The Code We Broke

The rules started as a joke, and then they weren't a joke, and now they're taped inside my kitchen cabinet where I see them every morning while the coffee brews. Five rules, typed up in Val's font of choice, printed off at work like we were scared somebody in the office would hack into our emails and find out we'd kissed in a stairwell. Which, fair. We do work at the same company. We sit four desks apart.

My name is Mona. I'm thirty-four, divorced this year after six years of a marriage that went quiet on us, and I'm a backend developer, which means I like things that behave. Inputs, outputs, stuff that does what it says. Val is thirty-one, frontend, all color and motion and "can't we just try it and see," and I fell for her the way you fall for a bug you can't reproduce. Slowly, then all at once, then swearing at your monitor.

Here are the rules, verbatim, because I wrote them out that night in June while Val watched over my shoulder and said "ooh, add the no-feelings one, that's a good one."

1. No touching before 10 PM. 2. No overnights. 3. No dates. Dinner is not a date if there's a laptop open. 4. No talking about feelings. 5. Either of us can call it off with one word and no explanation.

That was two months ago. Since then: rule one lasted nine days. Rule two lasted six weeks, and even then it only broke because her BART line shut down for track work and what was I supposed to do, put her on a bus at midnight? Rule three broke the same week as rule two, because a laptop open over pad thai apparently does count as a date when you split the bill and you both know it. Rule five has never been used, thank god, because I keep imagining one of us saying it and my chest does a thing I refuse to name out loud, per rule four.

So really we're down to rule four, holding on like a shingle in a storm.

Which brings me to last Friday, sprint close, the worst one we've had all quarter. The client moved the deadline up a week, our QA lead was out with the flu, and Val and I paired on the ugliest ticket of the bunch for three straight evenings. By Friday at seven we were still in the office, the cleaning crew vacuuming around us like we were furniture.

"Done," Val said, and hit enter, and the build went green, and I honestly almost cried.

"Done done? Or done until the client finds something?"

"Done done. Pushed, reviewed by me, and if Ryan has notes he can put them in a ticket like an adult." She spun her chair to face me. Her hair was a mess, she'd been running her hands through it all day, and she had that look. I know that look. "So. Decompress? Your place? I'll bring the good takeout, the Sichuan place, my treat, well, your treat, I'm broke till Tuesday."

"You're broke because you bought a keyboard for four hundred dollars."

"It lights up, Mona! It lights up in nineteen colors!"

"Yes, come to my place. Bring food. I'll pay."

So that's how it happened, which matters, because I want it on the page that she asked and I said yes and nobody tricked anybody. We drove over in my Corolla, the one with the cracked dash and two hundred thousand miles, with a bag of mapo tofu riding shotgun and the 880 rumbling under us the whole way like it always does. My apartment is a one-bedroom in a loud stretch of Oakland. You can hear the neighbor's TV through the wall, hear the freeway, hear everything. The only soft thing in the place is a worn-out rug that I bought used and have never once regretted.

Kitchen table doubles as my desk, so we ate there among my monitors, which is exactly what rule three was written to prevent, and neither of us mentioned it. Val ate half the tofu straight out of the container and told me a story about her landlord, a whole saga involving a water heater and a priest, and I laughed so hard I snorted, which she will never let me forget.

Then, because we are who we are, we opened our laptops.

"Look at this real quick," she said, turning hers toward me. "The transition I built for the dashboard. Tell me it's not smooth."

"It's smooth."

"You didn't look!"

"I looked. It's very..." I leaned in, and it was smooth, honestly gorgeous, she's got a real eye. "Okay, yeah, that's nice. The hover state lags a little on the left panel though."

"The hover state is fine."

"It catches. Watch." I reached across to her trackpad, and she caught my wrist, and that's when it started, because her hand stayed there.

Now, it was 9:40, so technically rule one was still in effect. Technically. And her hand was on my wrist, not exactly scandalous, except then she slid it down and laced our fingers together like it was nothing, like we do this all the time, and said, "Nine forty. Twenty minutes is nothing."

"Twenty minutes is twenty minutes. The entire point of a rule."

"You wrote the rule, you can amend the rule." She was grinning at me over the laptop, that grin, the one that got us into the stairwell in the first place. "Congress amends rules all the time."

"Congress is a terrible role model and also I'm not Congress."

"Fine." She let go of my hand, sat back, very dignified. "Then we wait twenty minutes and I will fill those twenty minutes with the most boring code review of your life."

She did, too. She pulled up my pull request and read variable names out loud. Out loud! "is underscore pending, bool, default false. Interesting choice, Mona. Why pending? What is it pending?" She kept checking the clock on the wall, which I could hear ticking over the neighbor's TV, and at 10:01 by her phone she closed the laptop and looked at me.

"Time."

"I heard you the first time."

"Come here, then."

I got up and went around the table and she pulled me down onto the couch, the gray one with the springs, and kissed me, and it's funny how after two months of this it still lands with the same shock as that first time in that stairwell, still makes me forget what I was worried about, which was something, probably the sprint, probably rule four.

Her hand found my thigh.

