by CD Reiss
“About time!” the older lady shouted.
“Is Harper back?” I asked, handing the bags to the blushing redhead.
As if summoned, Harper came through the swinging door, keeping it open so everyone could get past. She looked at me through the screen.
“You coming in?” she asked.
“We need to talk.”
“Did the decryption key work?”
The door slapped closed behind her as she came out, and we were alone. The way the setting sun hit her cheeks made her glow, and the strands of gold hair at the edges looked translucent. She belonged on a postcard.
I kept forgetting she was holding me hostage. I kept forgetting I needed to think strategically. I had more at stake with this girl than I’d ever had with another.
“Did you doubt it would work?”
“Not really. I’m just making conversation.”
“What are the thorns about?” I pointed at the thorn bed that had eaten my phone and went down the stairs to the yard.
She came after me. “Don’t you have these where you’re from?” She snapped a dry twig off the end.
“Roses? Yes. Impenetrable, groomed thorn bushes in our yards? No.”
“It’s not normal to give the gardeners in town something to do?” We walked around the perimeter.
“You are not normal.”
“It still blooms in spring. It’s really nice. You should see it.”
We were at the back end of the yard, where the very top of the factory’s roof cut the horizon.
I took her hand, pulling her to a stop. “Harper.”
“Taylor?” Her hair flew in her mouth when she turned, and she drew her finger across her cheek to get it out.
What was I supposed to tell her again? That I knew we’d interviewed her. That I didn’t give her the job despite her having a leg up on everyone else we saw.
But was I contrite? Accusatory? Was I just going to relay information? What did I want out of her after I told her I knew?
“Thank you for helping today,” she said. “If you’d asked me when we met, ‘Would Taylor Harden help clean the factory?’ I would have said, ‘No, not for any reason.’ But there you were. Pushing a broom. Scooping up shit. Not being an asshole.”
“My watch was at stake.”
“Yeah. Whatever. You can say what you want to keep your reputation as a shithead intact.”
“I have a reputation as a shithead?”
“You know you do.”
I did know it, and I reveled in it.
She faced me and put her other hand out. I took it, holding both hands between us. I couldn’t help it.
“Well, you guys are such a bunch of sad sacks I had to help. And let me tell you, every guy in Barrington has a little asshole in him. Trust me. I’ve played pool with them.”
“I want to say…” She stopped herself as if she really didn’t want to say. “Let’s get together tonight and get you another decryption code. But… saying this is stupid.” She bit her lip.
“Say it anyway.”
“The sooner you get four codes, the sooner you leave.”
I looked at our hands so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“I’m not sure if I want that,” she said.
Was she playing some kind of game? No matter how many ways I peeled this onion, I couldn’t get to the center. Was she after my heart? Had she changed the fucking rules?
I had feelings for her I couldn’t cope with, but if she was going to start moving the goalposts, I would lose my shit. I couldn’t do this dance. Not with Keaton walking around the cage like a specter.
I let go of her hands. She was turning my head inside out, and all the pieces were dropping to the ground.
“You have a buddy on Chaxxer.” I’d started, so I had to finish. “I saw it on your screen.”
Her eyes went a little wide, and her throat moved as she swallowed hard. She didn’t have to confirm it. She knew what I’d seen.
“So?” She planted her feet far apart as if daring me to knock her over. “What’s it to you?”
“More practice? Like me? The way I’m practice?”
“I like you better.”
“Don’t sweet-talk me. You’ve been telling how many guys on Chaxxer how hard you can suck the—”
“Shut up, Taylor Harden! You just shut your mouth.”
“A few years ago, we met a guy on the dark web who was a big fan of my partner. He was no one then. Keaton was Alpha Wolf; this guy called himself Beta Wolf. Just for shits. ‘Flow’ is ‘wolf’ backward, and if the B in ‘bro’ is a beta?”
“When did you figure it out?”
“That Fitz was Flow Bro? That you’ve been talking dirty on Chaxxer? Or that you were the one to get him to come to Barrington?”
She blinked too long, and her expression went slack as if she was looking inside her own mind. Calculating. I could see her making connections, but what connections?
I wanted to know—for all the obvious reasons and one not-so-obvious reason. I wanted to know her. Not just why she was lying but how.
“I can sell him a factory,” she said. “Or I can sell him a package. A place to make things and a girl who gives him what he wants, how he wants it.”
“How did you find out he likes it dirty?”
Her expression changed a dozen times before she spoke. “Does it matter? I hacked him. He’s a man. He’s a rich asshole from daddy’s money. He wants to be worshipped. He wants a few holes to stick his dick in, and he wants to be told he’s got powers no one else has. You guys are all alike. You want to be treated as though you’re gold-plated. Well, I got news—you’re not. Not him. Not you. Nobody. We’re all made of blood and electrical currents. All of us. And we all have a code in our neurons where a guy like Fitz can be tricked into doing the right thing. So, yeah. He’s filthy, so I learned to be filthy. But it’s got to work in the real world. You’re teaching me to fuck so I can seduce him. If I can make him love me, he’ll buy the factory. He’ll hire us. He’ll save us.”
