4.

We clinked glasses and I sipped my drink. The syrupy sweetness covered any taste of alcohol.

“I should have known you were an introvert,” I said. “It explains why you’re dressed like you’re going to prom. You’re not used to this.”

His grin was warmer and more natural now. “I’m really not. Used to this, I mean. I was roped into coming out to a work event.”

“Work?” I raised an eyebrow. “What do you do?”

“I’m a computer engineer,” he said. “A programmer, mostly.”

I felt something loosen behind my ribs. “I’ma coder,” I replied.

“Javascript?” he asked.

I snorted. “Come on. Give me more credit than that.” I gestured down at myself. “Have you ever seen a script kiddie wear a dress like this?”

His eyes glanced down politely at the invitation. “I’ve never seen a coder dress like that, to be honest.”

I had made the comment as a joking defense mechanism to cover my discomfort at dressing up for a night on the town, but now I was painfully aware of my clothes. A deep red cocktail dress that hugged my curves more than anything else in my wardrobe. The plunging neckline that showed off way too much of my cleavage. The cramp-inducing heels that I couldn’t wait to take off at the end of the night.

“I normally don’t dress like this,” I found myself saying.

“I don’t see why not,” Jude replied. “You’re beautiful.”

I felt myself blushing at the compliment. Jude’s freckled cheeks suddenly turned crimson in solidarity.

“I didn’t mean to imply you were a script kiddie,” he said. “What do you do?”

“A little bit of everything,” I said, seizing on the excuse to talk about something else. “PHP. Lots of Python. I spent a summer teaching myself Ruby, but I wouldn’t stake my career on that knowledge. And yeah, I know Javascript.”

“My entire job is Python,” Jude said with an eager smile. “That’s pretty much standard these days, though.”

“No kidding. I heard they’re starting to teach it to beginners in school instead of C++.”

“Kids these days,” he replied with a shake of his head.

“What, uh, rig do you run on?” I asked.

“My laptop is Windows 10,” he began.

“Noob,” I replied with a grin.

“…but my desktop dual-boots into Windows and Linux,” he finished with a satisfied smirk.

“Redhat, or Ubuntu?” I asked.

He arched an eyebrow. “SuSe.”

I whistled. “Old school. I like it.”

“The classics are the best,” he said. “Sure, the newer distros might be flashier or have better features, but I’ll always go back to the first one I ever used.”

I looked Jude up and down with new eyes. When I saw him dressed likethatat the bar, I assumed he was one of the thousands of asshole tech-bros who lived in this city. The kind of guy who wore a thousand-dollar suit to the bar because he wanted everyone to know he was hot shit. But Jude wasn’t like that at all.

He was likeme.

I took a deeper pull from my drink. The maraschino cherry bounced against my lips. Briefly, I wondered if I should seductively slide it off the toothpick with my tongue. That was how flirting worked, right?

Instead, I gestured at the glass. “This is good. I can barely taste the alcohol.”

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