And here's where I have to be straight with you about what happened next, because this is the part I keep turning over. It started fine. It was a hand on a thigh through jeans, warm, no big deal, we'd done this. But then it moved up, slow, and my breath went short, and she felt it, of course she felt it, she notices everything, that's her whole job.

"Okay?" she asked, right against my mouth.

"Okay," I said.

That's rule five's cousin, I guess, an ask and a yes, and we've gotten good at it, I'll give us that. Her hand kept going, up over the seam of my jeans, and I was already leaning into it, and the neighbor's TV was doing a laugh track at exactly the wrong moment and we both cracked up in the middle of it, which is very us.

But then she said something. Small, quiet, half into my neck, and I want to tell you it didn't register, but it did. She said, "I missed you this week."

Missed. You. Present tense feelings, past tense delivery, rule four shattered on the floor of my living room at 10:15 on a Friday night while her hand was on my zipper.

I pulled back. Not far. Six inches, maybe. Enough to see her face, and she looked like she'd stepped off a curb she didn't see, and the worst part, the part I keep chewing on, is that I didn't want to enforce the rule. I wanted to hear the rest of the sentence.

"That's a rule four violation," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"Yeah," she said. "I know."

She didn't take it back, is the thing. She didn't laugh it off or say just kidding or anything sensible like that. She just sat there six inches from me with her ears going red and said, "Yeah, I know."

"So what do we do about it?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do about it?"

"Val."

"What. You're the rules person. I'm just the frontend person who says true things apparently by accident."

I should have written an amendment right there. Should have said okay, new rule, no saying things like that, penalties enforced. Instead I said, "Fine. Noted. Logged. Moving on," and kissed her again, and that was my big mistake of the evening, or my second big mistake, depending how you count.

Because here's what I found out about ten seconds into that kiss. We had been breaking a rule we never wrote down. Which sounds insane, because obviously we'd been kissing on the mouth for two months, that was the entire stairwell thing. But we'd been kissing like people keeping a rule. Quick, sideways, mouth corners, that careful stuff. This was different. This was her hand coming up to my jaw and my mouth opening and her tongue, and somewhere in there I made a noise against her lips that I will not be describing in this story, and she made one back, and the kiss stopped being a kiss and became a thing with a schedule.

"Okay, wow," she said, pulling back an inch. "Where did that come from?"

"You. You and your missed you this week."

"That was a rule four violation."

"And this is an unwritten-rule violation, apparently, and we're just on a streak tonight, huh?"

"Apparently." She was grinning again but it was a different grin, less smart-aleck, more something else. Her thumb was still on my jaw. "Do you want to keep going?"

"Yes."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, Val, please stop making me say it."

"I like making you say it, though."

"I know you do."

So we kept going, and it got messy fast, the way it does when two people have been rationing themselves for two months and somebody finally takes the cap off. My shirt came untucked. Her shirt came off, actually fully off, which was new, and she had on this sports bra thing, black, very practical, and somehow that was the most attractive thing I'd seen all year. My bra went next, don't ask me how, there was a whole operation involving the arm and the strap and her laughing into my neck, and then we were half dressed on a couch with bad springs making noises like a fourth participant.

The neighbor's TV had switched to some movie with explosions. The freeway did its constant thing. I had Val's knee between my legs and my hands flat on her back and I thought, distantly, this is a rule violation too, whatever rule this is, and then I thought, you know what, I'll file the paperwork later.

"Bed?" she asked, right at my ear.

"Couch is fine."

"Couch it is."

She got me leaned back against the arm of it, and my jeans came open, and her hand slid in over my underwear, just resting there at first, and I was done, honestly, I was already so close it was embarrassing. Two months of careful. It all had to go somewhere.

"God," I said.

"Still okay?"

"Yes. Yes, obviously, stop asking."

"Never."

She pushed the underwear aside and got her fingers on me properly and I stopped having opinions about anything. She's good. I want to be fair here, she's genuinely good, patient, pays attention, adjusts when my hips said adjust, which they were saying a lot. And then she slid down off the couch onto her knees on my rug and pulled my jeans and underwear down my legs in one motion like she'd been planning it.

"Val."

"What?"

"That's, you don't have to..."

"I know I don't have to. Do you want me to?"

I looked down at her, on her knees on my ugly rug, hair a mess, looking up at me like I was the dashboard transition she was proud of. "Yes."

"Then quit arguing."

And she put her mouth on me.

I have had a grand total of one long relationship and a divorce and apparently a whole secret second life, and I can tell you nothing, nothing in six years of marriage, prepared me for what Val did next, which was take her time. She started slow, just her tongue, finding things out, and every time I reacted she did it again, like debugging, like watching the logs. My hands ended up in her hair. The couch springs were complaining. The neighbor's movie exploded something and I didn't even flinch.

"Right there," I managed at one point, and she said "mm" against me, which I felt more than heard, and that was about the end of my sentence-making ability.

She added her fingers then, two of them, careful, and I'd like to report I kept some dignity but what actually happened is I came in about ninety seconds, hard, loud, one hand banging the arm of the couch, saying her name in a voice I didn't recognize. She stayed with me through the whole thing, slowed down exactly right, and then kissed the inside of my thigh and rested her cheek there while I came