“You’re crazy.”
I’d made the observation before, but behind the thorn bush, something else stirred. She was crazy, but I wanted her. My cock pushed against my pants for her. Her insanity was rubbing off on me.
“You can be in or out.” She got her finger in my face. “But you’re in because I hacked you too.”
I grabbed her wrist and wrested it away from my face. “No, Harper. You’re crazy if you think I believe it. You’re too smart for such a stupid plan.”
There wasn’t a bit of insecurity in her eyes. How could she be so confident?
I couldn’t counter with the facts, couldn’t tell her he wouldn’t do what she wanted, because I was halfway to falling for her myself.
Maybe that was her gift.
Fuck this.
I was here to get shit done.
Shit was getting done.
Jamming my hand in her waistband, I made a fist around the fabric and twisted her jeans, tightening the crotch. She leveraged herself on my shoulders.
“When he walks away from you,” I said, “come to me.”
Her button-fly popped open when I pulled the sides apart.
“What are you doing?”
“Free lesson.”
Her gaze went from hard to liquid in a heartbeat, and her hands went to the lump in my pants, stroking through the fabric.
Was it real? Was she faking it?
Pushing her pants down, I got my fingers on her soaking-wet pussy.
Can’t fake that.
I crushed her lips on mine, tasting her tongue, biting her with a vengeance that made her squeal. I was going to fuck her right there in the dirt. Half dressed, wrestling under the darkening sky, I was going to tear her apart.
She had my dick out, and my face was buried in her neck as she stroked it. There was no expertise in her movements, but the ache in my body responded as if she did everything right.
“Give me your hand,” I said, tak
ing it before she could offer it.
I kissed the tips of her fingers, sucked them, left a trail of saliva across her palm. She gasped in surprise and arousal. I’d get to that later. But for now, I took her thumb in my mouth and sucked hard.
“Oh, I didn’t…” After another gasp, she finished, “I didn’t know that could feel so good.”
I put her slick hand on my erection and paced her. “The head’s where the nerve endings are. You have to…” She ran her thumb along the back. “Do that.”
She watched my expression with her big, multicolored eyes, taking in my every reaction like a learning machine.
She’s learning how to fuck someone else.
I’m fine with that.
I wasn’t fine with it. The pressure was building as she jerked me off. It got harder to think. The firewall between my jealousy and what I allowed myself to think was under attack. I put my hands on her cheeks and pressed her face to mine until I felt her breath on my lips.
“You don’t… ah…”
Say it.
Do not say it.
Do. Not.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Should I suck it instead?” Her voice was soft and suggestive.
She’d misunderstood. I could have corrected her, but I was about to lose it. I lifted her shirt and let loose on her belly, burying my face in her neck, her ozone smell, the air before a storm.
“Harper.” I groaned it. The longing in my voice was audible.
I’d been jerked off before, but this time I was in a weakened state. Not because of the orgasm. Those were a dime a dozen. Another bit of chemistry was at work. Some new variable had been added to the algorithm.
She pulled away, holding her shirt up so it wouldn’t get sticky. Under her white bra, her body dripped where I’d marked her with my DNA. I could only see the top of her head because she was looking down, moving her unbuttoned jeans away.
When she looked at me, her hair was a wheaten nest and her grin was a conspiracy of desire against logic. As if we were in on something together. As if we were partnered on an epic hacking exploit.
That was it.
I changed my mind about everything.
“Stay there,” I said, taking a wrinkled hankie out of my back pocket. “It’s the guy’s job to clean you up.” I kneeled in front of her and wiped her off. “Any guy that doesn’t clean you off, you get rid of, you hear? He’s not worth you.”
It was getting dark, but when I looked up at her, I could just about see her face. The wind blew from the direction of the river, covering her like window blinds. She shook her head. The hair came off her face, falling to one side.
“You got that?” I said. “It’s things like that that you have to watch for.”
“I got it. He wipes me off.”
“He worships you.”
I kissed her where I’d marked her, running my tongue below her navel, pulling her jeans to her knees. I kissed the fronts of her thighs as she ran her fingers through my hair.
“He worships me.”
She was wearing boots. I could have waited for her to get it all off, but I needed to taste her.
“He treats you like a queen.” Pulling her open, I got my tongue on her clit.
“Oh my God.” Her knees bent, giving me better access.
Without a wall or a bed to lean against, we fought a losing battle with gravity and physics. We fell into a tangled pile on the ground with my head between her legs, her pants and boots still on, her fingers gripping my scalp. We were feral animals, and I wanted to eat her alive.
I reached up to touch her face. My fingers slid into her open mouth. Her breathing got hard and fast, and the taste of her got clearer, sweeter, more raw. I covered her mouth so the people in the house wouldn’t run out to rescue her.
She came in the dirt and scraggly grass, pushing my face between her legs as I pushed my hand harder on her mouth.
“Wait. Wait, stop,” she muttered behind my hand.
Even when she tried to wiggle away, I kept on, lightening up so it wouldn’t hurt, but I wanted another. One for her. One for me.
