by Reiss, CD
She turned to face me and bent her head back to soak her hair. “Don’t worry about the distro center.” She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes as water poured down her face.
I ran the soap over her. Her body was slick and soft, with hard places at the bones and nipples. “Worrying’s my job.”
She opened her mouth to get water in it and closed her jaw so it came out in a gentle fountain. It was the kind of unthinking, unplanned gesture we all made in places where we were used to being alone.
“Worrying isn’t a job,” she said, opening her eyes. Her lashes were black and stuck together like thornless bushes, and one particular water droplet was centered exactly around a pale freckle on her cheek. I rubbed it away. It was too perfect.
“Your plan has so many holes it could drain spaghetti,” I said, pushing my dick against her.
“That sounds delicious.”
“Are you wondering what it’s like to fuck in the shower?”
“A little.”
Taking her by the backs of her thighs, I pulled her up and leaned her back against the tile. “Fucking in the shower is as American as apple pie.” I held her slick cunt against my length.
“What do I have to do?”
“Spread your legs around me.”
“Like this?”
“Tell me what you want. Say it exactly.”
She sucked in her bottom lip. “I want you to put your dick… no, cock inside me. All the way. I want it to hurt a little bit when I feel you hit the end. I want you to do it hard so I can feel everything.”
“Let me hold you up. And use the wall as leverage. You ready?”
“Yep.” She looked down at where we were about to be joined.
She was slick when I thrust inside. Two strokes to get the whole thing in. I grabbed under her thighs, holding her up and keeping her legs open and still. She was still looking between us.
Her curiosity was so hot. I looked with her as I pulled out and went back hard.
“Like that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“God, you’re in for it now.”
Holding us together, I fucked her as hard as I could, using my body to rub her clit when I was deep. I wanted her to come without my fingers. Just my cock and us and the dripping hot water. To get the most friction, I pulled her to me until she couldn’t see between us. There would be another time for her to watch our bodies couple.
In the shower, we were better positioned for a fingerless orgasm. Her mouth opened. Water dripped from her nose onto her lip.
“How’s it feel?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked on such a short word. “More.”
I gave it to her so hard I grunted with the force. I wanted to crawl inside her and live. Peel her open. Surround myself with her.
Her throat let loose a series of short ahs.
“Are you going to come?”
She nodded. I didn’t slow down or speed up. I wanted her there.
“I can’t hear you,” I said.
“I’m going to come.”
“Look at me.”
The effort to keep her gaze on mine and her eyes open was all over her face. I held her by the jaw to keep her toward me. Always thrusting. Always pushing. Something in me was loosening. The valve was turning, and when it spun, it was going to fly open.
I couldn’t come inside her.
But I couldn’t stop before she had hers.
I thought about anything. The exploit. Qubit structure. Her name in base64 encoding.
The muscles of her face tightened.
“Look at me,” I demanded again to keep my mind off my pending explosion.
Her eyes narrowed to slits but stayed open. I wasn’t going to last. Her back tightened, straightened. The muscles in her thighs tightened. She cried out to her creator, scratching the skin off my back more effectively than a thousand thorns.
When she removed her fingers from my skin, I pulled out and held my cock. It was lubricated and swollen. “Jesus, I—”
The valve blew, and I came on her belly, jerking myself like an adolescent. By the time I was done, the shower had mostly washed her clean.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“No, thank you.” She turned off the water.
She tried to get out, but I blocked her. “I mean it. Thank you. Not for the fuck. I mean, yes, thank you for the fuck. But thank you for…”
For what? I put my fists against the tile and lowered my head. Our feet comingled in the draining tub.
“For kidnapping me.”
“I didn’t kidnap you.”
“You did.”
She slapped my shoulder playfully. “Did not.”
“Well, whatever you did, it was worth it.”
“We’ll see.” She dodged me and stepped out of the tub.
“You’re a once-in-a-lifetime person, goose.” I followed her out.
Taking a white towel out of the cabinet, she let it fall out of the fold. “Yeah. Sure.”
I took the towel away and wrapped it around her. “I can’t explain what you’ve done to me. I want to take care of you and hurt you at the same time. I shouldn’t trust you, but I do. I’m willing to crash to find out if you’re trustworthy, and I don’t care if you’re not. It was all worth it to have you. Everything was worth it.”
She stepped on my feet, and I lifted her to kiss her.
XLV
The trick was to get past Keaton, who would have protections on his devices. I was sure he had scripts that he’d coded himself and never released, making them impossible to test.
The sun set at a deep angle through Harper’s third-floor window. She was in a tank top and shorts, her butt in her desk chair and her feet on her desk. I’d moved a few boxes of circuitry to stretch out on a beat-up love seat. In the previous hours, she’d looked through the exploit apps on my phone, I’d looked over her shoulder at code, we’d searched Tor for pieces of usable malware, and finally, she’d sat me at her desk so I could look for Keaton on the dark web.
Letting me fuck her was trust. Coming back into town with her was trust.
