And he couldn’t stop thinking about what was happening—or not happening—with Isabel. The downside of work being life and life being work was that there was no shutting it off, and the downside with hooking up with someone at work was there was no escape. He’d never been in this position before; usually he was the one cutting things off with a woman he worked with, taking her out for a drink afterward just to make sure there were no hard feelings. Usually he was the one who caught an ex staring at him from across the room or heard that she had been crying in the bathroom. And now that it was happening to him, it sucked.
He knew he and Isabel weren’t exclusive. He knew they were allowed to date other people. He knew this was a casual thing. But the note sent to her at the office that she’d put on Snapchat—he was still looking at her stories on there; he couldn’t help himself—felt like she was just taunting him. She was the one who hadn’t wanted to be in a relationship, and now all of a sudden it was like she was fucking married. It was true that he had never actually said he wanted to be exclusive, but he knew that he was getting to the point where if it had come up, he definitely would have. And now she had to go and throw it in his face like that.
What made it worse was realizing how much Isabel’s cold shoulder bothered him. He was stung by the rejection and doubly stung and embarrassed by how much it had hurt him.
He had never wanted to be, or thought he would be, in this position. There was one night, not long after he’d gotten TakeOff’s first seed funding, that had seemed especially, exhilaratingly pregnant with the possibilities that were to come. He and Victor Vasquez and Nilay Shah, the StrollUp guys he’d met when they both gave presentations at the New York Startup Series, and a couple of their friends had gone to dinner in Williamsburg, where they had started off the evening with absinthe drinks and dozens of oysters. Mack had quickly arrived at a place of happy and confident drunkenness, and the five of them had heatedly debated whether New York or Silicon Valley was the best place to launch a startup. The other two guys at the table, Dinesh and Kyle, were friends of Victor’s, and were about to move their six-month-old company to San Francisco.
“You have to look at it this way,” Dinesh said. He was a cheerful, slightly overweight guy who was apparently some kind of programming whiz. Mack guessed he was around twenty-five. “The access to capital in the Valley is unparalleled. But the only way you can get that access, really, is by putting yourself in front of their faces. And they like to know that their investments are close by; they want to be able to keep tabs on you.”
Kyle jumped in. “Not only that, but the talent pool—there’s just no contest.” Kyle spoke with a flat Chicago accent, and Mack could tell that he would be bald by thirty. “You’re telling me that you can get the same caliber of engineers in New York as you can in SF? Bullshit.”
Victor smiled. “I like to think of it this way. Silicon Valley might be baking the cake, but we’re making the frosting. And everyone knows the frosting is the best part of the cake.” Everyone laughed. “And those people in the Valley…are they people you would want to have drinks and oysters with? We’ve all been to SF. We know what it’s like there. Everyone looks like they came right off the assembly line at the engineer factory. All anyone cares about, all anyone talks about, is tech. And don’t even try to tell me that the girls in San Francisco have anything on the girls in New York. That’s where there’s just no contest.”
As if on cue, two women appeared at their table. They were both short and skinny with long brown hair. One was wearing a crop top and high-rise jeans, the other was in a vintage-looking flowered dress. “Victor!” Crop Top gushed, enveloping him quickly in a hug. “We thought that was you.”
Victor paused just a millisecond too long and Mack realized that his friend had forgotten the girls’ names. “I’m Mack,” he said quickly, standing and offering his hand to the woman in the dress.
“Erika.” She shook his hand.
“And I’m Sam,” said Crop Top, extracting herself from the hug and shaking Mack’s hand.
“Very nice to meet you both.” Mack felt himself almost bowing to them. Victor seemed to have recovered; he stood up and, smiling, said, “And this is Kyle and Dinesh,” and they stood up to shake the girls’ hands as well.
As the seven of them stood around semi-awkwardly, Victor asked, “So what are you all getting into tonight?”