eyes averted and face all red, said this was fucked beyond saving. She stumbled to her feet and staggered to the door.
She glanced back once from the entryway. Regina was pacing, face in her hands. From the way her shoulders shook, Cady could tell that she was crying. But, fuck, Cady just couldn't stop making it worse. So she left.
Cady woke to regret. It was about five percent her hangover, and ninety-five percent the knowledge of what she'd done the night before.
It was just that she'd really missed Regina, and she'd really wanted to apologize. And then she'd really, really wanted to kiss her. Now, in the cold, sober light of the morning…
She still really, really wanted to kiss her.
That should have been a surprise, right? Like, because Cady was straight? But somehow it didn't feel like new information. Actually, it felt like maybe Cady had wanted to kiss Regina for a long time. Definitely longer than she should have. And maybe part of the reason she'd been so careless about encouraging Regina's crush on her was because, deep down, she wanted Regina to feel that way.
Last night had not been the right way to go about it, though. Regina deserved some big fairy tale moment, and a sober Cady that was able to really tell her how she felt. Instead, she'd made her feel like a convenient rebound, and a chance to experiment. And that had already been her second chance. She probably wouldn't get a third.
It was kind of all she could think about, though, and she was still in her head obsessing about it by Monday, when she was in her design meeting with Gretchen and Shane. Shane was in the middle of talking about the new project requirements, when Cady interrupted him.
"I need your help," she blurted. "Both of you."
Shane glanced over at her from the whiteboard with a confused look. "With the design, or…?"
"I messed up," Cady said, "with Regina."
Gretchen tensed up and gave her a disappointed look. "Please tell me you didn't go see her on Friday."
Cady stared down at her laptop. "I… maybe… went to her apartment."
"Cady!"
"Well, I wanted to talk to her!" Cady whined. "And then I… tried to kiss her."
Shane's face brightened and he went for a high five. "Dude, that's awesome! She's wanted to kiss you for like, months, bro."
Gretchen glared at him. "Not awesome, Shane! She totally made Gina feel like a creep and they fought and haven't been talking. And now she went over there, drunk and on the rebound, and tried to kiss her!"
"Oh," Shane said. He furrowed his brow as he thought it through. "Yeah, maybe not the right play there, Cay-cay."
"I know," Cady moped, and slammed her head onto the conference room table. "I just really missed her, and I wasn't thinking clearly."
"So that's why you tried to kiss her?" Shane asked.
Cady hesitated for a second, head still down on the table. "No," she admitted. "Because now I am thinking clearly and I still want to kiss her."
Gretchen went wide-eyed, and Shane said, "Duuuuude. That's awesome." He grinned big and wide. "So you need our help winning her back. Ten Things I Hate About You style."
She glanced up at Gretchen, whose brow was furrowed and her lips pursed uncertainly. Cady knew if she couldn't win Gretchen over, she had no shot with Regina. "I… I think I just want her to know that I have real feelings for her. That I did it wrong, and I'm, like, so bad at this, but I didn't just want her to be a rebound or a casual hookup." She sighed. "But I don't think she wants to talk to me right now."
The room was quiet, Shane looking between the two women with nervous excitement. Gretchen fussed at her nails as she thought, and then finally she said, "Okay. I'll help. But this is the last time. If you hurt her again, you're cut off. That's, like, the rules of feminism."
Cady breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay. So, what do you think I should do?"
That, Gretchen was less sure about. She chewed her lip in thought for a moment, until eventually Shane chimed in. "Look, normally, I would totally say that big romantic gestures don't fix problems. You gotta, like, address the structural issues to work toward a healthy relationship. But since it was a big stupid gesture that messed up your really good relationship, I think this one time, maybe, a big romantic gesture would put you back to squaresies."
"That… kind of makes sense," Cady admitted. "But what do I do? I keep trying to think of things she wants, but," she paused, a slight blush creeping across her cheeks. "The whole time I've known her, I feel like the only thing I was ever sure she wanted was to spend time with me, and now I messed that up, so I don't know what to do."
Shane nodded. "True, she kinda just works, shops, and spends time with y'all. And she's got enough money to do all the shopping she wants, so that's no good, either."
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room as they all thought.
"Jason," Gretchen said suddenly. She looked nervous, coiled up in her chair, but she spoke clearly. "She's wanted Jason dealt with ever since you told her what he said about me."
There was something to that, for sure. Cady's brain was working now. "But how? I can't just go to HR, right?"