Her second orgasm flipped us over. My hand fell away from her mouth, and she straddled me with her jeans behind my neck. Her back arched. I held her to me until she stopped moving.
“Please.” She was practically weeping. “No more.”
I let her go. She shifted back but couldn’t untangle herself completely without help. Her jeans had slid lower and were completely wrapped around the boots. My body was between her legs, with one hand over my head and one trapped by the jeans.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I think we’re stuck.”
“Think of it as coding praxis. One step at a time.”
I rolled until I was on top of her, more or less, holding myself up with my free arm. I kissed her cheek then her lips.
She flicked her tongue over my chin. “That’s what I taste like.”
“Yes. And I want to tell you something.”
I’d never told a woman anything like I was about to tell this one. So I paused and considered it. Thought hard. Swapped words around. It had to be perfect, but I kept changing what that meant.
“I think I need to take a boot off.” She shifted and stared at the dark blue sky.
“No. You need to stay still for a minute.”
She moved her face from the sky to me. “Okay. I’m still.”
“You and I.” Nothing I’d prepared was right. I threw it all away. “We don’t have to be against each other. We can be…”
Be what?
Partners?
Something simply more?
Or less?
I wasn’t ready to define what we were. I wanted to define what we weren’t.
“You don’t have to do this,” I continued. “This thing with Fitz. It’s bullshit. You’re making it up because it’s a stall for the real reason.”
“What’s the real reason?”
“You want me.”
“Oh, God, you have to stop believing your own PR.”
She bucked her hips, flinging me to the side. I wrestled her back down with one arm.
“There are too many steps.” I held up one finger with my free hand. “You come up with the hack of the century to—one—lure me here”—two fingers made a V—“so I could train you to fuck”—I put the W in her face—“so you can seduce a guy into reopening the factory. And that’s two steps right there.” Four fingers. “You want to tell me how that plan makes any sense?”
“It makes sense.” She growled from deep in her chest. “We’ve tried Congress. We’ve tried the law. We spent money we didn’t have sending people to talk and talk and talk to businesses. We’re still dying here. The only thing that makes sense is getting a human man to do what human men do.”
I twisted, pulled, held her in place while I bent my body through the space between her legs and her jeans. Kneeling in front of her in the dark, she was an odd-shaped silhouette in the twilight.
I growled at her, “Human men fuck shit up.”
She rolled onto the balls of her feet and stood, naked between her waist and her calves. The house lights cast a glow on the top of her body while the thorn bed made twisted shadows over her stomach. I could smell her pussy.
“You know what?” she said, leaning over to loosen her pants from her boots. I reached out to help her, but she swatted me away. “My reasons and my sense aren’t your business. Your business is getting your code back.”
She slid her underwear up, covering her delicious pussy smell. I remembered I was on my knees with my dick out. My first impulse was to lash out at her. Hurt her. Bring her down to her knees. But a little voice mentioned that hadn’t worked with her yet and trying it again would be the definition of insanity.
I stood. “You’re better than this.”
She spit out a laugh and shimmied her jeans over her hips. “Don’t sweet-talk me, Taylor. It’s not going to work.”
But it had already worked.
Her tone was more pliant.
“I should have hired you.”
“So you remember?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t want to admit it any more than I wanted to lie about it.
“When I heard you had an opening, Catherine scraped up the money for a flight,” she said. “One night in a hotel. I aced the fucking coding test. You made some comment about ‘fitting in with the culture’ and didn’t listen to my answer.”
“So this is revenge?”
She walked along the back of the thorn bed, her boots crunching against the dirt path. One side of her was lit by the golden light from the house, and when she turned toward it, I could see her profile.
I couldn’t run away. Couldn’t fire her or ignore her. I was so angry and powerless the most hurtful things didn’t seem hurtful enough. And as much as cutting her down would be the definition of insanity, I wanted to shame her. Cut her down. Make her cry.
“All I’m saying is…” I paused as if hovering my finger over the send button.
She stopped and looked at me, daring me to press it.
Fuck it.
“You don’t have to be such a whore.”
I don’t know what I’d expected. She walked briskly to the house, taking big steps, ran up the porch stairs, and let the door slap behind her.
Her taste lingered on my tongue. I rolled it around with the word I’d used to break her and failed.
XL
Harper wasn’t at dinner. I ate with everyone, made small talk, helped clear the table while watching the driveway for her car. I had a beer with Orrin and Butthead on the porch. It seemed like the best vantage point to watch for Harper to come back.
She didn’t.
Percy looked at me with sad brown eyes and a drooping tail as if he felt sorry for me. When I scratched his neck, he laid his head on my lap.
“My God, son. What happened to you to make old Percy give you comfort?”
“Did half a day’s work in a factory. Nearly snapped me in two,” I deflected.
Butthead belched. Orrin laughed. Harper still didn’t show up.
The fucking send button. It needed to be locked before a guy called any woman a whore, especially Harper Barrington aka Watson, who was just about as far from a whore as a woman could be.
