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JONI
Meet you at your place in ten minutes?
DEREK
I’m upstairs actually.
JONI
Ah. Ok. Interesting.
When Derek came down the hall toward the front door in his running clothes, he stopped so suddenly he nearly tripped. “Holy shit…” he said, taking in the scene.
He’d only ever seen Dylan work hunched over his laptop on the couch. But now, he sat at a fancy up-and-down desk inside what Derek had always thought was just a locked storage closet. It was the kind of thing advertised in Sky Mall or some shit. Four large monitors. He also had a laptop and a tablet. Every now and then he would stop to scribble something into the open spiral notebook in front of him. He adjusted his large headphones and gnawed on his bottom lip, making the lip look slightly bee stung in the screen light.
Dylan stretched his neck to either side with a small groan. His hair stuck out at all angles. There were three Diet Mountain Dew cans next to that cardiologist nightmare of an energy drink they’d all taken “shots” of yesterday. The drinks surrounded an apparently untouched bowl of apple slices spread with peanut butter.
At least the man had thought about consuming something with nutrients.
An alarm dinged on Dylan’s phone. He silenced it and spun around in the chair. Seeing Derek evidently startled him, because he almost fell off the chair as he tried to pull off his headphones.
“Steady there.” Derek grabbed hold of the chair before it toppled.
“Thanks.” Dylan smiled sheepishly and then yawned. “Morning.”
“This is some secret identity–level technology. A mini-Bat Cave.” Derek scanned the equipment. “Why didn’t I know this was here?”
Dylan laughed. “Definitely not as fancy as all that. I guess you’ve usually been at work when I’ve had to run meetings. If it’s just emails the laptop’s fine, but for this kind of crisis I need a real system. You sleep okay?”
“Like a rock. You’ve been at this all night?”
“Except for walking Gus and replaying his chosen entertainment.”
“Thanks for handling stuff so I could sleep.”
“No prob.” He scratched at his hair. “Heading out?”
“Meeting Joni for a run.” Derek paused. “Can I… can I grab you anything while I’m out? Anything to eat, I mean.”
“Nah, I’ll be fine. Stopped for a snack a couple hours ago after…” Dylan checked his watch again and then gave the untouched bowl of cut fruit a confused look. “I guess I never ate it after taking Gus out. Huh.” The preciousness in his baffled and bloodshot eyes gave Derek a very confusing impulse to feed the poor man himself. By hand. Like he was a sad, homesick puppy.
Well, that was some weird, kinky shit.
“I could bring you back coffee? Also, do you even drink coffee?” Derek eyed the soda cans.
“Sometimes. I’ve got a good espresso machine at my house. The drip one here’s shit but Uncle Sean won’t get rid of it. I don’t know how you and Felicity drink that sludge. I’m picky about coffee.”
“Probably because you’ve never had to survive on hospital break room—wait, can we get back to the fact you have a house? You have an actual house somewhere?”
“Oh right. Guess we haven’t talked about that either.” Dylan took off his glasses, squinted, and then put them back on. “It’s rented out right now, which is why it wasn’t an option for me to stay there after the disaster.”
“You’re an onion, Dylan Gallagher.”
The buzzing sound made Dylan’s eyes shift to his phone. He silenced a call. “Before I forget, I got pulled into this thing with a new client. They want me on-site in Palo Alto for the next round of demos, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get out of it.”
“Oh. Uh—how long will you be gone?”
“A week or so? It’s not settled yet. It just means I probably won’t be able to get the last stretch of work done on the apartment as quickly as I’d hoped.” Derek’s first thought hadn’t been about the apartment work at all. He’d just been sad at the idea of Dylan leaving when they’d just gotten started with… whatever this was.