Page 132 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
The countdown clock reads: 00:00:10.
“TEN! NINE! EIGHT!”
The chant fills the room. The entire office is transformed into a nightclub. Blue lights wash over the crowd. Champagne towers glitter.
I’m standing by the window. My feet are killing me in my stilettos.
“THREE! TWO! ONE!”
00:00:00.
“WE ARE LIVE!”
A roar erupts, shaking the glass walls. Confetti cannons—which I explicitly told Owen were a fire hazard—explode, raining silver and blue paper over the crowd.
I watch the monitors.
Downloads: 1,042... 5,300... 10,000...
The graph is a vertical line.
“Holy shit,” I breathe.
“Language, Miss Hartley,” a voice says in my ear.
I turn. Ethan.
He’s holding two flutes of champagne. He looks magnificent. He’s wearing a tuxedo—no tie, top button undone. He looks like James Bond if James Bond ran a Fortune 500 company.
He hands me a glass.
“We did it,” he says.
“Ten thousand in ten minutes,” I say, pointing at the screen.
“I don’t care about the numbers,” he says.
He looks at me. The room is chaotic. Harper is dancing on a table somewhere. The investors are swarming the bar. But Ethan’s only looking at me.
“You did this,” he says. “The voice. The soul of it. That was you.”
“The code is yours,” I deflect, my heart hammering.
“The code is just a structure,” he says. “You gave it a heartbeat.”
He clinks his glass against mine.
“To us,” he says.
“To Mosaic,” I correct.
“To. Us.” he repeats, intense and unyielding.
My phone buzzes.
I look down.
New Group Created: SYSTEM OVERRIDE (Members: Ethan, Owen, Asher, Tessa)
