Trade Me

  And me? I hold my breath. I know these things are supposed to be true constructions, but I also know that Blake won’t tell the real truth. They aren’t going there. They wouldn’t.

  “Which,” Blake says smoothly, “is this: I’m gathering up my dad’s cocaine.”

  Holy fuck. They did. There is dead silence from the crowd. I set my hand on the screen, my head spinning.

  True construct is one thing. This? This is too real. I’m not sure if I’m looking at the truth or a fake. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, and I’m living it.

  “This might be a good time to mention,” Adam says with a growl, “that I have a problem.”

  I don’t even know what to think.

  “So I put all this in the car, my girlfriend drives me to the hospital, and I am distracted by the fact that my dad had a heart attack, and also happens to have a cocaine problem. So I leave, and um.” Blake shrugs. “Yeah. There’s still cocaine in the car. Which wouldn’t be a problem, but she gets pulled over by the cops, who find it. She spends six hours in handcuffs.” He makes a face. “See? I told you not to blame her for breaking up with me.”

  “So it is his fault,” my mother says beside me.

  “That is so not how it went down,” I say to the screen. “Blake, you idiot.”

  “In any event,” Blake says with apparent good cheer, “this leaves me with two choices. First, I can keep quiet, stick around for the launch, hire lawyers, and let my girlfriend take the fall. Or…” Blake shrugs. “I can strike a bargain with the DA to get her out.”

  “Well,” Adam points out, “she did break up with you, so I vote for door number one.” The audience laughs.

  “I kind of think that announcing this on a live stream with—what are we at, David?”

  “A hundred and six million viewers,” Yu puts in.

  “Yeah. I think I’ve kind of shut that door.” Blake smiles. “Jokes aside, there was never any choice about what I was going to do.”

  “There is that,” Adam says softly.

  I have always been confused by Blake’s relationship with his father. It is, in so many ways, not remotely ideal. They swear at each other. They milk their friendship on stage for corporate good will. Blake’s dad put him in a commercial when he wasn’t even two years old. The first time I met Adam Reynolds, he offered me fifty grand to leave his son.

  I told him I’d settle for sixty-six billion. In this moment, I realize that he would take that—that if it came down to it, if the choice was between Blake and his company, between Blake and those sixty-six billion dollars, he’d choose Blake every single time.

  It may be fucked up, but it’s love.

  “But that’s between me and her, not me, her and one hundred and six million viewers,” Blake says.

  “You know,” Adam puts in, “we could make it between you, her, and a hundred and six million viewers.”

  Blake shakes his head. “No. Seriously. This we did not talk about.”

  But Adam just looks up at the ceiling. “If only,” he says with a smirk, “we had made a video-capable smartwatch that could manage robust five-way video calling over a cellular network.”

  “Dad,” Blake says sharply.

  But time has seemed to slow for me. There’s no way I should be able to call in. Their tech automatically blocks all unauthorized calls to devices during the launches. But… Adam is looking calmly at his screen. I feel like he’s looking at me.

  This is a true construct, truer than anything else. It’s a risk, a huge risk. If I make that call, everything will change. Adam Reynolds has just put in his sixty-six billion dollars.

  The only question is if I’m willing to match him.

  Without thinking, I pull up Blake’s contact information on my watch and hit call.

  On my tablet, on the live stream, I see my name show up.

  Incoming call: Tina Chen.

  “Oh wait,” Adam Reynolds says. “We did.”

  And then I’m on screen. There’s a horrible noise.

  “Tina,” Blake says, “turn off the sound on your live stream or there’ll be feedback.”

  I flick the mute on my tablet with shaking hands.

  “This is not scripted,” I say. “I was in jail literally an hour ago. You people are crazy.”

  “That’s not true,” Adam says smoothly. “It was scripted. I just didn’t tell you and Blake about this part. Thanks for playing along. Internet, meet Tina.”

