Love in Tandem Page 6

  “The couch is fine.” Was Scott a little nervous? Paradoxically, that made Eamon feel better. He had just kind of shoved himself into Scott’s problem after all, and once he’d had a little time to think about it, it did make him feel a touch ridiculous. Why on earth would Scott want a guy who couldn’t even keep his shit together to try and do some coding? How long had it been since Eamon had last looked at the base code instead of taking his employees’ word on how things were arranged?

  But Scott was looking at him hopefully, and Eamon was struck by the firm impulse not to let him down.

  He put his best reassuring face on and smiled up at Scott. “Why don’t you show me the problem?”

  They sat down on the couch together, knees touching as they balanced the laptop between them, both peering at the screen.

  “Honestly, I don’t know how much help I’m going to be,” Scott admitted. “There are no error messages, nothing. It just doesn’t make appointments anymore.”

  “There are always error messages somewhere,” Eamon told him. “You just have to dig a little to find them.”

  “Really?” Scott looked surprised.

  “Usually.” Technically, it depended on how badly the coders had put things together, but Eamon had years of experience under his belt and this was an app intended for literally anyone to install. How hard could it be? “You want to walk me through exactly what it’s supposed to do?”

  An appointment scheduler should have been a simple enough little program to design. Take down information in one form, send it over to the spreadsheet in Scott’s calendar almost untouched. The third step, sending it from the calendar to the accounting software, should be fixed all on its own once the information was actually hitting the calendar properly.

  At least, that was Eamon’s first impression as he ran through the kind of basic troubleshooting that anyone would do with a problem like this on their hands. Uninstalling. Reinstalling. Reading the help documentation and swearing at how vaguely worded it was. The usual things.

  Scott opened the wine at some point while they were waiting on the world’s slowest installation wizard, apologizing for not having real wine glasses, but, more importantly, pouring generous amounts into the tumblers he’d scrounged up from his kitchen.

  “It’s kind of nostalgic,” Eamon admitted, taking the wine from Scott’s hand and holding it up so they could clink their glasses together. “Like I’m back in university again with some messy code and a deadline.”

  Scott laughed. “Don’t feel like you have to do this all in one night. I’ve limped along with this stupid thing for weeks now: I can last a while longer.”

  “It’s getting into your busy season though, isn’t it?” Eamon asked, tapping his fingers on the plastic casing of the laptop. The edge of the case was worn shiny from use. Was this Scott’s personal laptop? “You’re going to need this to work.”

  Scott looked faintly surprised and pleased that Eamon had remembered. “Sure, but, I mean, you’re doing me a favor here.”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a favor if I didn’t actually fix it,” Eamon joked. He leaned forward to put his wine down on the coffee table. “But don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

  “What’s the next step then?” Scott asked. “We reached the limits of my knowledge like half an hour ago.”

  “If this doesn’t work,” Eamon indicated the almost completed installer inching its way across the laptop screen. “Then I guess we don’t have a choice.”

  “A choice about what?”

  Eamon grinned. It had been too long. He should have thought of this years ago. “About whether to get into the code.”

  10

  Scott

  “Was this designed by monkeys? Toddlers?” Eamon half-yelled out of nowhere and Scott nearly dropped his glass of wine. Eamon had been staring at the laptop in silence for at least five full minutes, his expression growing increasingly infuriated with every passing second. It was a little awkward, especially as he’d been so good before at explaining what he was doing, though Scott had to admit that he’d been completely at sea ever since Eamon had opened the back end side of the application.

  Next to him, Eamon was still ranting, arms thrown wide. “No commenting. Loops that don’t even end anywhere. Who the hell signed off on this?”

  “It was very highly reviewed,” Scott told him.

  “Reviewed.” Eamon made the word sound like an insult.

  Scott lifted an eyebrow. “How else was I supposed to find out what to buy?”

  Eamon’s rage dwindled to a certain sheepishness. “I don’t mean you, Scott. I just can’t believe anyone made this and then tried to sell it to other people. For money!” His voice rose again.

  “Should I just move on then?” Scott asked. “Find some other piece of software.”

  “No, no.” Eamon was glaring at the laptop again. “I said I would fix this trash heap and I will.”

  “If you’re sure,” Scott said, uncertain. He looked around the room, eyes lighting on the bottle on the table. “More wine?”

  Eamon stuck his glass out without taking his eyes off the screen.

  Honestly, Scott had been a little surprised when Eamon had actually shown up with a bottle of wine in hand. He appreciated the gesture, but he really had hoped that Eamon would be able to help with his website problems, and a bottle of wine seemed like this would be more of a chance to socialize than to actually get some work done. Now, well into his second glass of wine and – it seemed to him – even further into Eamon’s deep dive into the code of the malfunctioning application, he appreciated the gesture a lot more.

  It gave him something to do with his hands, for one, while he watched Eamon stare at the laptop and type furiously, keeping up a running commentary on whatever mystical thing he was doing to the code. There was something oddly appealing about Eamon’s focus and his brief spurts of profanity, always directed at whoever had done the coding on the app that Scott had, in all innocence, bought.