But probing each other’s devices, especially knowing what we knew about each other, was intimate beyond imagining.
“Can we plant a transmitter on Deepak?” she asked. “You’d have to refuse his resignation and make nice first.”
“I don’t want to get anyone else involved. He and I fighting works right now. Keaton’s got a thing about revenge. If we break him and he comes after anyone, it’s going to be me.”
“Or me.”
“Yeah. No.”
“He’s going to find me,” she said. “I’ll deal with it.”
She thought she was strong enough to survive anything, but I wouldn’t leave her long enough to test the theory.
“I’m not trying to scare you, because none of this will happen,” I said.
“Oh, this should be good.”
“He’s loyal. That doesn’t make him a nice guy. He has this code he lives by. If you’re in, he’ll kill for you. If you’re out, he’ll kill you.”
“‘Kill’ meaning commit actual murder?”
“Mostly cyber stuff. I don’t know if he’s capable of actual murder, but he knows people who have the same code. They all live by it. And the rest of these guys? I’ve met them. I can’t say for sure they haven’t buried any real bodies.”
She’d gone bedsheet white. “I’m the enemy.”
“No. Not yet. Just trust me. I’ll take care of it.”
She cleared her throat. Nodded.
“So.” I changed the subject. “We transmit from inside the cage. And he takes the transmitter in and out, like you did with my watch?”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to get him to fall for that?”
“What’s he keep in his bag?”
“His bag? Lunch?”
“He brown bags his lunch?”
“He’s a cheap motherfucker. And he’s picky about his food. He only
uses this one kind of mustard made by French monks. It’s disgusting. It tastes like asshole.”
“But he wouldn’t carry a whole jar of asshole mustard in his bag.”
I leaned back, stretching the backs of my knees over the armrest. What did he carry around? What had I seen him take out of the leather bike messenger bag? Laptop. Keys. Wallet.
She tapped at her keyboard so fast and hard it was no wonder she needed to tape her knuckles. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.”
I got up and looked over her shoulder, brushed my lips along her neck, then looked again. She was inside a deep web database.
“Is this the distribution center?” I asked.
“Yeah. I cracked it months ago. We don’t need his credit card. Do you know his home address?”
“He’s not going to just order stuff from Amazon, goose.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone says. What they don’t know is half the small businesses in this country run fulfillment through four major distro warehouses. One of them’s right off the interstate.” She pointed north. “Unless the owner’s writing addresses in Sharpie at the kitchen counter. Can I have an address?”
I gave it to her. She tapped it into fields faster than I could speak. Nothing came up.
“Wait.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to remember the address he had everything forwarded from.
“You’re very cute when you’re thinking.”
“And when I’m not thinking?”
“You’re dazzling.”
I kissed her and gave her Keaton’s forwarding address.
A recent order came up under Lupine Alfa. What my friend and silent partner had in malicious intent, he lacked in imagination.
“British hand cream and deodorant,” I muttered. I couldn’t believe she was right, but there was the order—in full color LED. “So much for being an international man of mystery.”
“It’s at the distro center now. Shit. Stuff to California goes out on the night shift because it buys them an extra day. Turning of the earth and all. I’m only scheduled for a morning on Tuesday.”
She and I were silent for a minute. She stopped typing and tapped the table.
As calm as I’d been on the surface, I’d been covering a deep well of panic that this town, this house, this woman was a snare designed to hold me squirming forever. The panic revealed itself in its decline. I was still unnerved. Still anxious. But as I leaned on the desk and looked over her shoulder with my arms on each side of her, I could see a way out. The tunnel was long and dark, but at the end was the tiniest and dimmest of lights.
It was the possibility of a social engineering hack that let some of the anxiety go. Hacks always revealed themselves in time. It was Harper. Her partnership. Her knowledge. Her loyalty.
I put one of my thumbs over her tap-tapping fingers. “I say the hand cream.”
“I say we have room in the deodorant container.” She crossed her fingers over my thumb.
“Both then.”
“We need to work fast. I can only hold it in distro a few hours before there’s a flag. Everything moves out in twenty-four hours, even if it’s five-day delivery.”
“I’m not going to have time to fuck you, am I?”
She turned to me with brutal efficiency in her eyes and sex on her lips. “Not if you want to get this done, Beeze.” Back at the computer, she opened a field and dropped down the delivery time. “Johnny’s on the night shift. He can do the switch. It should be in his mailbox in… I’ll upgrade the package delivery now.”
“No,” I said. “He’ll notice. And he’s a cheap motherfucker.”
“You want to wait an extra five business days?”
“Split the difference.”
“Fine.” She put him on four-day delivery.
“I code,” I said. “You make me some pretty transmitters.”
“You think I’m going to let you sit at my machine unsupervised?” she purred.
I kissed her neck. I could die happy with my lips on her jaw, tasting her passion and her panic. “Yes. I do.”
She sighed, and with that sigh, she surrendered.
XLVI
Catherine didn’t ask questions when Harper sent her miles away to get the nearest deodorant stick that matched Keaton’s taste. Harper said she’d done plenty for her sister without asking questions.
