Page 26 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“Yeah. He’s counting the seconds.” I signal for the check. “We have to go. Before he locks us out of the building.”
Tessa laughs, but it’s a shaky sound. She grabs her purse, her hands trembling slightly.
“Okay,” she says. “Back to business.”
“Back to business,” I agree.
I stand up and offer her my arm. She hesitates, then slides her hand into the crook of my elbow. The heat of her touch burns through my jacket.
We walk out of the restaurant, stepping from the shade into the bright Texas sun.
But the heat between us doesn’t dissipate.
I lied to Ethan. I told him I was taking her to lunch to talk about appetizers. But as we walk back to the office, hips bumping, the air crackling with unspoken promises, I know the truth.
I didn’t take her to lunch to talk about a party. I took her to lunch to see if she was willing to break the rules.
And looking at the flush on her cheeks? I think she is.
6
ASHER
[Log: Tuesday, 9:42 PM]
Only one place in the world makes absolute sense: the server room.
It’s kept at a constant sixty-eight degrees. The humidity is regulated to forty-five percent. The only sound is the white noise of the cooling fans and the rhythmic hum of the racks processing terabytes of data.
It’s a perfect ecosystem.
I sit on the floor, my back against Rack 4, my laptop balanced on my knees. The screen reflects in my glasses—lines of white code scrolling against a black background. I’m rebuilding the encryption key for the user chat function. It has to be unbreakable. People lie to each other in person, but they tell the truth to screens. They trust the screen.
Trust is a dependency. I don’t ship broken dependencies.
I type a command, execute a script, and then minimize the window. I open the Network Admin dashboard.
It’s a bad habit. I know this. Ethan would call it a distraction. Owen would call it obsessive. But I call it data collection.
There are one hundred and twelve active nodes on the network right now. Most are automated background processes—backups, updates, security sweeps.
But one User ID is still active.
User: T_Hartley | Status: Online | Location: Terminal 4 (Main Floor) | Session Duration: 13h 12m
I watch the data stream on my screen. Tessa Hartley is still at her desk.
The packet flow shows she isn’t browsing or idling, but uploading large files and running queries on the retention database. She’s typing at a sustained rate of eighty words per minute.
I imagine her up there. She’s likely the only source of light on the main floor. The blue glow of her dual monitors illuminating her face. She has probably kicked off her heels. Sitting cross-legged, leaning forward, typing with a ferocity that suggests she’s either writing a manifesto or fixing the retention model.
“Go home, Tessa,” I whisper to the scrolling text.
She can’t hear me, obviously. But I say it anyway.
I check the logs. She arrived at 8:30 AM. Her current output is a straight line. Throughout today’s session, she hasn’t gone idle for more than ten minutes.
The forty-five-minute gap for lunch with Owen last Friday glares on the log as a significant anomaly.