"Don't think that would help," Shane agreed. "If HR took action on every dude who was a shitty creep, this place would look totally different. Trust me. I know what dudes say when there are no ladies present, before they learn that I don't stand for that shit."
"And it's not like I can get him fired for being bad at his job," Cady said. "If that was gonna happen, he'd be gone by now."
But that made Shane shrug. "I mean, Sharon's totally trying to get rid of him. It just takes a lot of bad performance reviews before you can actually boot someone. But she's already laying the groundwork, y'know? One big fuck up might do the trick."
"So how do we make him mess up?" Gretchen asked. "What's he even working on right now?"
Cady sighed miserably. "He's working on my old app, Murmr, getting it ready for shut down. They're adding in the ability to download all your messages before it goes away. Which should take like two days, but he's been working on it for weeks." She paused. "Gretch, are you really okay with us going after him? You're the one he was shitty to."
Gretchen shrugged. "I think… it would mean a lot to Gina, and I want you two to make up." Then she smiled a little, and added, "And, okay, maybe Jason Weems can eat a dick."
"Okay," Cady said. "I think… I have an idea." She looked to Gretchen. "The GPL."
It took a second for Gretchen to process that, and then her jaw dropped. "Oh, that is so fetch."
Shane nodded. "Yeah, totally. What is that?"
Cady looked over at him. "Okay, we use a lot of open source code, right? Publicly available, free to use. The whole internet runs on it. But we have to be super careful about what open source code we use as a company, because sometimes the license the code is provided under comes with strings attached. If we use the wrong code, we could get sued, or worse."
Another nod from Shane.
"The GPL is the 'or worse,'" Gretchen explained. "It's an open source code license, but it's viral. Basically, anything that uses GPL code also has to be released under the GPL, too. If we —if Jason— accidentally uses GPL code anywhere in the app, then, like, all the code for the entire app has to be released to the public, open and free for anyone to use."
Shane blinked. "That… would be a hell of a fuck up." He grinned, but then shook his head. "But there's gotta be reviews and stuff. No way one person can mess up that bad unchecked."
"It's an end-of-life app getting a few last changes," Cady said. "So no big design reviews or anything. It just has to pass code review. And the person doing the code reviews for Murmr," she paused for dramatic effect, "is me."
Gretchen shot her a tense look. "You'll get in a lot of trouble, too, Cady."
Cady just shrugged. "I'm quitting in a month and a half."
Then Shane was smiling again, all thought of their real work put aside in favour of getting Jason fired and getting Cady another shot with Regina. "So. What's our plan?"
The pod was almost empty, Tim and Kevin having been called into a meeting with Shane. Only Cady and Jason were still there working. From the next pod over, Gretchen's keyboard was clacking softly as she worked, the only real sound around. Cady wheeled her chair over to Jason's and kicked the bottom to get his attention. He slid one headphone off.
"Sup?"
"Hey," she said, batting her eyelashes and putting on her ditziest voice. "Were you in the budget app design meeting?"
Jason blinked and then nodded. "Yeah."
"I totally don't get the schema design," she said.
"Oh." He gave her a cocky smile. "It's simple, it's, like, a relational database."
Wrong.
She leaned in a little closer, eyes wide, nodding like he was the smartest guy in the world. "Like a KV store?" Cady asked.
"Yeah," he nodded.
Completely wrong.
Cady tilted her head toward a nearby empty conference room. "I still don't really get it. Could you whiteboard it for me?"
He glanced over at the room, and then back at his computer, where he was browsing reddit in a dozen tabs. Moment of truth. Jason had the bad habit of not locking his computer when he stepped away. But if for some reason he locked it this one time, the whole plan fell apart.
"Sure," he said, grinning again, and walked over to the room with her without touching his keyboard. Relief flooded through Cady, and she shot Gretchen a quick look as they headed in. Gretchen nodded back. Now all she needed to do was keep Jason talking while Gretchen made the changes. Fortunately for Cady, Jason loved to hear himself talk.
Unfortunately for her, he still worked extremely slowly, and Cady had to wait nervously to see if he'd notice the change for another week. But, finally, the code review was posted, and she checked the compression library he'd used. Sure enough, the swap Gretchen had made was in place. The license file was as clear as day. GPL version 2. Trap sprung.
Cady would have to be an idiot to miss it. Honestly, it was extremely sloppy of Jason to have missed it before sending the code review out. So, really, hey, this was his fault.