The hand cream wasn’t as accessible. There wasn’t a jar of Moxie’s shea butter at retail in a one-hundred-mile radius. So Harper filled out a form saying the distro center’s jar was broken, buying us another day. Johnny would grab the unbroken jar from distro and deliver it the next night before his shift.
“We do it all the time.” She waved at me as she got off the phone with Johnny. “They log everything, but if it breaks, you fill out a form and it’s done.”
“Fucking criminals. All of you.”
She locked her hands around my waist. “You mad, bro?”
I kissed her and returned her hug. “Yes. Raging mad we have to finish this before I can fuck you again.”
She pushed me off her and picked up the legal pad that had our notes and flowcharts. “Let’s get ‘er done.”
Though we’d conceived the plan without words, we’d worked out the details with lists, on paper so nothing was missed.
We would place tiny transmitters, much like the one Harper had built for my watch, into Keaton’s toiletries. One or both would (hopefully) end up near his cell phone, where it would keylog from his Tempest emissions. Every tap on his phone would be transmitted to us. He might not bring his phone into QI4’s Faraday cage, but we’d have access to his laptop through the Bluetooth connection and could figure out how he’d put a layer of encryption over Harper’s. Then it was a matter of time before he connected his laptop to the poison pill. Which would give us access to QI4.
A hundred variables bounced around the plan. This was why I didn’t like social engineering hacks. They were too dependent on human behavior, which was unreliable as shit. Openings in code were openings in code. You could depend on code to do exactly what it said. No more. No less. That was the beauty and downfall of pure code.
Harper’s machine was safe when I coded what we were planting on the transmitter. She showed me her QI4 hack so I could use pieces of it, and I was lost. It strung together pieces of what she assumed was there, looping them together like a drawstring bag and tying them tightly with layers and layers of encryption and exploitation code she’d designed.
“You really wanted to get me,” I said, scrolling through it.
“I guess I did.” She reached up to the top shelf of her closet for a clear plastic box. The muscles in the backs of her thighs tightened when she went onto the tips of her toes and just touched the bottom of the box, slipping it half an inch forward.
I got behind her and grabbed the box with one hand and her waist with the other. “How long did it take?” I shook the box before I gave it to her. It was full of circuitry scraps.
“Lot of hours. But…” She shrugged, embarrassed. “Anger’s a motivator, I guess.”
“No shit, goose.” I kissed her forehead and gave her butt a little spank. “No shit.”
“You really forgive me?”
I hadn’t used the word forgive. It was too heavy and serious. Too high on itself. It meant something had been broken.
In her little room, with her in my arms, I didn’t have to forgive her for what she’d broken. By smashing her way into my life, she’d made it whole.
“I have no choice,” I said. “I love you.”
We didn’t have time to fuck, but we had enough time to kiss as if the future was a done deal.
XLVII
Out in the deep parts of the country, the horizon’s different. It doesn’t disappear behind buildings or get lost in a haze of light and particles. It’s not a line graph of mountains. It’s cut straight all around, like an ocean of land, and at night, it’s marked by the line where the stars end.
“Why don’t you get O
rrin to fix the steering on this thing?” I asked.
It was hard enough to keep the shimmymobile on the road in daylight. With visibility at zero outside the cones of the headlights and the wind whipping the plastic we’d used to cover the window I’d broken, I’d almost run into a ditch more than once. She took deep breaths whenever the car went wide, digging her fists into her sweatshirt and tying her face into knots. It was cute and unnecessary.
“He won’t take my money. I won’t let him do it for free, and if I go to another mechanic, he’ll never forgive me. And I like it that way. It’s like a horse I tamed myself.”
“You’re all crazy. Down to the last one of you.”
“You’ve mentioned that. Pull over here. I see him.”
I didn’t see shit until she pointed toward the right and the headlights caught a flicker of reflective red. His truck was parked behind a bush between the road and the train tracks.
“I love the whole cloak-and-dagger thing you guys have going.”
“Yeah, well, if Pat knew, she’d have a fit.”
“She’d be right.” I pulled up in front of the bush and cut the engine. I’d never known stars could be bright enough to see by, but there was a lot of shit I didn’t know.
The deodorant with the transmitter was in a paper bag at Harper’s feet. We’d opened the deodorant from the bottom so it wouldn’t disrupt the seal and put the transmitter under the base. The other transmitter was in Harper’s pocket, protected by clear kitchen wrap.
Harper pulled down the plastic over her broken window. I turned on the dome light. He leaned his elbows on the top of the door. “Well, hello, Mr. Harden. Harper. What happened to the window, here?”
“Taylor happened.”
He shot me a dirty look, and I shrugged like a man driven to madness.
Harper handed him the paper bag. “The order number’s on the inside of the bag. Do you have the jar?”
He looked at Harper, then me, then back at Harper. There was only one interpretation for that look. What the hell is this guy doing here?
“He’s all right,” Harper said, holding out her hand.
