"God DAMN IT."
I crushed my empty red bull can into my desk and flung it against the brick wall next to me.
"Hey. Rae." Jude's voice was smooth and calming. "Fuck it, we'll get it, don't flip out."
"It's the same god damn exception that I had this morning." I gestured towards the screen. "Null Pointer Exception. It shouldn't be null! There's no reason for it..." I took off my glasses and buried my head in my hands.
Yes, a bit dramatic for work, I am aware. But in these circumstances - 80 hour weeks before deadline and ridiculous amounts of pressure - made my usually professional exterior completely buckle. At this point in the day the sun was beginning to set over the office building, reminding me I was running out of time. You could see the dust particles floating in the air. It was eerily quiet. Our software startup just opened their second location, and the rest of the building wasn't quite leased yet. Exposed air ducts traversed the ceilings, and through the windows of our suite, it was all darkness, particle boards, and discarded power tools. In our office there were two long rows of tables, littered with monitors, keyboards, Star Wars figurines, rubber duckies and other random nerd paraphernalia.
Everyone else had gone for the day, and it was just me and Jude, the cofounder of the company, left in the office, furiously programming. The company's best-paying client was unfortunately the most demanding one - and our deadline was in the morning. Jude and I usually sat with our backs to each other when we worked, but my outburst made him whip suddenly around.
Jude rolled his chair over to my desk and delicately moved aside the graveyard of red bulls and stress-eaten candy wrappers. Unlike me, he had been doing this a long time and never seemed to lose his cool. He reached his arm over mine, our skin lightly touching, as he reached for my mouse.
"Can I drive?"
I nodded and moved over slightly, but not enough to give him the usual amount of pair programming space. My frustration made me need to be close to someone, and the room was just cold enough where I wished I was wearing a sweater. Jude didn't seem to mind...leaned into it even as he deftly searched through my config directory.
Shit, he smelled nice. Like sandalwood.
His eyes narrowed. "This all seems right." He quickly shifted over to my open code editor, and then smiled. "Beautiful methods," he said. "Concise. Much better than they deserve."
I blushed a little. "Thanks."
He started making adjustments, compiling, and testing. But the thing about this code was that it was an ancient monolith - Java that had been written about ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was in high school, blissfully unaware of the horrible trap those developers were laying for me in the future.
I had never really spent time with Jude. My hiring was handled by the overly-enthusiastic HR lady who kept talking about "diversifying the engineering team." I mean, I get it. I was the only female in a development team of 40 men. But I don't like to be constantly reminded of it.
Jude was usually out of town. As the cofounder of our company, he was typically traveling to be onsite with our consulting clients. Jude was taller than average, with vaguely wavy and short black hair, and piercing brown-black eyes to match. The few times I had seen him, he was leaned into his computer screen, always with horrible posture, stroking his black stubble. His skin had a dark tint, with the barest hint of a birthmark on his cheek. I wondered what kind of ethnic background comprised a man as startlingly attractive as Jude.
He didn't speak often - he was the introverted half of the founding team of our software consulting company. James, the sandy-haired, blue-eyed man who signed on new clients, was the charismatic one. James was the energy; Jude was the brains. Both were in their early forties and extremely successful, and to be honest I was too intimidated to approach either of them, even if it was coffee in the break room.
The only thing I really knew about Jude is that he was online at weird hours of the night. As I logged on at 2am, 3am, frantically waking up and realizing I knew the answer to a problem, the only other person that was still in the slack chat room was Jude. All of the other names on my team were dim, with "zzs" to show that they were offline. But night after night, Jude was always there. I could see his name, bolded, at the top, with the glowing green dot affixed to it.
I often wondered if he noticed that I was online too. Did he notice that I was awake? Did he feel the weird tension that I felt? Like the two of us, even though I was in my living room and he was wherever he was...we were up at the same time, alone, with that little slack channel to connect us. It was a tenuous, weird little cosmic space. How did it make him feel to share that space with me, in those quiet hours, while the rest of the world slept?
To be honest, it made me curious. But I don't know. He probably didn't even notice.
"Compiled! Let's give this a shot." We re-ran the code - I used the mouse, he used the keyboard. His leg was cocked a little backward, behind mine, as he leaned in to investigate, and our legs were about an inch away from touching. The code failed, again, and my stomach dropped as I saw the red errors pop into the logs. But then. Wait. For a split second as the stack dump scrolled by, I saw something off.
"Hang on, lemme look at something."
I pulled the keyboard in, pulled up the config files, and searched the entire directory for any instances of a double backslash. BOOM. There it was. In a file path, there was a fucking double backslash referencing the web content. That's why nothing was loading. Nevermind that everything else was set up perfectly, there were no friendly errors to guide us - this code was like a delicately balanced house of cards. One small thing and it all collapses.
Jude exhaled, with a slow whistle. "Nice catch."
I smiled, and dropped my whole body back into my seat in relief. "Ha. Thanks. But fuck. Whole day wasted...due to an extra backslash..."
He laughed. "Welcome to software, my dear."
The term of endearment felt out of place, like he let something slip. It hung in the air for a moment, tenuously.
He cleared his throat. "Ok. Let's get this shit in. And ship it."
"Let's do it. I have one last user story. It should be easy."
"Word," he said, "let me know if you need any help."
He moved back to his desk right behind me, and I zeroed in on my work. But I felt a sense of loss. I wanted to spend more time with him.
I still smelled just a hint of sandalwood lingering in the air.
-
It was late, around 1am, when I felt a warm pair of hands on my neck, massaging. Jude. I stiffened up for a second from the shock and then relaxed into the massage. Damn. He had strong hands, and it felt too good. I felt a lurch in my stomach as I processed the incredibly unprofessional nature of what was currently happening to me. His hands moved down to my shoulders, and his thumb became acquainted with a painful little pressure-filled node.
I moaned a little, involuntarily. Jude seemed to come to his senses and quickly pulled his hands back. I mourned the loss of them immediately.
"Sorry," he said, "Just seeing your posture made my shoulders hurt."
A heavy silence. "It's ok," I said breathlessly, "damn that felt good."
