by CD Reiss
“You’re more likely to knock it over like that.”
Damn. That meant I was leaning in the right direction, which meant I was in that same room. Fuck.
“And anyway, that’s the wrong side,” she added.
Different room? Okay. I reached out with my left hand. My knuckles found cool plastic.
“For the love of Pete.” Her exasperation was cute in a psycho kind of way.
The cold container was put right in my palm. It was short. I opened my eyes. Everything was a mad blur except the water container I held three inches from my face. It was a purple-and-yellow sippy cup with clowns biking around the sides.
“You don’t have to pick your head up this way,” she explained.
I closed my eyes and put the bottle to my lips, sucking on the end like I’d sucked her hard little clit. I remembered it had been a red-painted pebble.
Or not.
That had been a dream. Right.
“Thank you.”
“There’s something for your headache if you can reach it. Or I can get it for you.”
“I got it.” I gave up sweet darkness and opened my eyes for real, blinking the blur out. The ceiling was painted in roses. “You put me in the moldy room.”
“Closer to the stairs. You were heavy. Butthead’s not in great shape, you know.”
I got up on my elbows. I was dressed. I knew that much. A blanket was thrown over me, hiding my dream-induced boner. When I turned to Harper, my neck hurt. She was in a white wicker chair, one knee folded with her bare foot up on the edge. Her arms wrapped around the bend in her leg, and her fingers laced together around her calf. I couldn’t read her expression.
“Thank you,” I said. That hurt too.
“You still drunk?”
“A little.”
“Kyle said you could still hit bank shots better than you could stand.”
“It’s math.” I scooped up the three brown pills on the night table. “I can do that drunk.”
“Apparently. You were the proud owner of half the Harleys in town until about midnight.”
“I don’t ride.” I washed down the pills with sippy-cup water and flopped back on the pillow. “They can keep them.” I put my arm over my eyes. My Langematik was gone. “Where’s my watch?”
“You played nine ball with Johnny. Mistake.”
Right. Math + Sobriety > Math/Drunk.
“Those guys are a bunch of assholes. I don’t know how you stay here.”
I meant it as a compliment, and she read my sarcasm like a pamphlet on guy-speak.
“They’re all right.” Her voice was bathed in warmth and pride.
“No, I mean, yeah, sure. They’re fine. But I can’t get the hell out of here, and I don’t even live here.”
“You should really think about my offer. I’m a great student.”
“You’re a terrorist.”
“I’m desperate. There’s a difference.”
I moved my arm and looked at her. “Why?”
“Why is there a difference?”
“Why are you desperate?”
She got up, leaned down until her hair brushed my chin, and whispered so close I could hear the wet pop of her tongue on the roof of her mouth.
“You haven’t been paying attention.”
She quickly kissed me and walked out before I even felt it.
XXIV
I’d gotten where I was from paying attention. Her town was desperate. The guys in the bar last night were desperate. They stank of it. Their jokes were laced with it. They were uneducated, unemployed, and stuck. But Harper had money, beauty, and talent. Maybe the headache was keeping me from seeing what she wanted me to see.
Maybe that was all I had to do. See her problem. Then she’d release my system and kick me out of her fucking house. Maybe she’d marry one of Johnny’s kids and make smart babies.
Yeah. No.
Harper didn’t need to marry anyone right now.
My reaction was so quick I couldn’t question it until I was entrenched in refusal. Obviously, from a completely impartial standpoint, she was too good to be stuck here. I didn’t need to want her myself to know that. Staying here and making babies with a guy in a trucker hat was a betrayal of her potential. As opposed to (me) someone with resources (me) and a valid passport to take her around the world (me).
Not me, obviously. I wasn’t interested in crazy. I wasn’t even interested in a relationship.
But someone like me.
The room swam when I sat up, and the knife in my head jabbed hard when I stood, but I wasn’t so hungover that pissing in the bed was an option. By the time I’d emptied my bladder, I had my balance back. My eyes cleared, and I could see the wiry mushroom growing out of the ceiling. The paint it grew from was probably full of lead. I put my dick away, washed my hands, and tried to walk out. But the mushroom bothered me. It had a long stem and a small, cone-shaped head. I pulled it, but the plaster put up a fight. A chunk of dusty white grit came off, leaving rocks and dust on the toilet tank. But a string of mycelium stayed attached. I pulled again. Another line of plaster came off.
“Shit.” I dropped it and let it hang from the fissure. That was going to bother me more than if I’d just left it alone.
“Mr. Harden?” A female voice came from the bedroom.
Catherine stood in the doorway with her hands folded over her chest. She was so sweet and unassuming in an apron and dress. Like a real throwback to an earlier time. The exact opposite of her sister. I wondered how much she knew about what Harper was up to.
“Yeah. Hey, thank you for putting me up again.”
“It’s not a problem. I was making eggs. Did you want some?”
“Hell yeah.”
She smiled. She liked being useful. I could tell that much. “Any preference?”
“Any way you make them. But if it doesn’t matter to you, fried is fine.”
“How many? Three?”
