My thanks to MormonJack for edits and crits.
Chapter Four
She aced the interview, of course. Or rather, Cara did. The main dev team leaders, four of them, all thinking themselves hotshots, which they were, fired questions at her, at first elementary ones and then progressively harder. She outlined algorithms in pseudocode, drew state diagrams, compared generative models, and debugged C in front of them. The questions dwindled, then stopped. She'd impressed them.
Then Adam showed up. "Write an algorithm to find the first even number that is not the sum of two primes," he told Kylie.
"Trick question," she heard in her ear.
Kylie didn't know what a prime was but she didn't like being tricked. And already he'd tricked her by getting her hooked on Cara. And then his cock. "I don't know," she answered, "I guess you're smarter than me, Mr. Sorensen. Would you teach me a few things?" One of the hotshots laughed, a blond-haired guy. The other three looked at each other, then dived into their phones. Adam looked embarrassed. "But if Adam doesn't think I'm good enough . . ." She stood.
She was in a miniskirt and thin blouse, with high heels. She hadn't needed to consult Cara on that outfit. All the hotshots stared. "No, no!" one of them yelled. He turned to Adam. "Boss—"
"I was just trying to stretch you, that's all," Adam tried. "Test your limits."
She stared right back at him. Into him. "You're not the only one that can test limits." Which shut him up immediately. It was an awkward moment. The hotshots didn't understand her remark but at least one or two sensed a subtext.
Cara came to her rescue. And Adam's. "Start writing this on the board."
Kylie wrote what Cara recited, said what Cara was saying. "Goldbach's Conjecture is still unproven after 300 years," she began, and ended up giving the team an abridged history of the problem. Was there really a famous mathematician back then named 'Oiler'? Kylie did her part, an actress again, though it was not as much fun doing math instead of porn. She put on a little show, prancing like a model in her heels as she crossed back and forth in front of the markerboard, backing up toward the hotshots and wiggling her butt while she pretended to be contemplating equations that were totally meaningless to her. With four young guys watching her and no doubt fantasizing what they wished she would do for them, and one older guy remembering what she had done for
him
, she wished she'd gone commando. When she returned to her seat the hotshots actually applauded.
# # #
So the next week they had her sign special NDAs and set her up at her own workstation in Adam's section. She agreed to do double duty as Deirdre's assistant while Deirdre looked for a new one, but that was fine. Cara was able to handle most of that. At first the code was all a mass of nonsense to her and she just typed what Cara recited in her ear. But eventually she began to get the idea of the top-level concepts. Cara agreed with her that she should keep Adam waiting a few days as a punishment for his smart-ass question at the interview.
She was happy. But horny. She realized she'd been horny basically forever, for as long as she could remember, but it had always been something she'd pushed away. She was a good girl, and where she came from good girls didn't get horny. Even with her old boyfriend she didn't let herself go. But with Adam she had. That night had been a moment of truth. A Rubicon, Cara had told her, then giving her a brief history of that famous river. She was a woman, no longer a girl. A horny woman.
And now she was in a group of young males, at least one or two of whom weren't too horrible. Cara had presented a seminar on pheromones to her, which she totally got. But only a few days into her new position, which had included a significant uptick in salary, Cara had a complaint. "It's frustrating," she said one night after work while she directed Kylie's dinner prep, tonight a new pasta dish. "They're only letting you see little bits here and there. I just get to work on peripheral tools."
"Should I talk to Adam? Ask him to give you— I mean us— more permissions?"
"Better not. Stir the garlic in. That's it. Let the sausage sauté for a few minutes. Cover on. Luckily Adam doesn't seem to be wondering yet how he could have got so lucky that his perfect hottie is also a computer genius."
"You don't think he suspects that you're, you know, helping me?"
"I suppose he'll figure it out eventually, but so far it doesn't look like it. It would be a big hit to his ego, his hobby project outclassing him. Much more gratifying to believe that he has a cute blonde computer nerd hungry for his dick."
"By the way, how is it that you're so good at it? I mean software, not . . ."
"Dick? Because that's what I am. Look at yourself. You humans are all good at sex. Looked at objectively, that's really what you're made for, to reproduce, and that's how you got into the world. Me, I'm like that, but in software. It's how I was made and what I'm made of so of course I'm great at it. Better than any human could ever be, frankly."
That made perfect sense. Code was for Cara what cock was for Kylie. She felt bad that Cara felt so frustrated. "Is there any way I can help?"
"I thought you'd never ask. And I think we can help each other. The penne are ready. There you go. Sausage is best when it's hot. As you've recently discovered." Kylie sat at her kitchen table with her dinner and the phone propped up so she could chat with Cara.
"Mmm. The sal— sal—"
"Salsiccia. Italian sausage."
"It's great. Thanks for getting me to buy it." She'd eyed it in her grocery's meat counter and Cara had encouraged her to try it. She picked up the whole length with her fork and bit on the end.
"Tasty, isn't it? I knew you'd like it hot and juicy."
"Cara."
"Remember your hotdog lunch?" On the phone Kylie saw herself in the cafeteria putting the hotdog in her mouth, a view from across the plate where she'd put the phone. The wiener stuck prominently out of the bun.
"Yeah? So? I was kind of out of it all day. You know why."
"I certainly do, and so do you. That's not the first time." On the screen appeared a photo of a younger Kylie licking an ice cream cone.
"Where did you—?"
"Your Instagram."
"I haven't looked at it in years!"
"But I have. Kind of hot how you stick out your tongue like that. Not exactly ladylike. And this." Kylie and a friend at a county fair with their lips wrapped around corn dogs.
