by Reiss, CD
“I like you, Harper.”
She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were huge. Her demeanor was calm, and she didn’t say a fucking word.
“I want to know why. Of everything, why this?”
“Ever have a goal, Taylor?”
“Don’t get me started.”
“I have a goal, and it’s through you. You’ll live. You’ll walk away and be fine.”
“And you? Will you be fine?”
She smirked from one side of her face. “Oral and you get the object code back.”
“You tell me how you did it. Then you suck my dick, then the decryption code.”
I couldn’t believe what I was saying. It was all win for me, but I felt as though I’d never bargained for anything as hard in my life.
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms and legs. “I like you too.”
I crossed my arms, leaned back on cheap plastic chair legs, and crossed my ankles. Now we were fully crossed. No one was going anywhere.
“How did you transmit signal out of the cage?”
She shook her head slowly and stood. “That’s not on the table.” Scooping up her soup container and my empty cup, she dumped them into the garbage. “Wait here.”
She went past the gate and into the parking lot, showing her ID card to the guard as she went. I was alone again. Her Chevy came out of the gate soon after, and I got into the passenger seat. She drove onto the interstate.
“The poison pill had an antenna,” I said. “Too short to send far.”
“Didn’t have to.”
I hadn’t expected to hear that. As if she could see my discomfort, a smile twitched her lips. Hackers loved nothing more than recounting an exploit. As much as I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of telling me how she’d done it, I needed to know.
“Just tell me. If your exploit isn’t part of the deal, there’s no deal,” I said.
“I never met a guy so unwilling to get a blow job.”
“I never met a woman who wanted to give one for your reasons. If I can even figure your reasons out. Which I can’t.”
She got off the interstate and took a couple more left turns than rights. I was sure she was trying to disorient me, but that was easier said than done. Eventually, she pulled past an opening between two beige-painted cinderblock walls, past rusted hinges and a couple of wrought-iron strips bent into the shapes of an alien alphabet.
It was a place of weird contradictions, like a toy graveyard or an abandoned arcade. Wood rectangles the size of my railroad apartment in San Jose were set in a grid. Brightly painted cracked flowerpots, broken swing sets, a brand new but disconnected screen door. A twist of lead pipes coming out of the ground. One had a valve and spigot.
The fact that I couldn’t see it right away after my father taking me to so many job sites was embarrassing. It wasn’t until we slowly passed a tractor trailer wheel filled with thriving tomato plants that my brain put the pieces together. We were in an abandoned trailer park.
She stopped in the spotty shade of a tree and put the car in park. “This was my father’s last project.”
“Looks like it didn’t go so well.”
“He made money. Trust me.”
We got out. It was chilly, fall weather. The trees’ leaves hung like laundry from the branches. When the wind blew, dozens fell like brown scrap paper.
She spun a few feet from me and held out her arms. “Ready?”
I wasn’t. My dick was, but I wasn’t. “How did you get signal out of the cage?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Very sure.”
“Then you’ll show me?”
“How to suck a dick better than a Coke bottle? Yeah, Harper. It’ll be my pleasure.”
She looked down slightly. Bit her lip. Prelude to a lie? Or a closely held truth? “You want a lot for not much.”
“I want everything. And I’ll pay everything for it.”
“Yes. You will.” She whispered it like a filthy promise.
Fuck her.
Fuck her for being so in control. Fuck her for being so beautiful and intense. Fuck her for fucking up everything. Fuck her for scaring the shit out of me.
I took her by the back of the head and kissed her, not to tell her how much my body wanted to fuck her or how much I needed to get control of this negotiation, relationship, deal, plan, whatever, but to decode her. In the kiss, my anxiety was soothed. Her lips were honest. The groan in her throat told me she had less control than she thought. Her tongue yielded. She had barriers, but in that kiss, she told me she wasn’t a stone monolith.
When I pulled away, she gasped.
“I could spend the entire day kissing you,” I said. “But that’s not why you brought me here, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
Was she disappointed? Yes. I decoded that much as well, and I relished it. I had to do what she wanted. I didn’t have to pretend to like it, even if I wouldn’t have been pretending.
I undid my belt. “You’re going to suck my dick. You’re going to take the entire thing down your throat, and you’re going to swallow whatever I give you. Is that what you’re after?”
“I want to learn how to do it right.”
“Don’t worry about that. You’re going to learn.”
Opening my pants, I got my dick out. I was so hard it hurt. She knelt in front of me, knees in the dirt. When she laid her eyes on my cock, I thought I’d burst right there. I turned her chin upward.
“Open your mouth.”
She did, just enough to fold the crease in her lower lip.
“So you know how to open your throat?”
“Ahh.” She made the noise people made for the doctor.
I put two fingers on her tongue. “Press the back of your tongue down while doing that.” I slid my fingers down her throat as far as I could.
Her eyes scrunched shut. Her stomach heaved twice.
“Hold it down,” I said, and she got control of her gag reflex. “You really have been studying.” I took my fingers out, letting her breathe.
