Chapter 32

Before he walked into the theater, David received a message from Tori, saying she didn’t need his help. The dude who thought he needed a British accent had come to his senses when he found out David had offered to step in.

He had mixed feelings about the change. While he wanted to work with Tori, he didn’t want to overshadow her performance. She was good enough to get noticed if given a chance. His hope was that with the people he invited, that might happen.

He walked out of his room, and Alex perked up.

“Sooo ... uhm ... are you introducing Cammie to your parents tonight?”

David had an epiphany: he hadn’t even told Cammie what he was doing that night. It never crossed his mind that he should invite her. Did that make him a bad person?

This was exactly why he was so anal about defining a relationship: so things like this didn’t bite him in the butt. If his exes ever found out that he was having booty calls without ‘a talk,’ they would high-five him or give him a hard time—maybe both.

“It never crossed my mind to invite her,” David admitted.

“So, she’s not ‘the one’?” Alex asked, acting scandalized.

David probably deserved that, but that didn’t mean he had to put up with this level of disrespect.

“Bite me, Mister ‘I get all my kicks blocked.’”

When Amy, their special teams coach, put in the Big Boy package, Alex’s field goal success rate plummeted. David had seen Wooga dunk a basketball, so he knew the guy could jump. That didn’t mean the training staff hadn’t started working with him on improving his jumping ability. The same could be said of the rest of the guys that they’d slipped onto field-goal defense.

When you combined monsters like Wooga and Bear blasting the line of scrimmage with them being able to jump up and swat the ball with their huge paws, Alex didn’t have a chance. If they didn’t get there, then they disrupted the blocking enough that Percy could worm his way through and get a clean shot at the kick.

“Does that mean you’re making a play for that smoking-hot Alpha Mu pledge?” Alex asked, ignoring David’s jab at his roommate’s low success rate on field goals.

“She’s working through her issues with her ex. I don’t want to be her rebound guy,” David said and then wanted to kick himself because Alex got a big grin.

“So, if they both show up?” Alex asked hopefully.

“Then I’ll have a threesome,” David said, sounding more confident than he felt.

Alex flopped on the floor like Coby did when David acted like he shot him.

David grabbed his book bag and left. He could hear Alex chuckling as he closed the door.

He put the odds of Tori ending up in his bed at slim to none at the moment.

David spotted Alyssa, the coder who had created his mom’s software and was working with Dare on his AI project, in the computer room. He was there to pick up a printout of his most recent program. It had a bug, and he wasn’t finding it on his tablet. When that happened, he had them print out the code so he could go line by line and check it.

Yes, he could cheat and use an app to figure it out, but Alyssa had told him that if he wanted to learn, then this was the best method. He had to agree because having to do the work of debugging by hand was a giant pain in the ass. When he would finally find the mistake, it was burned into his brain, and he didn’t do it again.

Alyssa had a gift for coding. He’d watched her time and again create a program, and it never failed. She sucked, as far as David was concerned.

“Just the man I was looking for,” Alyssa said when she spotted him.

“You need help with your current coding assignment?” David asked.

“I’m working on a compression—”

David held up his hand to stop her.

“You lost me at ‘working.’ As you can see, mine doesn’t do anything.”

They grinned at their byplay. They both knew David was only taking his computer class to understand how things worked; he would never write another line of code after this class finished.

“I wanted to give you an update on Dare’s project. He’s about ready to try it with a bigger, more diverse group of beta testers. He’s going to hit you up for more money for headsets and more servers.”

“What do you mean by ‘more diverse’?” David asked.

“We need fifty or more grade and middle schoolers, the same number of high schoolers, and then college level,” Alyssa said.

“Tell Dare to call Coach Hope at our old high school; he’ll let us practice on his football players. I can reach out to the people here at USC and explore the possibility of getting my teammates involved. I’ll have to think about the grade and middle schoolers, but I’m sure I can figure something out.”

“Dare said he could sucker you into doing that.”

“I bet he did,” David grumped and then changed the subject. “Would you be up for a summer job?”

“I could always use more money,” Alyssa said.

“I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind about the software you created for my mom’s real estate business. We have an office in Illinois. Could you do something for them?”

“I think it would be more complicated than it was here. Give me a moment to look some stuff up,” Alyssa said, typing away on her phone.

“Okay, LA County’s population is a quarter of the state, so their data covers a huge portion of the housing market,” Alyssa said. “But it says here that Illinois has more than a hundred counties and a total population that’s only a third more than LA County alone. To be useful there, my program would need to span several counties, and maybe as many as ten. That would mean dealing with that many different government systems because I bet each county has its own.”