The Hero Next Time: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 4)

Chapter Thirty-Three: Sunny, Summer, 1995

"To be fair, kiddo, if you told them at the beginning, you wouldn't have been in that mess. Balwinder wouldn't even be in the picture."

"But now I can't actually see myself bringing Jordan around. It's just not appealing to me, having him at dinner, talking marriage with the folks."

"You're kidding," Sunny said in disbelief. "So, what, he was only exciting when he was illicit?"

She didn't choose to answer that. Instead, she said, "Plus, I couldn't break Balwinder's heart. He really is in love with me."

"What about you, Bishan?" he asked, a little irritated. "Whom do you love? Isn't that what all this is about?"

"I love Balwinder enough. He's a good man, gentle and generous. Jordan is... he burns bright hot, and I admit it's great when we're together, but we'd burn out too quickly; marriage and kids with him, I just can't see it. Most likely we'd divorce in a few years."

"So, you're playing the long game. Jordan's good for a romp in the sack, but Balwinder's the one you want to marry."

"In a nutshell."

"If only you could have both the passion and the security."

"Brother, the two rarely go together. You hit the jackpot with that wife of yours."

He had. Bishan was right about that. "But Jordan's still around? You still communicate?"

"Yeah, but not as much as we used to. He's working now, long hours at tech startups, developing new Internet services. It's a really crazy sector; companies spring up and collapse within months, investors either hit the jackpot or lose everything, because all of their value is on paper. Everything these companies offer is in the services they provide, the innovations they're predicting people will need in the future that the Internet will facilitate. There's nothing liquid in their companies; their headquarters are nothing but buildings filled with computer workstations and server farms."

"Server farms? That sounds ominous."

"They're just rooms filled with computers stacked on top of each other, which handle all the requests for service from computers throughout the World Wide Web. The room has to be heavily air conditioned because there are so many of them; they're always on and they get hot from all the processing they do."

"Sounds like he talks a lot about his work."

She shrugged. "I like hearing about it. As an economics major, it fascinates me, seeing a case study in action. All of these startups are little bubbles; investors pour money into these companies on hardly more than word of mouth about what services they provide and what value they'll have after a certain amount of time. There's no physical product to show them, no real value, no projection of profits over time. The bubble inflates with all the investment cash, but what happens to a bubble once it inflates past the point of stability?"

Sunny made an exploding gesture with his hands. Bishan nodded. "And Jordan is fine working in this unstable work envrironment?" he asked.

"Are you kidding? He loves it. He's on the ground floor of something world changing, at least in his eyes. He doesn't mind the inconsistent income because he still lives at home, and his family has money."

"And you? You wouldn't want to be married to that lifestyle?"

Bishan shrugged. "Feast or famine never really appealed to me. At least Balwinder's work is relatively consistent. People always need to move things around."

"What about you? Are you going to work?"

She'd quit her job at McDonald's, having reached the position of crew chief, after she and Balwinder had gotten engaged. Balwinder wasn't opposed in principle to his future wife working, he said, but he didn't see the point of her working in a soul crushing job if it didn't add significantly to the family income. Sunny thought more likely it was because Balwinder was subtly encouraging Bishan to think about starting a family by clearing the way for her to stay home without guilt.