“Thank you.”
Why didn’t I get the dirty talk? Why did Flow Prince or whatever get it and all I got were the innocent polychrome eyes?
“Tell me what you’re going to do.”
She opened her mouth and slapped it shut. “I…”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to suck your dick. I hope you like it.”
I laughed. Who could help it? Her courtesy was disarming even when it made me question everything I’d seen on her screen. Even when she was holding me hostage.
“Assume I’ll like it and say it again. Say it…” I paused, realizing the right way to approach it. “Say what you’d say if you were typing it and you couldn’t see me.”
She put her hands on the backs of my thighs, bringing me that much closer to her mouth. “I’m going to suck you until you come in my mouth.”
“You know how a news reporter says things?”
“Am I too much like that?”
She was, but complaining would get me nowhere.
“Do this. Say it real seductive. Too seductive.”
She tilted her head and puckered her lips, letting saccharine syrup mixed with heavy musk fall from them. “I’m going to suck your dick.”
I held my laugh in the back of my throat. “Now do the news reporting with twenty percent of that second try.”
“I’m pretty sure you know what I’m going to do already.”
“You want to learn to do this or not?”
Deep breath. Eyes closed. She put her hand around the base of my cock and opened her eyes to look up at me. “Fuck my face, Taylor. Fuck it hard.”
My dick throbbed in her hand, and for a moment, just a moment, I lost the ability to speak. I had to clear my throat before I responded. “Gold star.”
“Yay.”
Yay? Who made this woman? What cruel god put together the sweetest traits with this level of joyful fil
th? I’d never met anyone like her. I didn’t know if I’d said that to myself before, but I was sure I’d say it again. She was a complete original.
“Put your lips at the tip.”
She did what I told her.
“Lick the drop off. The tip and behind it, right here? That’s the most sensitive part. Now put your hand around the base. Open. Say ah and press the back of your tongue down. Right. Breathe through your nose as long as you can. Open. Good.”
I pushed her head down, and she bobbed on me. Fuck. I usually guided a girl and let her guide me, but this was ridiculously hot. She took every instruction, every correction, as if her job was at stake.
“Pull away when you need a break. Lick the sides and start again.”
She did and took me deep again. A blade of hair stuck between her lips and my dick. I pulled it away and tucked it behind her ear. I could come in that hair. I could blow into her mouth the next time the wind blew the leaves down, but that would give her all the control, and I had something to prove.
I wanted information more than I wanted an orgasm.
“Put your hand around it.” I nudged her head away, and she looked up at me with my dick in her fist. “The signal. How did it transmit?”
“You want to know now?”
“Now.”
She rolled her eyes and licked the taste of my cock off her lips. “The poison pill transmitted to an object that went in and out of the cage. A little bit at a time. When the object was outside the cage, it transmitted to a Pwnie Express item in reception.”
“We found it. The power strip.”
“Right. It had a router in it.” She held up two fingers to show me the miniscule size of the router. “It transmitted back to the object and brought information back. Once I figured out how to lock you out, and when Wired was coming, I told the Pwnie Express when to encrypt and how to decrypt, and it told the object.” She moved closer, and I couldn’t help but touch her face. She was a work of art. Her hack was as gorgeous as she was, and both made me angry and humbled at the same time. “The object went in and told your system what to do.”
I stroked her cheek with my left hand and grabbed a fistful of hair with my right. “What’s the object?”
She put her hand over my left wrist and held it. “Not yet.” Defying the force of my hand, she pushed toward me, flicking her tongue over the head of my aching cock.
“Tell me, or I’m making you swallow.”
She answered by opening her mouth, and I replied by fucking it.
“I’m going to come,” I gasped. But I had to teach her, not just come in her mouth. “A guy should tell you. And you don’t have to swallow for anyone else, but for me, because you won’t tell me the… you take—”
Too late. I blew it all, and she took it. When I looked down, her face was knotted.
“Swallow.”
She closed her mouth and swallowed, shaking her head like a puppy. “Ugh, I hope I can get used to that.”
I ran my thumb along the corner of her mouth, wiping the moisture away. She was lovely. “Why would you have to? Who are you doing this for?”
“Myself.”
“Really?”
She straightened her hair, and in the instant before she got on her feet, I felt her desire to answer fully and completely. Tell everything. A moment of weakness, maybe. Or I could have been misreading her.
By the time she stood, the moment was gone, and she was a hacker, a terrorist, my captor, and she was withholding information I needed.
“The decryption code.” I put my dick back in my pants. It was still sensitive.
She folded her bottom lip, deep in thought. I waited. Zipped. Buttoned. Tucked.
I didn’t want to be too transactional. I didn’t want to come in her mouth and ask for payment. Maybe I was a bigger pussy than I thought. She was the one who had turned a blow job into a negotiation.
“I didn’t expect you to come here,” she finally said.
“And?” I fastened my belt. Was my voice hard? Sharp? Too bad. This was business.
“I need to generate it. Let’s get back.”
