Due Diligence

Chapter 38 Marcus

Cass snuggled her back against my chest so I was spooning her. My hand settled on her stomach, flat against her bare skin. We lay like that in silence for a few minutes, naked against each other as our heartbeats slowed down from their racing state.

I knew I loved her months ago, but tonight was something else entirely.

“I don’t think I want to be apart from you for that long ever again,” I told her, before I pressed my lips against her bare shoulder.

She placed her hand on top of mine. “Then don’t be,” was her response. “You can do whatever you want to do now. You’re a free man in every sense of the word.”

“Nope. I’m not free. I’m yours now. If you told me you wanted to pack our bags and move to Iceland, I would book a flight and start learning Bjork songs right now.”

“Lucky for you, I hate the cold,” she said with a sigh. “But seriously…you can do anything you want. Literally anything. Do you want to try shrooms? Go to a sex club? Do you want to take the subway like a normal twenty-something year old?”

“Is it weird that all I want to do is stay in this bed with you? That’s irony, right?”

Cass turned over so she was facing me. “I’m on the same page, honestly.” She kissed me once, soft and measured, before she pulled back and said, “Wow…who are we?”

“Just two people who love the shit out of each other,” I responded.

Her smile hit me like a ton of bricks. It occurred to me that from this point on, I was going to be able to see that smile every morning when I woke up. That realization did more for me than any drug, drink, or dalliance ever had.

“I do have a question for you,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“It occurred to me when I was walking home today that I’m unemployed for the first time in my life. I’m also a college dropout, not to mention a cautionary tech tale. I’m probably borderline unemployable at this point. I have literally no idea what to do with my life.” I reached out and I tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “And then I remembered I have the attention of a brilliant woman whose parents cut her off when she was twenty-two years old, and somehow she figured out how to pay for her life and business school and to find a lucrative career—you know, until I got her fired for making out with a seller—”

“Hell,” she muttered as she groaned and pressed her forehead against my chest. “I had almost forgotten about that. Did you have to bring that up?”

“I’ll be telling that story to everyone we meet for all eternity.”

She narrowed her eyes lightly before she softened her expression and said, “I wish I still had the capacity to dislike you.”

Grinning, I pulled her close to me again as I let my hand rest along the line of her spine. “I need a job,” I murmured.

“Figure it out tomorrow.”

“But you deserve to be with a guy with a job, who can provide for you—”

“Stop,” she interjected as she placed her index finger flat against my lips. “I did not go to Princeton and Harvard to expect a guy to take care of me. I definitely did not spend all these years paying off student debt to have you swoop in like some fancy, gilded angel and tell me all that hustle and struggle wasn’t even worth my time.”

I didn’t object. Instead, I pulled her closer to me. “I love you,” I told her. “So much.”

“Same, baby boy. Fucking same.”

I sighed. “I just feel like I could be doing more for you. I should do more.”

Realizing I wasn’t going to just let this go, Cass sat up. “Do you really want to talk about this now?”

“Kind of, yeah,” I admitted. “I’ve been working since I was eighteen. I’m somewhat of a workaholic. I don’t know if you know that.”

“I’ve surmised,” she deadpanned.

“Well, I don’t feel like I have an identity without Libra.”

“Why not? Libra was never your identity. It was what you did, not who you were.”

“Well, who am I?” I questioned. “I’ve been trying to figure out who I am if I’m not the COO, and I’ve got to be honest…I’m coming up short.”

Cass leaned down to kiss me. “You’re a guy who takes messy shit and cleans it up. And I’m a woman who makes a mess. We’re together now. It sounds like we’re doing exactly what we should be doing.”

I stared at her in the low light from my end table lamp. She looked so at home here in my bed that I was tempted to pinch myself to make sure that it was all real.

“You don’t make a mess though,” I responded. When Cass raised an eyebrow, I chuckled. “Well, not anymore.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. “I don’t. I haven’t since I met you.” Cass kissed me once again. “That’s how freaking good you are.”

I let out a sigh and shifted to my back so I was staring up at the ceiling. “What about you?” I asked. “What are you going to do with your life?”

Cass didn’t respond. Instead she exhaled out as she tilted her head to the side, watching me seriously.

“What?” I asked after a beat. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

She did that thing where she flipped her hair off her shoulder. “Look, I was going to wait to tell you this once I felt like you had finally decompressed from everything that happened, but you just look so sad.”

