//Author's Note: Bighuge thanks to ArmyGal33 for her invaluable input, without which this story would not have been possible.//
Rome sank back into her chair, clapping because everyone else was clapping. All around the room, the excitement was tangible. Jim was, of course, going the hardest, and making intermittent eye contact with everyone to reinforce the
this was good, you should be happy
mood that basically everyone but her was already there for. She gave him a smile as she clapped, and that seemed to appease him, but it was a half-effort at best.
"That's a wrap!" Jim said, closing down his laptop and unplugging it from the meeting table. "Thank you, everyone! They seemed pleased!"
"Yeah, that went well!" said Kevin, another of her teammates, as he stood up from his chair. "I don't know if you guys were watching, but one of the guys in the back that came in late was their CEO."
"White shirt, blue tie," Jim said, nodding emphatically. "Yeah. I recognized him too. He was smiling by the end."
"I'm just glad Not Connected didn't pop up," said an older woman, seated across from Rome. Darla was one of the oldest members on the team, and took a practical approach to progress that Rome tried to emulate.
Of course, the Not Connected bug had likely come from Rome's stream, and was entirely her problem to fix, so her affection for the sentiment was muted.
"All we need is for the app to work as advertised, right?"
"That's what patches are for,"
everyone said, together, by rote, as Jim waved his hand in the air like a conductor.
"Hitting a milestone like this," Jim said, taking up his spot at the head of the table, "is good. That was a great demo, everyone. You should all be real proud of yourselves."
At another round of clapping Rome again followed suit, though she felt even more disconnected from the mood. No one was saying it, but it felt like the rest of the room was just happy that her part hadn't made them all look like idiots. She hadn't noticed that tension before, but now that it had been put in front of her she couldn't help feeling it.
"One more thing," Jim said, raising his hands as bodies started moving toward the door, Rome's included. "5 o'clock. TJ's. Nance. Em. Rome? You in? Darla? Kev?"
A chorus of yesses filled the room, but Jim was staring at
her
. She was always the most reluctant to spend her free time with the team. Rome quickly nodded affirmatively, before too much more attention could be trained on her for her reticence, and sighed as she moved out into the hall.
***
TJ's was a popular bar for all the wrong reasons. The drinks were overpriced and watered down. They were proud of the fact that they had over two hundred televisions in the joint, most playing sports of one kind or another; all the advertisements talked about it. No kind of local flavor. She'd never been able to fathom why her coworkers always wanted to go to TJ's, but she thought that maybe, at some point in the future, she'd recommend someplace else first just to have some form of control over the conversation. That seemed doable, if scary, and ultimately worth it.
Rome sat in her car for a full ten minutes once she'd parked. She was sure that, given an infinite universe, there was a bar out there somewhere that would appeal to her. TJ's was not that bar. It was loud, full of visual noise, and distracting.
As much as she wanted to, she couldn't avoid it forever. Poor Mitzy, her long haired cat, would need to fend for herself for a few extra hours.
It wasn't that Rome was anti-social; she just wasn't much of a people person. Given the option to choose for herself, she spent her free time doing solo things. Visiting the art museum, or writing at the coffee shop around the corner. Curling up with coffee on the couch, and binge watching Korean dramas. Drinking coffee.
She could really use a cup of coffee, she realized, as she pushed through the front door. It seemed like too much to hope for that a bar could make a good cup, but if worse came to worse she knew a shop not too far away. She could duck out early...
...and get coffee on her way back to work, to put in a little overtime. Jim would certainly let her go if she used that excuse, no questions asked. It was the
no questions asked
part of this plan that appealed to her much more than the
going back to work
part, but the Not Connected bug loomed in the back of her mind. It really wasn't her fault, per se, but it was her responsibility to fix.
It was the legacy hardware, not that anyone believed her.
She heard her name being called from the back, and saw Jim waving emphatically over the crowded room, so she started heading that way. She ran her hand through her bob, tucking it behind her ear. She was definitely too dressed up for the crowd she passed through, with her button-down blouse and slacks, and found the group in back much larger than she was expecting.
"Rome!" Jim cried, smiling broadly. "Did you take the long way?"
"I guess," she said, nervously eying the faces she didn't recognize. A lot of faces.
"Rome, this is my girlfriend," he said, throwing his arm around the shoulder of a brunette. "Angie, this is the last member of my team. She's sort of a...
sui generis
."
Angie seemed to take Jim's trademark latin insertion with good humor, giving him a rueful smile and shaking her head. Rome only knew what
sui generis
meant because it wasn't the first time Jim had used it, and she'd googled it.
"Babe," she said, giving him an elbow, "come on."
"He means that I do the weird, old stuff," Rome said, "that no one else wants to deal with."
"Oh!" she said, her eyes widening. "Are you the one dealing with those old handheld thingies?"
"Yes she is," Jim said, proudly.
"Jim had some rants about those," she said, giving them both a very genuine smile.
Rome started to get a kind of knot in her gut.
"But that means that if the demo went well, you handled it?"
"There's some kind of lingering reset function," she said, wincing, "in their hardware that isn't documented in what we could find, and something we're doing keeps tripping it."
Angie gave her a patient smile, and when she was done, added, "But the demo went well."
"Yeah," Rome said, nodding and looking down at her shoes. "It did."
"Congratulations."
Jim gave her a meaty clap on the shoulder, which jolted her.
"
So,
" she said, searching for a change of topic, "how long have you two been together?"
"Six months!"
Rome could not hide her slack-jawed reaction, and tried to tug up on the ends of her lips to make shock look like a smile. "Wuh-uh, w-wow!"
"Yeah, sorry," Jim said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, "you kinda missed me saying something about it to everyone else. Today makes six months on the dot."
"We already had something planned with our friends," Angie said, reaching toward her without quite touching her, which Rome appreciated, "but of course, with something like this, the more the merrier."