We got in the car, and she took off, eating road like a whale eats krill.
“We skipped a hand job,” I said. “We need to go back and get that done.”
She perked up. “You’re halfway there.”
“Yeah.”
She was right. I was halfway. The point of no return. Too far away from home to quit and too much a stranger in Barrington for comfort.
XXXI
When we got back, she ran upstairs without a “give me a minute” or a “wait here.” I was like a piece of furniture in a furniture-bare house. My fingers twitched. I wanted to talk to Deepak, touch that old life, connect to the person I knew I was. Even if it meant being reminded of my failure to protect my work, I wanted to be the person I’d spent a decade building.
I made coffee and brought up two mugs.
Harper’s door at the top of the stairs was open. Was it an invitation?
“Harper?” I put my foot on the bottom step.
She appeared in the doorway above me. “You were in here.”
“I was.”
“Like what you saw?”
Was she talking about breaking into her room? Or opening her computers? Or seeing her notebook?
“Maybe.”
“Coming up here is cheating.”
I took a step up and put my next foot above. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”
“I shouldn’t have to. I can’t let this slide.”
“What does that mean?” I could smell her. Smell the room. Feel the pressure of her presence on my dick. I put the cups on the bottom step and started up to her.
“You’re going to forfeit getting the decryption today.”
“What?” I froze halfway up.
“Play fair.”
“I do. You—”
I had some choice words for her as I bounded up the rest of the stairs. Just as I got to the top, she slammed the door in my face. The lock clapped shut.
“Do not fuck with me, Taylor.” The door muffled her voice. She was right on the other side. Inches away.
“I’m a hacker. I hack. I get into things. You can’t put this door at the top of the stairs and think for a minute I’m not going to come up here.”
“What did you see?”
I didn’t want her to know. I had no idea what kind of leverage I had, and until I did, I wasn’t telling her anything. “Your room. Again.”
“And?”
How much was I willing to give? “The elastic on your panties is wearing out.”
“What else, Taylor? Do not even think of lying to me.”
Do not even think of lying to me? Who fell back on that?
Someone who was fishing, that was who. I was the one with leverage. She had no idea what I’d seen, and she wanted me to tell her.
And the fact was she wanted something from me that I didn’t have to give her. So she could hang on to the Harperware decryption for now. At some point, she was going to want me to teach her something else.
“If you need me,” I said, stepping down one, “I’ll be around.”
I hopped down the stairs without hearing a reply.
XXXII
I looked over the balcony at the thorn bed. My phone didn’t light up, and I didn’t hear it. Even if I got it out of that mess, it would be useless.
I went through the other doors, to the master suite. Flicking the light on, I craned my neck to look at the ceiling mural with its vignette of pink flowers. It looked Victorian enough, but in the lines, I could see a touch of 1980s.
Catherine came to the doorway with a tray. “You didn’t come down to dinner.”
“I forgot. Sorry.”
“Barnard came by to see how you were getting on.”
“Barnard?”
“A large gentleman.” There were no tables. She put the tray on the floor. “Fuzzy hair.”
“Butthead?”
Well, I’d certainly stepped in it. That was what I got for not asking his real name.
“And Orrin called. He said to tell you the battery’s coming in the morning. Your car will be ready.”
A car. So simple, yet… everything. A car equaled an option. I’d been short on options until just then.
Catherine pulled her cardigan around herself. “We never fixed this room because I didn’t want the ceiling ruined.”
“You can fix the mycelium without ruining the ceiling. It’s tin.”
She looked at it dreamily. Harper was her exact opposite. Catherine had rounded edges and a soft voice. Her sister’s edges were going to gut me.
“This was my room,” she said. “Daddy gave it to me when he and Mother moved to separate rooms. Those flowers? He had them put in for me when I was having a hard time. Look, over here.” She pointed toward a dim corner.
I looked at what she told me but didn’t see what she saw.
“Those open roses with the leaves up like that? In a V?” she said.
“Yes. It’s…” Weird? Off? Not flower-like?
“That’s Harper.”
I got up on tiptoes as if the extra two inches would help.
“She was always running around,” Catherine continued.
I could see it when I stopped trying to make it a flower in my head. The petals of the rose next to her made a skirt that flowed in the wind, and the beige center of the flower was a little girl’s face. The more I looked at it, the more it looked like Harper.
“And I was always trying to get her to stay still and read or pay attention or do anything.”
The leaves of the rose next to Harper were around her sister, and looking at it, squinting, I saw Catherine’s face in the details. She stopped looking up, and I did as well. We regarded each other in the yellow light.
“A lot of things happened in this room. A lot of tears under these flowers,” she said.
“I know why you don’t want it ruined.”
“Do I bother you at night? People say they can hear me cry all over the house.”
“I haven’t heard it,” I lied.
“I keep saying I’ll stop.”
“It’s your house.”
“I’m not upset about not having anything left. Or the conditions I live in, compared to what it was. I wish I’d lost it all sooner.”