  Scott was, in fact, still watching Eamon’s face when Eamon suddenly looked up with an apologetic smile. He quickly flicked his eyes away, wondering if Eamon had seen him looking.

  “Sorry,” Eamon said. “I get a little obsessed when I’m trying to fix something.” He reached forward to pick up his ignored glass and took a sip. “I’m just letting it compile now.”

  “Ah.” Scott nodded as though he had any idea at all of what that meant. “So, does that mean you know what the problem is?”

  “Know what it means?” Eamon grinned at him, pride glowing on his face. “It means I’ve fixed it.” He touched a hand to his chin, tilting his head a little. “I think.”

  “Well, I’m impressed,” Scott told him. “How long does compiling take?”

  “Depends.” Eamon shrugged. He looked back at Scott and took another sip of his wine. “Now, I’m pretty sure you were telling me about your day when I got stuck in my own little world.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” Scott leaned back on the couch. “Couple of rentals. Some pick-ups from people who had their spring repairs done.”

  “Are spring repairs a thing?” Eamon asked.

  “They are when you leave your bike outside all winter and blow out your tires the second you pick her up in the spring,” Scott said drily. “Though I guess I shouldn’t complain about people providing me with work.”

  “You can always complain about idiots.” Eamon laughed. “Trust me.”

  It was kind of funny, Scott thought, but he really did. He’d barely met Eamon – had known him for less than a week, largely forgotten high school classes notwithstanding – and here he was letting him into his house and letting him futz around with his business applications as though his whole shop wouldn’t come crumbling down around his ears if he lost those files. Had he even backed them up lately? Now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure he hadn’t done it before Eamon had come over.

  “Speaking of idiots,” Scott said slowly. “The work you’re doing i
sn’t going to delete anything out of my calendar, is it? Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t back anything up before we started tonight.”

  Eamon raised an eyebrow. “I copied everything over before I started messing with code.” He made a dismissive noise. “I told you, I’ve been doing this for years.”

  “Believe me, the idiot in that scenario was always going to be me,” Scott said gratefully. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Do you not have automatic backups?” Eamon asked.

  “Uh, I want to say I do?” Scott hedged. “But I don’t really know how they work?”

  Eamon looked stricken. “An external hard drive? A cloud account? What are we talking here?”

  “I let my cousin set me up, so I guess I could call her?” Scott admitted. “She might even be up now – she moved to China for work a couple of years back.”

  “You have to figure out how your backups work,” Eamon said pleadingly. “What if your shit went down?”

  “I would call Suzanne, I guess.”

  The noise of outrage Eamon made was, frankly, adorable. It was really cute that he cared this much about Scott’s IT arrangements, even if it was out of some kind of computer-guy devotion to best practices. Scott wasn’t a total Luddite, but he’d never been able to make himself figure out things he couldn’t see in front of him. That was the great thing about running his own cycle works. He got to work with his hands all – or at least most of – the day, working on real things: people’s chains, sticky gears, stuff that he could see and touch and fiddle with until he got it perfect.

  “Sorry?” he offered Eamon.

  “You don’t have to apologize to me,” Eamon said, sounding as if he didn’t quite believe in what he was saying.

  “You sure?” Scott teased. “You sound pretty personally offended.”

  “Just for that,” Eamon told him, pretty mouth twitching into a smile, “I rescind my offer to help you get your backups sorted out.”

  “You can’t rescind an offer you didn’t make.” Scott’s own smile was growing as he watched Eamon’s.

  “I was about to make it,” Eamon told him. “And now I won’t, that’s all.”

  “Offer accepted,” Scott said, triumphant. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

  Eamon started to laugh, soft and helpless at first, and then turning into something that made him clutch at the laptop balanced on his knees to keep it from shaking to the floor. “How does that logic even work?”

  “Very well, thank you!”

  “It doesn’t at all,” Eamon told him, still chuckling. “But I guess you win this one.”

  “You’re so generous,” Scott told him, lifting his glass.

  “I don’t have anything better to do,” Eamon said, lifting his right back.

  Scott leaned in to clink their glasses together and peer at the laptop between them. He tilted his head to the side, reading the tiny letters in the pop-up on the screen. “Is that supposed to be happening?”

  “Is what–?” Eamon asked. His gaze dropped to the screen. “Definitely not.” He put his glass back down without even taking a sip, fingers once again flying over the keyboard as he mumbled imprecations to himself.

  “I’m starting to think this might not have been a great program to choose,” Scott said, mostly to himself.

  Eamon snorted. “You think?”

  He was less quiet this time around as he worked and Scott watched him. His attention was still clearly mostly on the screen, but he was letting himself chat through it now, telling Scott stories about the all-night coding sessions he would pull in college and the first few years of running his company.

  Scott had a few stories of his own to contribute. Though most of his college days had been spent avoiding his last-minute assignments and having a good time, he recognized that struggle from the early days of running Cycle Works. He’d spent a while trying to do renovations all night while keeping the shop open during the day, until his need for sleep had eventually overcome him and after the third customer had come in to find him taking an involuntary nap on the front counter, he’d cut back a little bit and let the renovations take their time.

