Chapter 50 - 49 : Stress Test

Chapter 50: Chapter 49 : Stress Test

It was past midnight when the chandelier went dark, one tier at a time. The eight music students packed up their instruments and came over one by one to shake Rhett’s hand. The cellist was last in line, and he hung on after the handshake to ask when the next gig like this was.

The party had broken up by then. Jess had a room booked upstairs at the hotel and the girls were all staying over, so Rhett drove Kelsey back to Santa Monica.

Kelsey kicked off her heels the second she got in and curled up barefoot in the seat, humming under her breath the whole way. She kept coming back to the song from the ballroom.

When they pulled up out front, a doorman started toward her door, and Kelsey waved him off through the glass. He took the hint and stepped back.

She didn’t get out right away. She held her shoes in her lap and turned to him. "The newspaper thing. What are you going to do?"

"I’ve got something." Rhett still had both hands on the wheel. "I’m meeting some people tomorrow morning. If it goes well, by next week the story on TV is going to be a different one."

"And if it doesn’t?"

"Then I come up with something else."

Kelsey nodded and let it go.

The car went quiet. The engine was still running, and the glow off the dash lit half her face. Out front, the revolving door turned twice and stopped.

Kelsey was picking at the thin strap on one of her heels. Then, out of nowhere: "Rhett."

"Yeah?"

"Today..." She looked up at him, then quickly back down. "Today was the best birthday I’ve ever had."

"Technically, it ended forty minutes ago." Rhett tipped his chin at the clock on the dash. "But I can pretend I didn’t see that."

Kelsey laughed out loud, and then the laugh trailed off. She turned to face him, and this time she didn’t look away. It was a small car. There was nothing between them but the center console, close enough that he could hear her breathing. Her lips parted, as if the words were right there and all she needed was one more breath to get them out.

Rhett had something to say too. About tonight, about the song, about her hands shaking while she tied his bow tie. He’d barely opened his mouth when—

Kelsey kissed him.

Rhett froze for a second. He hadn’t seen it coming, not now, and not from her first. But he didn’t pull away either. The girl who’d pressed an energy bar into his hand, who’d read that paper and asked first whether he’d eaten, had already taken up a corner of him somewhere.

She didn’t know what she was doing. Her lips were stiff, her nose bumped his, her fingers had a death grip on the front of his shirt, and she wasn’t breathing.

Rhett brought a hand up to the back of her neck, tilted his head a little, and took it from there. Slower. Softer. Bit by bit her shoulders came down, and the hand fisted in his shirt let go and came to rest flat against his chest.

When they came apart, Kelsey caught his lower lip between her teeth and bit down, lightly.

"Hey." She was red to the ears, but she was glaring at him. "How are you this good at that?"

Before Rhett could come up with an answer, she had the door open and her bare feet on the pavement.

She bent down and looked back in at him. "I’ll wait for you. Till you come pick me up in an Aston Martin."

She carried her shoes in through the revolving door and didn’t look back. Rhett sat there until the door stopped turning, then put the car in gear.

The road back to campus was nearly empty. There was still light under the door of B14.

He pushed it open, and nobody looked up. Sam was hunched over the editing desk in headphones, rough-cutting last week’s footage ahead of tomorrow morning’s promo shoot. Dom was crouched on the floor charging batteries and ticking his way down the shot list. Kevin was writing emails to professors, a list of names running the length of his screen.

Rhett hung his jacket on a chair. His eyes drifted around the room, idly, and paused on the corner.

Claire was at the computer there, numbers scrolling up her screen line after line. She glanced up at him. Her eyes stayed on his bow tie for half a second, then went back to the screen. Nothing showed on her face.

Rhett walked over. "Still testing?"

"Stress test," she said. "Ten thousand concurrent, and it hung for point eight seconds."

"Point eight is plenty for a conference room tomorrow."

"It’s not." Claire pulled up a graph. "The minute Red versus Blue goes public, somebody’s going to run a script at it inside the first hour. The Red Light, Green Light stream got knocked over not long after it started, and that was seventy thousand people. If this one makes the morning news, I’d guess three hundred thousand show up to click on day one. Point eight turns into eight. After eight, the page goes white."

Rhett leaned back against the next desk over. "So what do we do?"

"Split the counting from the accounting." Her fingers never stopped on the keys. "Every click goes into a queue. The front end just adds one and shows it right away. Who clicked and who pays for it, the back end works out at its own pace. Nobody can tell if it’s a few seconds behind." She paused. "It’ll take the rest of the night."