"Looks good to me," Cady commented. "Ship it."
It was Cady's first time at a Correction of Errors meeting, and she was very happy that it would be the last. Sharon had told her that the point of the meeting wasn't to assign blame, it was to prevent the same mistake from happening again in the future. She wasn't sure the people running the meeting had gotten that message.
Still, after an hour of getting yelled at while pretending to be a ditz who had just trusted Jason so much she hadn't checked, she was finally dismissed from the meeting. She crammed her things into her laptop bag before anyone could change their mind, and bolted.
Regina was waiting outside the room, leaning against the wall in a chunky sweater and some very tight jeans, with two coffees in hand. Her hair was up in a bun that Cady knew from past observation Regina had spent a long time getting just the right amount of messy. She looked soft and sexy and gorgeous, and she was smiling a wry smile at Cady.
"Wow, Cads," she said. "Quite a fuck up. I can't believe you got sloppy and now the encryption code you worked so hard on, which was going to sit and rot in our source control, is suddenly free and public for anyone to use. You must be so heartbroken."
She held out one of the cups for Cady.
Cady took it, her fingers just gently brushing Regina's as she did, sending a little spark of excitement up her arm. "Yeah," she said. "And I'm really sad for Jason. It was kind of his mistake, and I think this might actually be a career-limiting slip up."
"Tragic," Regina agreed. Her smile softened a little. "I mean, really, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."
Cady sipped at her coffee, let the warmth and the presence of Regina soothe her frazzled nerves, a little. She dropped the performance from her voice, and when she spoke again, it was quieter. "I'm so sorry about the last time we talked, Regina. You deserved so much better than that." She scanned Regina's face and spoke carefully. "I was so eager to talk to you again that I just… got really stupid. It was the wrong way to tell you that I have feelings for you."
She'd been looking away awkwardly through the apology, but at that, her eyes shot back to Cady. There was a trepidation in her expression, a little doubt in her eyes. "Oh," she breathed. "I… you do?"
Cady nodded earnestly. "I think… kind of for a long time." A soft gulp. "I didn't really recognize what my feelings were, because I didn't think I could feel that way about a girl. So I wouldn't let myself. But eventually I just couldn't deny it anymore. Gina, you're so good to me, and fun, and smart, and you're, like, so hot, oh my god, and—"
The doors to the conference room slammed open and Jason stormed out, finally dismissed as well. "This is bullshit!" he snarled, and then he noticed Regina and glared. "What, did you come down to be extra bitchy?"
Startled out of the moment she'd been sharing with Cady, Regina glanced over to him and gave him a saccharine smile. "Actually, I was just here to say my goodbyes. Cady gave her notice."
Jason looked at her in surprise, then shook his head. "Wow. Good idea, I should get the hell out of this dump. Go somewhere I don't have to deal with PMs who are on the rag."
Regina just held that smile. "Well, I hear Alpha's hiring." She shot a quick glance to Cady. She hesitated for just a second, clearly not sure how to proceed with Jason right there. Finally, she seemed to decide. "I'll see you at your goodbye party," she said, and turned to head off.
"Okay," Cady replied, watching her go with a yearning weight in her stomach, staring until she was fully gone.
Ugh. Leave it to Jason to find a way to ruin her big romantic confession. Still, Regina had said she'd see her at the party. That wasn't no. A little spark of hope ran up her spine, and she smiled to herself.
A week before her last day, the meeting invite to her GTFO party had updated with details. The guest list was thorough, including basically everyone Cady liked at the company, and nobody she didn't. (Cady would have felt obligated to invite some of the people she didn't really like, but Regina clearly did not share her delicacy.)
And it had a location now: the Seattle Aquarium. Regina had taken her there once, apologizing that it wasn't exactly a zoo, but Cady had been delighted. She loved any animals, not just the ones she'd grown up around, and the aquarium had not disappointed.
The idea made her blush. It couldn't have been cheap to rent the place out. It was kind of a big gesture from someone she technically wasn't really talking to.
On her last day, she gathered up her things, made the rounds saying goodbye to people, and took one last look at Nile. Despite everything, it hadn't sucked. There were even parts she was going to miss. The pay, for example. But now she was more than ready for the next thing.
She turned in her employee badge, and then she took her bag into one of the bathrooms and changed from her work clothes into something more party appropriate: a pretty navy blue dress that Regina hadn't seen before, that Cady had picked up from one of those local designers she was always going on about. It showed a lot of back, and Cady was a little self-conscious about it, but the designer had assured her she looked great in it. And Cady definitely didn't have any expectations about the evening, but still, she wore her prettiest underwear. Just in case.