I could have eaten a dozen. “Yeah. That would be great. Thanks.” She was about to leave when I stopped her. “Catherine?”
“Yeah?”
“Where’s Harper?”
“Running errands. Be down in ten if you like your eggs hot.”
* * *
Catherine had eggs, coffee, toast, and bacon ready on the kitchen table. I washed up in the sink.
“I made a mess in the bathroom.”
“What was it?”
“The mushroom was making me crazy.”
She laughed. “Reggie plasters over it at least twice a year.”
I rinsed, wondering what a person would have to do to make Catherine angry. “I can spackle it up.”
“Really? Well, you can see if there’re any tools in the shed.” She handed me a towel. “When are you leaving, Mr. Harden?”
She didn’t sound cruel or rude. Her tone barely moved.
I wiped my hands, wishing I had an answer. “I keep trying to.”
The eggs were still warm. I tried not to shovel them, but I was starving.
“I want you to think about taking Harper with you.” Catherine sat across from me, cradling her coffee mug.
Did she know her sister was a hacker? Did she know her sister was inches away from ruining me?
“Excuse me?”
“She’s dying here, and she won’t leave. The longer she stays, well, you know what happens.”
She didn’t know. She thought Harper was just her smart sister.
“To be honest, I don’t know what happens.”
“She made it to twenty-five without having kids. Most girls around here start at eighteen. She’s going to be an old maid like me unless she finds a man who can match her.” Catherine didn’t look as if she’d hit thirty. Hardly an old maid. “I think where you are, she might find happiness.”
In Silicon Valley, a girl like Harper would get swooped up like a steak in a wolf’s den. She’d have her pick of rich and talented men. The fact that what she’d done to QI4 would make her a talent commodity was an oddly seconda
ry concern.
“She can go where she wants.”
“No, I mean… you could introduce her around. Be her friend.”
My reflection stared back at me from the black surface of my coffee. “I could. But where I’m from, no one really likes me. Right now, my company’s under attack, and outside the people who work for me, everyone thinks it’s funny, or cool, or they’re somehow vindicated. The whole world watched me burn, and now you know what they’re disappointed about? Not that my creation crashed. They’re disappointed that they won’t get to be the ones to take me down. They won’t get the glory. Someone beat them to it. So I’d love to help Harper, but if I brought her back with me, they’d hate her too.”
“I doubt everyone hates you.”
“Believe it. I can show you tweets that would make your hair turn red.”
She blew on her coffee and sipped it. Tapped the edge. “She’s had a rough time.”
“I know.”
“When our father died, she was supposed to take time off school and go back. But our mother…” Catherine shook her head pensively. “She took a mortgage out on the factory, defaulted first chance she got, and left with everything. Just. Gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
She waved as if it was old news. “There was a man involved. Of course. Had been for a while. She was waiting for our father to die so she could leave.”
“So you started selling furniture.”
She smiled at some foolishness then sighed. “I hear someone has a problem… if all I have to do is give them an antique to sell, I give it to them. That’s all they’ll take. An object or work. No one accepts a handout.”
“It’s a big house. That’s a lot of problems.”
“It is.” She gathered the plates and brought them to the sink. “And there are more. Always. The furniture’s gone, and I’m running out of projects around here.”
I couldn’t imagine her sacrifice. Richest girl in town with a father who owned the primary place of employment reduced to poverty by her own mother.
“Do you have tools around? Hand tools? Stuff like that?” I asked.
“In the shed out back. We’ve loaned a lot out and sold some, but the basics should be there.”
“Okay, to your first question, I don’t know when I’m leaving. Harper and I have some things to work out.”
“What things?” Her voice was all hope wrapped in surprise.
“Just things. Let me fix that hole in the wall first.”
XXV
I found the shed to the right of the thorny bed of bushes. It was a rotted-out mess. The door nearly came off when I opened it, and dozens of crickets jumped whenever I moved something. How did these women decide what got attention and what didn’t? Was it money? Time? Materials?
The tool bench was tidy but dirty with disuse. Some of the metal jar tops screwed into the ceiling had glass jars of nails threaded in; some were just circles waiting to be used. This had been someone’s special place. They’d kept pictures of boats, model planes, vintage cola signs, and wooden boxes that probably held treasures I had the curiosity but not the courage to open.
A hole in the roof had let water in, rusting everything. A hoe with the grey handle. A sledgehammer with the handle half broken off. A pair of pliers screamed in a permanent open state.
I found a box of old scrapers crusted in plaster. I found three containers of joint compound. I could only get one open. After working past an inch of dried crust, I found a pocket still wet enough to use.
Back upstairs, I scraped off the mushroom and plastered over the crack, laying the compound on as smoothly as I could. It stuck and shifted on the cracking plaster, and I ended up with a larger patch than I wanted. Eradicating the mushroom meant ripping out the mycelium, which was probably in the wood on two of the walls and the bedroom adjacent. No one had time for that.
“Taylor?” Harper’s voice came from the open French doors.
I checked my watch, but it was gone. Once I was on the balcony, the breeze cooled the moisture on my skin. The sun came in at an angle, and I was a little hungry.