Rhett didn’t ask anything else. He went back to his own desk, opened his laptop and started on the three proposals for tomorrow, one at a time. Around two, Sam and Dom packed up and headed back to the dorms, and Kevin sent his last email and left too. After that, the only sound in the room was two keyboards, one fast and one slow.

Rhett finally swung his chair around. "Tomorrow morning, you’re presenting the button."

Claire’s hands stopped. "I don’t talk to people in suits."

Rhett looked down at his own shirt, then back up. "You’re talking to me right now."

Claire’s fingers started moving again. She didn’t look up. "Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean."

Rhett got up, came over to her desk and braced one hand on the edge of it.

"I mean it," he said. "I don’t know data. I don’t know code. How you split that queue, why it holds up under three hundred thousand clicks, I’d be lucky to follow half of it. If even one of those people tomorrow asks a real question, all I can do is stand there and smile.

"This company can’t have just one person who stands up and talks. This time it’s three sponsors. Later on there’ll be bigger meetings, bigger rooms. Some things, people are only going to believe if they hear them from you."

He paused. "There’s a long way to go after this. I need you there with me."

Claire’s hands stopped again. She looked down at the hand he had braced on the edge of her desk.

Only then did Rhett notice where his hand was, an inch from her keyboard. He drew it back, rubbed it once against his trouser leg and finally pushed it into his pocket. His eyes never left her face.

Half a minute went by. The only sound was the fan in the server.

"Send me tomorrow’s proposals," Claire said, eyes on her screen. "All three. I need to check the numbers in them."

"Oh. Right. Yeah." Rhett went straight back to his laptop and fumbled his email open.

Claire went back to typing.

She’d seen the photos a little after midnight. Balloons around a rooftop pool. A cheering crowd. The back of someone in a black suit leading a girl by the hand toward a stairwell. Somebody in the comments had written, Pelican just kidnapped the birthday girl. The comments kept piling up while she watched.

She’d made up her mind about this a long time ago. She and Rhett were partners. Just partners. He’d never actually asked her anything, but as far as she was concerned, she’d already turned him down.

So the photos had nothing to do with her. She told herself that, scrolled to the bottom of the page, and scrolled back up to the top.

But the bow tie he’d walked in wearing had been tied so neatly.

There was a bitter taste at the back of her throat. She glanced at the coffee on her desk, stone cold for hours, decided that was the problem, and went back to the code.

Rhett got an hour on the couch. When he woke up, the windows were light, and Kevin was sitting across from him with a cup of coffee and a page of names covered in handwriting.

"Professors." Kevin handed him the coffee. "I emailed forty of them last night, and eleven had written back by this morning. Seven yes, three thinking about it. And one sent back a single line."

"Pendelton."

"Pendelton." Kevin nodded. "He said his lecture notes aren’t game-show material. Direct quote."

Rhett took a sip of the coffee and winced at the heat. "Good. Leave him to me."

From the hallway came Mac’s voice, loud enough for the whole building. "Failed three classes? Putting that on the sign is slander! I only failed two!" Then Dom: "Just hold it up. After the shoot I’ll change it to two." Their voices faded off toward the library.

Claire was still at her computer. She pushed the code to the server and ran one last test. Three hundred thousand concurrent clicks. The number kept climbing and didn’t stall once.

She closed the laptop, stood up and took the dark green wool coat off the back of her chair.

"Let’s go," she said to Rhett on the couch. "It’s nine."

There was nobody else in the elevator of the Century City tower. The numbers above the door climbed one floor at a time.

Rhett was still in last night’s suit. It was the only one he owned, and that was the only tie. An hour asleep on a couch had pushed the neat knot off to one side.

Claire kept her eyes straight ahead. "Your tie’s crooked."

Rhett worked at the bow tie with both hands, up, down, and only made it worse. It was a relic Kevin had borrowed from the drama department, one end wider than the other, nothing like anything he’d be wearing to black-tie dinners twenty years from now.

Claire sighed, turned to face him, undid the knot and tied it again. She was fast about it, and her fingers didn’t shake at all. When she was done she gave both ends a tug to even them out.

"You know how to tie one of these?"

"When I was little, I used to do my..." She stopped.

Rhett turned his head to look at her, but Claire was watching the numbers over the door, and she didn’t finish.

Ding. Twenty-eight.

The doors opened. At the end of the hall was a conference room with a glass wall. All three sponsors had come early. Claire held her laptop a little tighter against her chest.

Rhett touched the tie she’d just fixed and stepped out of the elevator.