She drove to the aquarium and headed in. The little event space Regina had rented was under a glass dome beneath the water, little tables of hors d'oeuvres and drinks under the sea. Marine life swam all around, and the floor was patterned with refracted light.
"Oh my god," Damian called out as she stepped in, and rushed over to give her a hug. "I can't believe you're actually leaving. Who's going to do the work now?"
Cady laughed and smiled. "They'll figure it out."
Janis was lingering behind him, but stepped around to give her a hug, too. "Totally not fair you're going, you're like one of five people there I don't hate."
"Well, if you ever start making coffee some place I don't need an employee badge to get to, I'll be there." And then, with a hopeful little smile, "Or an art show?"
That made Janis look away self-consciously, but she nodded. "I'm working on some stuff. It might happen. By the summer, I think, no promises."
"That's awesome," Cady grinned. "I can't wai—" Then she was yelping as she was picked up from behind and spun around. "Shane!" she shrieked and giggled.
He set her down and ruffled her hair. "Cady-plus-plus! I'm so sad you're leaving, dude. I'm gonna miss you." He paused and looked her over. "Also, yeah, this is definitely gonna get the job done."
Damian and Janis glanced at each other as he said that, and Cady ignored them, as well as the blush forming on her cheeks.
"I'm going to miss you, too," she told Shane. "I think you might actually be my biggest fan."
"Second biggest," Shane assured her. "But I haven't seen the biggest around, yet."
Cady bit her lip and then spotted Gretchen and Karen, heading over to talk to them before Damian or Janis could ask her what Shane had been talking about.
It was amazing seeing everyone, and she tried to relax and not watch the clock. But an hour after the party started, without any sign of Regina, she was starting to wonder if this was just a goodbye gift, and Regina didn't have any plans to show up herself after all.
Then she felt a gentle tap on her shoulder and turned.
Regina had clearly rushed there from work, still in a pencil skirt and white blouse, her makeup and hair a little less than perfect in the way that Cady secretly loved. Her eyes roamed up and down Cady as she turned, and her cheeks went a little pink. "Well, for once, I feel under-dressed."
"You came," Cady breathed.
That made Regina laugh. "Did you think I'd skip the party I planned?" She shook her head. "I got pulled into— it's not important, I'm sorry I'm late."
But Cady shook her head. "It's okay, I'm just glad you're here. I— if I didn't get to see you again, I would've been really sad."
Regina nodded. "Are you going back to Chicago?"
"Not right away," Cady said. "I like it here, I thought I might stay for a little while, see what happens. I was… there were some things I was hoping might happen. Y'know, if I stayed."
The words brought the pink back to Regina's cheeks. "Oh yeah?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Mhm." Cady stepped a little closer, eyes darting between Regina's lips and her eyes. "I kinda messed something up really badly, but as I recently learned in a very scary meeting, it's not about assigning blame, it's about making sure the same mistake doesn't happen again."
Regina nodded thoughtfully. "I see. So how do you plan on doing that?"
"Well, my key action items, I think, are, one, get my head out of my ass, two, be honest with myself about my feelings, and three, make sure that the person I care about always knows how important she is to me."
It was hard to read Regina's expression, a little tense and very focused. Her lips formed a thin line, and her eyes never strayed from Cady. "Hm. I think you're missing one important step."
Cady blinked. "What's that?"
Regina tilted her head just slightly. "You gotta kiss the girl, Cads."
"Oh." The word fell out of her like a breath, and the rest of the party faded away. Regina was there, in front of her, soft and beautiful and she was giving her the chance. Cady stepped a little closer, eyes focused on pink lips while her heart throbbed in her chest. The distance between them got shorter and shorter, and then Cady pressed onto her toes and—
There had been a little part of Cady that was afraid she was wrong about her feelings. She'd always thought of herself as straight, and she hadn't been able to shake the idea that when she kissed Regina, it wouldn't feel right, and she'd realize she really was straight after all. Then she'd have to hurt Regina all over again.
All that doubt disappeared the second she felt Regina's lips. Cady may have been bad at knowing what she wanted, but she was absolutely sure she wanted this. Her hands moved without her thinking about it, reaching up to stoke Regina's neck and thread into her hair, holding her close. She felt Regina's hands move over her sides to her back, felt Regina's sharp inhale as she touched the bare skin of Cady's back.
