Loan Sharks

My name is Jason Hopkins, I'm 34 years old, and on the first Friday of October I was sitting in my third quarterly review prep of the week, staring at a loan application from a food truck operator in Sacramento who had attached his entire bank statement as forty separate screenshots.

The company I work for is called Pivot Capital. It's a fintech startup in Oakland, housed in an old warehouse that they renovated just enough to be legal. I've been a loan officer here for three years. Before that I did mortgages at a credit union, which was boring in a comfortable way. This job is exciting in the way that a dental drill is exciting.

My husband Alan is 36. He's a software engineer and he works remotely, which means he spends all day in sweatpants in our apartment in Temescal while I sit in this converted warehouse pretending to understand risk models. We've been together seven years, married for four. We met at a networking event when I was 27 and he was 29, and he likes to tell people he fell for me at first sight during a startup pitch competition, which is a generous way to remember the fact that I knocked over a pitcher of water on a venture capitalist's laptop.

So anyway, it was our anniversary, and I had completely forgotten.

Not forgotten in the dramatic way. Forgotten in the way where your calendar pops up a little alert that says "ANNIVERSARY DINNER" and you swipe it away because you're mid-review on a term sheet. I saw the alert at 11:40 that morning. I remember thinking, tonight, we'll do something tonight. Then Dev from underwriting came over with a printed spreadsheet and a face like a man carrying bad news, and the alert went the way of all my good intentions.

The spreadsheet said our approval rates were down nine percent quarter over quarter, which is the kind of number that gets repeated out loud in meetings with the word "concerning" attached to it. I had eleven loan applications to finish reviewing before Monday and three of them were already overdue. The quarterly review was Wednesday. I was going to be in that meeting with Dev's spreadsheet and my name attached to the approval rates, because apparently when the numbers go down they're my numbers, and when they go up they're the algorithm's numbers.

At 12:15 my phone buzzed. It was a message from Niko, who sits two desks away from me and refuses to just talk to me like a person.

niko: hey someones in the breakroom asking for you

niko: tall guy. Cute. Looks like he came prepared

niko: is that your man? tell him the microwave here is a war crime

I typed back "that's Alan, it's our anniversary apparently," and I felt a small warm thing happen in my chest, quickly followed by the large cold thing of my inbox. I had a restructure memo due at one. I had the Sacramento food truck screenshots. I had forty minutes.

I went anyway. Married four years, you learn that the smart move is to just go.

* * *

The breakroom at Pivot is a long narrow room at the back of the building, off a hallway past the conference rooms. The floor is linoleum that has never once in its life been clean. There's a refrigerator that hums like it's resentful, and a microwave that smells permanently of fish that someone heated in 2022. There's a camera in the corner over the door, because of course there is, our security budget went to cameras and none to the floor.

Alan was standing at the counter with two takeout bags from the Thai place on Telegraph, the good one, and he was grinning at me before I even got through the door. He had his bike jacket on and his helmet hanging off his arm, and he looked like the best thing that had happened in that room since they installed the fish microwave.

"Happy anniversary, baby," he said, and came over and kissed me, which I returned at about sixty percent enthusiasm, which he noticed immediately.

"Happy anniversary," I said. "God, you smell like outside. It's nice out there?"

"It's gorgeous. It's the kind of October that makes you forgive California everything." He held up the bags. "Green curry, the noodle thing you like, and spring rolls. I figured I'd surprise you at work, since somebody scheduled a quarterly review over our anniversary dinner slot."

The guilt arrived a second late, the way it does. "That's tonight. Dinner's tonight. I know it's tonight. I put it in the calendar."

"You swiped it away. I watched you do it, you're on the shared calendar, remember, I can see your little gray dot go dark."

He laughed when he said it, so I laughed too, kind of. "Okay, well. Yes. I'm the worst. But you brought lunch, so this counts, right? Lunch counts."

"Lunch counts," he agreed, and started unpacking containers onto the counter. "How bad is your day, one to ten?"

