Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

“Oh?”


He gives me another one of his smiles, and this one seems to curl around me, catching me up in a wave of warmth. “You said that I didn’t notice people like you.” His voice lowers. His eyes are relentlessly blue, and they cut into me. “That’s completely false. You’ve never been invisible to me. I saw you the first day we crossed paths, and I’ve been seeing you ever since.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think. Against my better judgment, that little spark of something ignites in my stomach. A flame dances, ready to catch fire.

But I have to be vigilant.

“On the contrary,” I hear myself say. “This morning, you cut in front of me in the parking lot. You were three inches from me. And…” I hold up my sleeve, showing the damage.

He winces.

“So when I said you didn’t see me, I meant it. Literally.”

His eyes shut. “Shit.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m used to it.”

2.

BLAKE

The kitchen window of my house high up in the Berkeley Hills overlooks fog-shrouded waters, interrupted by the bulk of San Francisco to the south and the illuminated towers of the Golden Gate Bridge further north.

Twilight is coming and I haven’t turned on any lights. I’m surrounded by granite and stainless steel, and I’m considering the benefits of an apple that I’ve rinsed, when my phone rings.

To be precise, it’s not actually my phone. It’s the highly experimental video chat app on my even more experimental watch.

My pulse picks up a few beats. I love my dad. But there is, after all, a reason why his ring tone is the ominous-sounding Imperial March from Star Wars. He’s difficult, demanding…and I’m not about to make him wait. I tap my watch, accepting the call.

He appears on the tiny watch screen. Reduced to thumbnail size, he looks exactly like his publicity photos. His eyebrows are thick and bushy; his hair is turning to salt and pepper. Other than the hair, though, he looks a lot like me. Same wiry build. Same blue eyes; same Roman-centurion nose.

“Blake.” He must be at one of his standing desks, because he paces back and forth, his head shifting. In the back of my mind, I notice that the video is finally following his movements with nary a glitch. He frowns at me. “You’re backlit.”

“Julio,” I say. “Lights.”

My kitchen lights come on in a dazzle of brilliance—all of them, from the bright, recessed LEDs overhead to the warm under-cabinet lights that catch the gold flecks in the granite counter.

At the exact same time, the lights in my dad’s office shut off.

“Goddammit,” Dad says. “There’s an unintended consequence. Julio, lights.”

Obligingly, his experimental computerized environmental system turns his lights back on—and just as obligingly, mine plunges my kitchen back into darkness.

Dad lets out a sharp bark of laughter. I cross the room and flip the lights on old school with my elbow. “Okay, I’ll file the bug report. What’s going on?”

I’m holding the apple in my hand opposite the watch. I got it from the fridge a minute before and it’s still cold against my skin. In a few minutes, my hands will warm it up until it’s body temperature. I pass it to my watch hand. One.

“We have to talk about the Fernanda launch in March.” Dad growls when he talks, an effect so powerful that unless he makes an effort to sound friendly, he comes off as perpetually angry.

I know him well enough to know that’s just the way he talks, but still, a hint of anxious anticipation gathers in me at his tone. “It’s only a few months away.” His eyes spear me. “I think you should run it.”

I swallow, feeling a pit open up in my stomach. This is far from the first time he’s pushed me to take on a larger role in the company, and it won’t be the last. And this particular role?

“Come on, Dad. Nobody wants me to do the whole launch. That’s not how these things work.”

One of his eyebrows rises. “Bullshit. These things work the way I say they work.”

I don’t think there is anyone in the world who could argue that my dad is not a great man—or, at the very least, a powerful one. Over the course of the last three decades, he built a Fortune 500 company from almost nothing. He’s right; the world bends to him, not the other way around.

I used to think that was cool.

“I know you want me to take on a larger public role, but I’m busy with school.”

He could point out that we scheduled the product launch to coincide with my spring break. Instead…