Harper looked up from ground level, shielding her eyes from the sun. Her hair was in a loose ponytail at the back of her neck.
“What are you doing?” she called.
“I’m not leaving until you give me what you took, and the mushrooms were making me crazy. They grow behind the walls. It’s… unnerving.”
“Unnerving?”
I gripped the railing. Are you doing this or not? “Come up here, Harper.”
I’d decided. I was doing this.
I pointed toward the doors on the other side of the balcony that led to the room I’d slept in the night before. I did not say please, and I did not ask a question. One of us was in charge, and it wasn’t her. Even if she had the keys to my life on the little ring in her head, this wasn’t working if she was the one calling the shots.
I washed my hands in the mycelium-free bathroom by my room. No time for a shower.
The stairs creaked. A pressure grew behind my balls because I knew what was coming.
She stood at the end of the hall, hand draped on the bannister. Branches of hair had escaped her ponytail and dropped to either cheek. I pointed at a spot on the floor in front of me. She scratched a spot on her neck, which was unremarkable except for her hand. It looked as if it had been rinsed in light blue paint and scrubbed. The tinge was in the corners of the nails and the deep lines in her wrist.
“Come into my room and close the door,” I said.
“You’re all sweaty.”
“You want to do this or not?”
If I had been trying to scare her, I’d failed. She practically skipped into the room.
“Close the door,” I commanded again. She did it. “I want to set the rules right off.”
“Okay.”
“You won’t tell me why you want this or why you went to all the trouble, but if you’re trying to trap me into marriage or some shit—”
She laughed derisively. “Yeah. No.”
My feelings were not hurt.
Nope.
Not one bit.
“Condoms.” I put up a finger. “Every time.”
“Yes.”
I put up a second finger. “Don’t come to me with emotional attachment. I’m not interested.”
“Me neither.”
My third finger made a W. “This has to be done in nine days. If it’s not, I’m leaving, and I’ll just deal with the consequences.”
“It won’t take longer than that. I told you. I’m a really good student.”
“All right. Let’s get this show on the road.”
I dug my thumb into my other palm absently, thinking this might not be a bad way to spend a few days. QI4 would be back, Deeprak would spin it into a learning experience; we’d work on manufacturing our own goddamn monitors and BIOS. I could just go back to the way things were. That alone was enough to give me serious wood.
“Take your clothes off, Harper.”
XXVI
I’d never seen anything like it. She was a good student. Good like the kid who raises their hand highest, shakes it, bounces, and says, “Ooh ooh!” until they’re called on. She dropped her jacket like a bad habit and attacked her shirt buttons with enthusiasm.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Hold up.”
“What?” She was frozen with her shirt on one shoulder.
“Slow down.” I dropped into a chair, crossing my legs and watching.
She tossed her shirt on the floor. Then her bra. Bent to slide her pants down. Deliberate. Slow. Authentic.
By taking away the cover of kisses and close bodies, I intended to make her uncomfortable. Punishment for what she’d done. Hack my system. Humiliate me. Put everyone on my team in jeopardy. Lure me hundreds of miles away. Use me.
And for all of it, never tell me why.
She was naked in front of me. Smooth and pale, hair over her shoulders so I could see her shape from top to bottom, her
rounded tits, her curved waist, the bald triangle between her legs. The tiny slit at the bottom was the focus of all my attention. I couldn’t have solved for x and looked at it at the same time.
“You shaved.” I asked a question by stating the obvious.
“Men like it. No?”
“Some do. Some don’t.”
“What about you?”
“How you keep yourself is your business. There aren’t any rules.”
“Ah.”
“A guy will let you know.”
I got near her and let the backs of my fingers run over her nipple. My body pushed up against my mind, saying, Now now now. But the moments before the first time, before sex with whomever, they were worth savoring.
She licked her lip and looked at me with an utter guilelessness that was so sexy the pressure to get my dick in her became unbearable. Fucking her would be so easy. Giving her a tip or a trick, nailing her, bending her, and making her come over and over. So easy.
But I had my pride. “Kneel on the bed.”
She did it, and I tapped the edge of the foot.
“This is awkward,” I said. “You’re blackmailing me, you won’t tell me why, and I still want to fuck you.”
“You’re a complete fucking douche, and I still want to fuck you.”
I held my finger up to her face. “Keep talking like that, and I might start to like you.”
A smile crept across her face. She confused the fuck out of me, but I liked her. I hated her. I was angry at her. I was afraid of her. And still, I liked her.
Letting weight fall against her bottom lip, I leaned into her until I could feel her breath on my chin.
“The moment before a kiss is important,” I said. “You need to savor it.”
“Okay.” Her eyelids fluttered.
“Never rush.” I heard her swallow. “Lips first. Keep it loose.” I brushed ours together, and she shuddered. I had full wood already. “Light. Gentle to start.”
I kissed her top lip then below. She tasted like river water and rain. I flicked my tongue into her mouth quickly, and she gasped.
“Has no one ever kissed you before?”