  It was a pretty good story, if Scott said so himself, and he had Eamon laughing again by the time he was done imitating his attempt to go from waking up straight into salesman’s patter.

  “I never technically fell asleep at work,” Eamon told him, still typing like a madman. “But, uh, I did fall asleep over dinner a few times. When I made it home for dinner. My boyfriend – ex-boyfriend now – was ready to murder me.” He didn’t look at Scott as he dropped that particular bombshell, which was probably good, given the expression Scott was pretty sure he was making right about now.

  “Read you the riot act, huh?” he asked, as casual as possible under the circumstances. He still wasn’t exactly interested in Eamon, but it was always nice to know that his gaydar wasn’t completely broken. There had definitely been some flirting going on here and there and it hadn’t all been from his own side.

  “I guess you could say that,” Eamon said. “And, uh, I didn’t really stop because we were getting so close to our big app release date, so he broke up with me.”

  “On the eve of your big moment?” Scott said, shocked. “That asshole.”

  “I’m over it.” Eamon shrugged, not looking up from the laptop screen. “He just wasn’t ready for the kind of work it took to become CEO, you know?”

  “Didn’t you own the company from day one?” Scott asked.

  Eamon brightened up at that. “Sure. But everyone knows you’re not really hitting CEO level until you’ve got the staff under you. Before that, it’s just something you put on business cards to make sure people know you’re serious.”

  Scott laughed. “Should I start doing that? I’m the only employee at the shop, admittedly, but that means I’m also in charge.”

  “What about your two part-timers?” Eamon flicked a glance in Scott’s direction. “Don’t sell yourself short. I’m sure you’re an excellent manager.”

  “Teenagers do take a lot of wrangling,” Scott said thoughtfully, and started to laugh at the disgusted expression on Eamon’s face.

  This time around, whatever Eamon was doing to the scheduling app took a lot longer, and Scott didn’t think it was just because they were talking more. They finished the wine between them and moved on to the six-pack Scott unearthed from the back of the fridge, sliding down off the couch until they were sitting on the floor, the laptop propped up on the coffee table.

  “It’ll be ready to compile in a sec,” Eamon said for the fiftieth time, still tapping away.

  “Take your time,” Scott assured him. He did have to work tomorrow, but getting this fixed was more important.

  “Don’t need to,” Eamon said smugly. He clicked the enter key with a flourish. “And, done!”

  “Done?” Scott asked, pleased.

  “Well, done for the moment. We still have to compile it, of course. And test to make sure it works.”

  Scott let his head loll back against the seat of the couch. It almost touched Eamon’s shoulder, they were sitting that close. Eamon kept insisting on telling Scott what was going on after all, even though it mostly sounded like gibberish to him. Eamon’s cologne smelled good, or maybe that was just the man himself. He certainly looked good, in both the sweater he’d arrived in and the perfectly fitted t-shirt he’d revealed when he took the sweater off partway into his marathon of coding. Scott dragged his attention away from contemplating Eamon’s shoulders and lifted his beer bottle in salute. “Let me know when it’s ready.”

  Compiling seemed to go okay that time, or at least it didn’t make Eamon swear at the computer more than he already had been, and soon enough Eamon decreed they were ready to test.

  “I’ll make an appointment on my phone,” he said. “You keep an eye on the laptop.”

  “Sure.” Scott leaned over to pull the device closer to himself. Despite knowing it wouldn’t help, he opened the cale
ndar at once, watching while Eamon typed to see if the appointment would appear right away.

  “Done,” Eamon said after a moment. “I did a really basic one so it would be quick.” He leaned in to get a good view of the screen, his shoulder bumping Scott’s. Scott repressed a shiver as they watched together, a minute passing, then another one. He hit refresh, frustrated, and almost yelled when the screen reloaded into a new configuration with Eamon’s appointment at the top.

  “You’ve done it!” he announced, beaming at Eamon. “You’re a genius!”

  “I try, I try,” Eamon said, amused. “Now let’s try something more complicated.”

  “Why?”

  “I think that’s where the problem was in the original code. Too many details and it would put them in the wrong places and crash out. So we’ll try again.”

  Once again, he typed something up on his phone and they waited together, Scott refreshing the calendar obsessively. Nothing. Nothing for fifteen whole minutes. The other appointment seemed to be still there, though when Scott clicked on it to check, the name ‘Test McTest’ had turned into an alphanumeric string that didn’t resemble anything Eamon had written.

  “So I didn’t fix it.” Eamon sounded furious with himself. “But I think I know where the problem lies now. I can do this.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Scott said gently. He’d been watching the clock on the laptop screen tick its way past midnight while they waited to see if it was going to do anything. “But it’s getting late. I know you pulled all-nighters in the past, but I have to work in the morning.”

  “Oh.” Eamon seemed surprised. “Sorry, I forgot.” He offered a crooked smile. “Nostalgia, I guess.”

  “You’ve done a ton tonight,” Scott reminded him. “I don’t want to keep you away from your bed either.”

  “I don’t mind,” Eamon said. Was he looking fondly at Scott or at the computer? Scott didn’t want to read too much into something that wasn’t there.