The kisses flowed in to one another, mouths shifting just slightly, until Cady sucked Regina's lower lip between hers and Regina's fingers clutched her in response. Cady pressed her body against Regina's. They'd spent so much time, so many nights, cuddled up together that their bodies knew each other instinctively, knew how they fit. But it was so different this time, and Cady was on fire with excitement and anticipation and want.
Everything had her senses buzzing. Regina's warmth, Regina's scent, Regina's lips, softer than Cady could have even imagined. Cady's fears of not wanting this were replaced with a fear that if this didn't work out, no one else's kisses could ever compare. She felt the gentlest little touch of Regina's tongue, still worried about doing too much, still focused on Cady's comfort. But Cady wanted it, wanted it so badly she could scream. Then just before she could meet it with her own tongue, she heard a clear voice from behind her.
"Oh, come on." Cady didn't need to turn her head to recognize Janis' voice. "Caddy, I thought you were better than this."
Regina pursed her lips in frustration, but her cheeks were flushed and her pupils were dilated, and she really didn't seem all that mad. Her arms were still wrapped around Cady, anyway. "Thanks for your contribution, Jan," she called.
Cady let herself fall back onto flat feet, breathing deep and feeling like she was floating. She bit her lip and giggled, smiling so hard against Regina's lips. "Can we pick that back up later?"
Fingertips trailed over her back, and Regina exhaled softly. "If we don't, I think I'll die."
That made Cady's heart flutter, and she was sure she was completely red at this point. She let her hands trail back down Regina's neck, to her sides. "Maybe, y'know, since it's closer, I could crash at your place?"
"Wow, so thirsty," Regina teased. But then she bit her lip and looked into Cady's eyes again. "It's been so empty without you, Cady."
"We can fix that," Cady promised, and kissed her again.
Cady was not unsympathetic to the idea of working late. Five months ago, when her start-up had been getting ready to launch the first version of their app, she'd been working nonstop late nights herself. But she did object to the idea of working late when it wasn't important, and she knew full well that Regina's current project could get done today or two weeks from now and it wouldn't make a difference.
So, when eight pm rolled around and Regina still wasn't home, she opened up her spreadsheet and added one to the counter of "Unnecessary late nights," she kept. This was the tenth this month, and that was just unacceptable.
A valuable fact she had learned in her year at Nile was that anyone at Nile could page anyone else, if they really wanted to. Obviously, abusing that fact would be a career-limiting decision, but Cady didn't have a career at Nile.
She pulled out her phone and messaged Shane.
Cady: If I send you a message to page Regina with can you promise not to read it? Or talk to anyone about it ever?
Shane messaged back almost instantly.
Shane: 1 condition. i get 2 b a bridesmaid
Cady: I'm not paging her to propose!
Shane: ur not paging her 2 propose yet
Shane: i gotta get my foot in the door early
Shane: bro im not even asking for maid of honor
Shane: even tho i wld plan a baller bchlrette party
Shane: there'd b beat saber
Shane: just sayin
She laughed softly.
Cady: Fine, deal.
Shane: send me the msg
So she did, and then she checked the clock. Probably she would need five minutes to get her stuff together and get out of the building, plus ten minutes to walk home. Cady crawled into bed and decided on her pose.
Thirteen minutes after she sent the message, Regina strode into the bedroom with a look on her face, ready to rant, and then stopped dead. The sight of Cady lounged out across their bed in pink lingerie took her breath away, and she just stared for a moment.
Then, with an exhausted chuckle, "Did you seriously have Shane page me for a severity-1 'fuck me' event?"
Cady shrugged innocently and batted her eyelashes. "What gets measured gets managed, Gi."
Regina rolled her eyes, but she was already taking her clothes off as she did it. "And what, exactly, is the SLA, here? Because I seem to recall giving you several orgasms like two days ago."
"You did," Cady agreed, blushing and grinning as she watched Regina strip down. "But you never struck me as the sort of person who's content getting 'meets expectations' on your performance review."
"Meets expectations?!" Regina laughed and shook her head. Finally down to just her own underwear, she crawled across the bed toward Cady. "I'll show you performance, baby."
Cady grinned and pulled her close, pressing up against her as she kissed her slow and deep. Then Regina pressed her down into their bed, soft hands gently pulling the lingerie off of her, and made sure the page was well and truly handled.