  “Hi.” My voice is shaking a little. “I didn’t get my part, and so I’m going to tell you that Blake is a huge liar.”

  Now that I’m not looking at my tablet, Blake’s face takes up a mere quarter of my watch face. Tiny Blake raises his eyebrows.

  “I broke up with him before I was arrested,” I say. “I broke up with him because I didn’t want to fall in love with him. And before anyone tells me how stupid that is, I want to point out that his family broadcasts everything about them to their hundred and six million viewers. That is really screwed up, if you think about it.”

  “Wait just one minute,” Adam says, sounding wounded. “That’s completely unfair. According to internal statistics, we’re up to a hundred and eleven million viewers right now.”

  “Oh,” I say on a shaky laugh. “Well. That makes everything better.”

  “Tina,” Adam says, “has a little sarcasm problem. She fits in. We’re trying to keep her.”

  “Also,” Blake says, “we don’t broadcast everything on the internet. That’s a myth. I think we may have two or three secrets left. We’re holding those for a later launch.”

  I can’t help but smile. “Still screwed up.”

  Adam smiles. “Welcome to the family, Tina. We may be a little off kilter, but we have the best gadgets.”

  “A little premature, Dad,” Blake says. “We’re still broken up.”

  I take a deep breath. “Maybe we should talk about that,” I say, “when there’s a hundred and eleven million and three fewer people around, give or take.”

  Blake smiles at me. The video is tiny. The sound isn’t great. But that smile…it comes across, even with all those millions of other people watching along. It fills me up.

  “This video interface sucks,” I say. “You’re this small. Do not buy the Vortex, people, not unless you want one of the more romantic moments in your life to be compressed to the size of a sugar cube.”

  “Hey.” Adam frowns. “That is totally uncalled for. Don’t listen to her. Buy it. Buy three.”

  “I’m out.” I hit end, and then unmute the sound on my tablet.

  Blake is smiling and shaking his head.

  “You know,” Adam says thoughtfully, “possibly we should have gotten her in on the script from the start.”

  Blake just smiles. “Ah. That’s one we should talk about later, too.”

  24.

  TINA

  My mother drives me back to the Bay Area. This time, though, we take a proper freeway instead of going through winding mountain roads.

  We don’t say much. Her only commentary on the whole matter is this:

  “If Blake’s dad is so rich, can I make him pay for the gas money I spent to come up here?”

  For months, I worried about precisely this: my mother discovering I have a source who could fund her hobby to an extreme she’s never discovered before. I thought I would be embarrassed. Ha. Adam got me thrown in jail. He owes me.

  “Soak him,” I tell her. “Hell, don’t stop with gas money. You don’t know how rich people think. Make him fund a nonprofit center for you. You can quit your job.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “What, and let that bossy pain-in-my-butt tell me what to do with my time? Ugh. Gas money, and he can pay for my hours today.”

  She doesn’t ask me any other embarrassing questions. She doesn’t make horrible demands. She’s just there for me.

  I look up Cyclone’s press release halfway through the drive. It came out concurrently with our conversation. This release lays out the facts of what
happened last night in startling clarity. It mentions Adam’s cocaine habit and his subsequent heart attack. It says that he’ll be going into rehab.

  There’s more, too. Sometime this morning, the Board of Directors had an emergency meeting. Cyclone will be undergoing a reorganization. The CEO position will be split into three, going forward: a chief product officer, a chairman, and CEO. They don’t say anything about the deal Blake cut with the DA.

  The news is confused. Half of everyone thinks the whole thing is a stunt. The other half doesn’t know what to think. Some law firm is already talking about a derivative shareholder suit, but Cyclone stock is up—way up.

  Still, I’m out of jail. And he’s apparently out, too, since he’s done at least one interview since the launch. It just goes to show: you really can’t trade lives. There’s no way I could have managed that, not even with all Blake’s money. But that realization no longer makes me feel bitter. It just…is. There’s nothing I can do about it. No matter what happens, everything he does will always be easier for him in every way.