“I’m a sad guy,” I reminded her. “I journal and stare longingly out the window while I pet my cat and listen to melancholy jazz. I’m the poster child for sad guys everywhere.”

“You’re so fucking sweet, Marcus.”

“Sometimes.” I winked. We both knew it.

Cass took a deep breath. “Well either way, my sabbatical from working has put a lot in perspective for me. The past six months have been really fascinating in terms of me trying to figure out what I want to do.”

She was using her brilliant girl voice—the polished and eloquent voice that she used when she came to my office for due diligence. Intrigued, I hoisted myself up onto my arm. “Yeah?”

Cass nodded. “I think I want to start a company. A tech company.”

It took me a few seconds and some awkward laughs to realize that she wasn’t messing with me. She was dead serious. In fact, I had never seen her say something with so much conviction in all the time I had known her.

“Cass, what ?”

“I have this idea I think could change a lot of lives. Plus,” she went on, “my therapist told me this is the right time in my life to strike out on my own. I have some money left from what I intended to pay to my parents…and I think I’m going to invest it in my idea.”

“What’s the idea?” I asked as I pulled myself up into a seated position. “And should we put on clothes? I feel like this is a weird conversation to have naked.”

“You don’t want to look at my tits?” she demanded facetiously. “Just kidding. Can you get me a shirt?”

When she was wearing one of my t-shirts and had settled under the covers, Cass started again. “It’s a service that matches people with therapists,” she explained. “And before you poke holes in it, like I know you’re just dying to do, let me tell you why it’s different. For one, it meets the untapped need for an easy way to find counseling services for people who are too anxious to do it on their own. For another, it leverages technology. I see it as a cross between a regular medical scheduling platform and a dating app.”

“A dating app?”

“Yeah. I envision it as a way of finding the right fit. So, for example, if I were a man and I were queer and…I don’t know, Asian, let’s say. And I wanted to find a therapist who was also a man, was a member of the LGBTQ community, and was of Asian descent, this service would match me with a therapist who is compatible on as many of those different layers of identity as possible.”

“So you need an algorithm,” I concluded.

“Exactly. So, I think the next step for me is to find someone who can help me build this platform, and then I can try to get some funding for it.”

I nodded. “Even before you start building the product, there’s a lot you can get done. Like first order of business, I would say a business plan and a pitch deck.”

“A pitch deck?”

“It’s just a few polished slides you can take to funders. And while you’re out shopping that, you get an engineer to build an MVP for you.”

“MVP…minimum viable product.”

“Exactly. You could also try to get a prototype,” I went on, speaking faster now. “But when it comes to tech, I think you just need a mockup of an MVP. You’re thinking about an app and a web platform, right?”

“Yes.”

“Love it. I think you should figure out the branding pretty early on too. Hell, let’s get you a domain name now—”

“Marcus…”

“And I would probably do an industry analysis too, just to make sure you know what you’re competing against. Oh! And I would love to help you with some archetyping. You did that in business school, right?”

“Marcus,” she cut in as she grabbed my shoulder.

“Yes?” I asked, realizing my heart was actually racing.

Cass stared at me, her lips slowly unfolding into a smile. Her eyes scanned my face. She let out a puff of air—as if to say, Well look at you, Marcus. You’ve still got it. “I think we should do this together.”

“You and me?”

Cass nodded emphatically. “I think we would make such a good team. We both care about this, and if I could handpick anyone to start a tech company with me, it would be you—no question.”

Immediately, I started shaking my head. “Cass, I fucked up the last—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Doesn’t feel that way,” I admitted.

“Marcus, you didn’t. Before this all came out, you started out with an idea in a dorm room and you turned it into a half a billion-dollar enterprise. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever lose sight of that,” she continued. “You’re amazing—and you better not fucking deny it, because you insist on telling me I’m amazing all the time. So if I have to put up with that, so do you.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything.

Cass wasn’t done—not by a longshot.

“People make mistakes. We have to forgive them. You taught me that, but you need to apply that wisdom to yourself as well. You need to forgive yourself.” She reached out and took my hand. “Look, Like I said, I’ve got some money left over from the account I was going to use to pay back my parents. It’s just sitting there. Let’s do this together.”

“Really?” I finally said. “You really think we can do this?”

“Absolutely,” she assured me. “Marcus fucking Fitz, will you take over the world with me?”

She really did get me. She really did know what made me tick and what I needed to hear.

Grinning, I nodded in response. “There’s nothing I would rather do.”