"Six when you walked in. Now it's a four."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

We ate standing up at the counter, which is how we ate everything, apparently, even anniversary lunches. Alan talked about his morning, some bug in a payments pipeline that had eaten three hours of his life, and I nodded and said uh huh in the right places while my brain kept drifting back to the spreadsheet and the restructure memo and whether the Sacramento guy's screenshots counted as income documentation if they were sideways.

Alan stopped talking. I looked up and he was watching me with his head tilted, the way he does when he's caught me not listening and is deciding whether to be annoyed or entertained.

"You're gone," he said. "You left the building. Your body's here chewing spring rolls and you're somewhere in a spreadsheet."

"I'm sorry. It's this quarterly thing. Approval rates are down and it's my name on the memo and I have eleven applications to get through before Monday." I put my fork down. "And I'm eating pad see ew off a breakroom counter next to a sticky floor, since you ask."

"Nobody asked any of that."

"Well. It's my day."

He picked up the leftover curry container and turned it in his hands, looking at it, and then he looked at me with a different grin, a slower one, the one he gets when he's been sitting on an idea for a while.

"You know," he said, "we've got all this leftover curry and nowhere to put it."

"There's a fridge right there."

"That fridge is a biohazard. That fridge has things in it older than our marriage." He set the container down and took a step closer to me. "I didn't actually ride all the way over here for curry, Jason."

"Then why'd you bring curry?"

"As a cover story. As a decoy. I'm a very strategic person." He was close now, close enough that I could feel warmth off his jacket, and I still wasn't getting it, because my brain was operating at quarterly-review speed, barely. "Seven years, baby. You really forgot what today is?"

"It's our anniversary. I know what today is. I said that."

"Mm. And do you remember what I said to you this morning before you left?"

I remembered him saying something while I was tying my shoe. I remembered saying "mm-hm" twice. "Something about tonight," I guessed.

He laughed out loud, one short bark. "Unbelievable. I said, tonight I'm gonna take you apart so slowly you'll forget your own name. And you said mm-hm and asked me if the dishes were done."

"Those two things can both be true."

"They can. But only one of them is anniversary-related." He put his hand flat on my chest, right over the stupid lanyard, and I felt it all the way down. "So here's my thought. Your memo is due at one. It's twelve forty. Niko thinks you're having a nice anniversary lunch. And this breakroom has a camera over the door," he pointed at it with his chin, "and a blind spot behind the fridge that I scouted out four years ago when I came to your holiday party and you gave me the tour and I paid attention to the wrong things."

"You scouted the breakroom at my holiday party?"

"I scouted the breakroom," he said, "at your holiday party, while you were explaining interest rates to Dev, and I have thought about it maybe two hundred times since, and it is our anniversary, and you are going to put the curry down."

I looked at the camera, then at the fridge, then at him. My stress was still there, the spreadsheet was still there, and it was all suddenly very far away, like buildings seen from a plane.

"Alan," I said. "We're at my work."

"I'm aware. That's the fun part. I've been planning this since Tuesday." His hand slid down from my chest to my belt, and he stopped it there, resting, a question more than a move. "So. Yes or no, Hopkins?"

"Yes," I said. Not even a beat of hesitation, which honestly surprised me, because I could feel my whole career flashing before my eyes. "Yes. Okay. God."

"That's the spirit," Alan said, and he took my hand and pulled me toward the far end of the breakroom.

The room is long and narrow, like a train car, and the fridge sits at the back corner where the warehouse wall juts out. The camera over the door can see the tables and the microwave and maybe half the counter. It cannot see behind the fridge. Alan knew this because he had apparently spent a party four years ago memorizing sight lines instead of meeting my coworkers, and I was only now understanding what that said about him.

He walked me backward until my shoulders hit the fridge, and the compressor hummed against my spine. Then he leaned in close, his mouth near my ear, and his hand still resting on my belt.

"Here's what I want for our anniversary," he whispered. "I want you in my mouth. Right here. While you try to stand there and think about loan approvals. I want to watch you try not to make noise."

"That's what you want," I said. It came out weird and high.

"Since Tuesday. I told you. I've been planning this like it's a project at work, with milestones."

"You're a software engineer, you don't have milestones, you have sprints."