  Except when it isn’t.

  I come home to find Maria waiting for me with pad thai.

  “You know,” she says as we spoon food onto our plates, “you may end up the most famous Tina Chen of them all. You could be the first Google result for your name.”

  “Fuck that,” I say. But for the first time in years, I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know what my future holds. All of the things that I had planned, every stepping stone I had imagined… I’m not sure that I actually need them. I don’t know that I’ll do what’s safest.

  I don’t have to anymore.

  9:15 PM

  Hi Tina.

  Sorry this has taken so long.

  The day’s been kind of crazy.

  Can we talk?

  9:15 PM

  Sure. When? Where?

  Don’t take this the wrong way but I kind of want to see you in person.

  9:16 PM

  Is there a wrong way to take that? ;-)

  Meet me here in 45 mins

  He sends GPS coordinates. When I check, they’re a ten-minute walk from his home in the Berkeley Hills. I’m not sure what to say to him. I’m not sure how any of this is going to work. But after I take a quick shower, I go to my closet. Ever since that day in the parking lot long ago, ever since Maria got my favorite sweater dry-cleaned, I’ve been afraid to wear it.

  I’ve been afraid to believe in what it once represented: the hope that maybe today, everything that can go wrong, won’t.

  I’m not afraid any longer.

  I put it on.

  BLAKE

  I’m waiting in the park when Tina walks up. She’s wearing jeans and a white sweater. It catches the light in all this darkness, makes it easy for me to chart her progress up the street.

  I stand. I can’t keep myself from going to her. My heart is pounding; my head feels dry.

  Her hair is dark around her shoulders, cloaking her in the night.

  “Hi, Blake.” She walks toward me. Her head tilts back as I come close, and the light from a streetlamp nearby spills across her face. I want to hold her, touch her.

  “Hi, Tina.”

  She’s the one who reaches for me first. She takes my head in her hands and then pulls me down to her. I wrap her in my arms and kiss her. And for a moment—or maybe an hour—I don’t do anything else. I just hold her close and kiss her in the dark, let our lips, our hands, our bodies melt into each other. They say all the things we could whisper. We kiss and kiss, first, like there’s no tomorrow, and then—when we’ve made our way past that, when our lips and tongues are acquainted once more, we kiss like there is one.

  We end up on a bench.

  From up here, we can see the lights of two bridges, the shimmering skyline of San Francisco against the dark night sky. We see no stars—not a single one—and I like it that way.

  First, there are truths to be exchanged. I gesture south, into the darkness. “There,” I say. “Dad’s still in the hospital down there, and he’s already impatient to be out.”

  “He’s really okay, then?”

  “He’s fine.” I smile, despite myself. “One of the DA’s conditions was that Dad write an op-ed telling people not to do drugs. I read the first draft. I think…the DA will regret that one. But too bad. They already signed off on the deal.”

  “How did you pull that off so swiftly?”

  I sigh. “How do you think? Money. If they agreed to do a deal, we agreed not to contest the seizure of my car. It was basically a six-figure bribe.”

  Tina shuts her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey. You may recall that I left my dad’s cocaine in there in the first place. You have no business apologizing to me.”

  “Yes, I do. It’s just…” She points far out to sea, past the distant lights of an offshore rig, into nothingness. “There,” she says. “Years ago. In China. I remembered early this morning that when I was six, I said something that got my father in trouble. All my life, I’ve been remembering my mother grabbing me, telling me to be careful. And all my life, I’ve remembered what happened when I wasn’t. That’s why I walked away this morning. That’s why I tried to keep you so far away. Love is never safe.”

  I think about my father, still in the hospital. I think about Peter, who I never thought I could lose. I think about Tina checking the electricity bill for her parents.

  “Love is never safe,” Tina repeats. “It’s weird. It’s magical. It’s the moment when you break through the dark shell that protects your heart and say, this, this person. I’m going to let this person in, let him come so close that he can hurt me more than I can possibly imagine. I’m going to let him hurt me.” She inhales. “Love is never safe.”

