“That doesn’t have a fuck-you in it.”
“Does the rage have to be in the acronym itself? Can it come later, like in the press release?”
Destiny rolls her eyes. “We need to bring this shit down, all of it.”
“First we have to raise funds for WAI, and then I will join your revolution,” I say.
“How’s it going?” Li Ann asks.
“Cyrus and Jules are on the road. Every few weeks Gaby joins them and they send me selfies from VC parking lots.”
“You don’t go with them?”
“I gotta keep my head down and make the magic.”
“Asha’s good at following orders,” Destiny says. She waits for about three seconds, and then she’s all over me apologizing. “I’m sorry, that was shitty.”
I find myself getting a little tingly around the eyes. “It really was.”
“I guess I just don’t want you to get overshadowed by the boys.”
“It’s Cyrus, for God’s sake. He couldn’t screw me over if he tried.”
“But he’s a man.”
“It’s real between you two, isn’t it?” Li Ann says.
“I’ve been in love with him for as long as I can remember.”
“Then you just have to keep it all going, the marriage, the business, it’s all one messy thing.”
“I see it more as a happy symbiosis. Imagine if I had to go home and explain what I was doing all day.”
“Now that would be fucked up,” Destiny says. “Oh, I know! How about Female Founders Society?”
“FFS. I like it.”
Li Ann, Destiny, and I tap our oxygen cigars together. “Here’s to us. May we take over the world.”
* * *
Cyrus picks me up at the San Jose airport on a Sunday night in September. It’s cool out and he’s wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap. His skin has a reddish tint that makes him look like he’s been out surfing all week. I don’t realize how much I’ve missed him until we’re walking toward the parking lot and he stops to kiss me.
“I don’t want you to go anywhere ever again,” I say.
“That’s uncharacteristic of you, Ms. Ray.”
I turned thirty while he was away, celebrating at the office with Destiny, Ren, and a bottle of grapefruit gin. “I’m getting sentimental in my old age,” I say. “And that’s Mrs. Jones to you.”
He starts to sing the song.
“You know that song is actually about Mrs. Jones straying à la Mrs. Robinson, right?”
“I know. But since we’re disrupting everything, let’s disrupt that too, okay?”
“Pioneers.”
“Revolutionaries.”
The hotel room looks like a bomb exploded in it. Cyrus’s clothes are all over the floor; there are two laptops stacked on top of each other and several empty cartons of hotel cashews on the bed. I’m about to say something, but Cyrus peels my T-shirt down over my shoulder and kisses me right where my pulse is strong and hot, and so we just push everything off the bed and do our thing.
Cyrus dozes off while I text with Ren about a few fixes we’re planning to launch next week. I don’t know how Cyrus manages to sleep so much, or maybe it’s that I’ve got so much accumulated caffeine in me that I can’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. When I look up from my screen, it’s dinnertime, and I nudge him and we drive to a diner nearby and order omelets.
“So what should I say tomorrow?” I ask.
“Just be yourself,” Cyrus says. “You’ll do great.”
“What do they want to know?”
“They want to ask you how you did it. They asked me and I was, like, damned if I know, ask my wife.”
I still get a thrill every time he says the word “wife.” It’s not a fantasy, not anymore, but it doesn’t feel like marriage—the shitty parts of marriage, I mean, like actual responsibilities and getting tired of sex and one person feeling like they’re less beautiful than the other. It’s all the good things about being in love with all the good things about watching movies on the sofa with an old friend. It’s sexy and tender and sweet. For the thousandth time, I feel grateful for that day in city hall, the small woman behind the podium, the way we just went ahead and did it without asking anyone’s permission. Even now I feel myself unfurling into something light and airborne whenever I think about it.
* * *
I’m taken aback by the amount of space around everything in California. On either side of the road there’s grass, and after the grass there’s more road, and before you get anywhere you go through a long, entirely unnecessary length of driveway. Oh, and the parking lots. So many parking lots. I have never been this far west, and west, it seems, has a very high parking-lot-to-people ratio.