  “And yet,” I say, “we do it anyway.”

  “We do it anyway.” Her voice is a quiet echo of mine, but her hands close on mine.

  “What do you see now?” she asks.

  From here, we can see the skyscrapers of the city, the lights of the Bay Bridge. Behind it, there’s a dark silhouette—the old decommissioned bridge still being dismantled. We can see the darkness of ocean, and to the north, the scattered lights of the Marin headlands.

  “I’m not sure,” I admit. “I’m not sure what comes next. But whatever it is, I want you with me for it.”

  We’re kissing again, bathed in the light of the streetlamp overhead and the constellations we have yet to name below us. We’re writing our own script. And the light we’re going to build together will drown out every million-year-old star that insists we cannot be.

  Thank you!

  Thank you for reading Trade Me. I hope you enjoyed it.

  Is this the end for Tina and Blake?

  No. You’ll see more of Tina and Blake in the next books in the series. Hold Me is up next, and it will be about Maria Lopez, Tina’s best friend. Find Me, the book after that, will bring you even more of Tina and Blake.

  When will these books release?

  I’m not the fastest writer and I don’t like making promises if I’m not sure I can keep them. I hope that Hold Me will be out in late 2015. If you want to get an email when it’s available, you can sign up for my new release e-mail list at www.courtneymilan.com, follow me on twitter at @courtneymilan, or like my Facebook page at http://facebook.com/courtneymilanauthor.

  I don’t want to wait that long! What can I do in the meantime?

  Luckily, I have written many other books. If you haven’t already done so, you can try my historical romances. I suggest starting with The Duchess War— it’s free on most platforms right now. There’s humor, there’s angst…there are no smartwatches, but in the course of the Brothers Sinister series, you will get primers (they go from A-Z), pretty gowns (and some intentionally hideous ones), pink snapdragons (except there is no such thing as a pink snapdragon), and exclamation points (necessary for proper pronunciation). Give them a try. If you’ve already read all my books, I have a list of recommendations on my web
site.

  I want to know more about the Cyclone Series. Where can I go to do that?

  I maintain a microsite for the Cyclone Series, which contains a handful of extras: more about Cyclone itself, and a biography of Adam and Blake Reynolds. You can find it at http://www.cycloneseries.com.

  Is there anything else you can tell me?

  Many of my historical romance readers already know that if you continue past the end matter, I have author notes and extra stuff. I’m sure some of you are wondering what kind of anti-drug op-ed Adam Reynolds would write. Flip the page, and you’ll find out. If you go past that, you’ll find a short excerpt from Hold Me. I hope you enjoy them both.

  An op-ed by Adam Reynolds

  Don’t Do Drugs

  Hey, kids. Don’t do drugs.

  That’s what I’m supposed to tell you, isn’t it? I’ve already seen myself held up by disapproving pundits as a tarnished example of what might happen to you if you screw up. Kids, don’t do drugs. You might have a heart attack. You might die. Even Adam Reynolds suffered the consequences, so drugs have to be bad.

  The problem with this line of argument is that kids, unlike adults, aren’t stupid.

  Hey kids. Don’t do drugs. You might win the Tour de France seven times in a row. You might make tens of millions of dollars off of endorsements. But—hey—after reigning over the world as undisputed champion for decades, you might suffer a momentary embarrassment on national television when you’re forced to admit the truth.

  So definitely, kids, don’t do drugs.

  Kids, be careful with drugs. They might give you the edge you need to take your company from great to mind-boggling. Between 2004, when I first started using cocaine, and 2015, when I had my heart attack, Cyclone’s market capitalization went from $223 to $413 billion. So kids—beware of drugs; they might make you and your shareholders $190 billion. You might rule the world. You’ll be on the cover of Time.

  But you never know. Late one night, you might experience a momentary crushing pain in your chest, one that decent medical care will soon alleviate.