Page 27 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
She’s working too hard. It’s inefficient. Cognitive function declines after ten hours of sustained focus. She’s hitting the point of diminishing returns.
I should go up there and tell her. I should tell her to leave. But I don’t. I just watch the data.
Inevitably, my mind overlays the memory of the party—the red dress.
The selfie she sent is stored in my phone, in a secure, encrypted folder that not even Ethan knows about. But I don’t need to look at the file. I have memorized it.
The slope of her shoulder. The high slit exposing the curve of her thigh. The caption.
Tessa was always just “Harper’s friend.” Static background noise in the chaotic algorithm of our childhood. But the woman in that dress… she wasn’t noise. She was the signal.
And now she’s sitting in my office, rewriting my user engagement loops, proving that she understands the system almost as well as I do.
I close the laptop, unable to work anymore as the code blurs.
I stand up, stretching my stiff muscles. I grab my hoodie from the floor and pull it on. It’s time to initiate the shutdown protocol.
I walk out of the server room, locking the heavy steel door behind me. I take the back stairs up to the main floor.
The office is silent.
I walk through the shadows, my sneakers making no sound on the concrete. I stop at the edge of the bullpen, staying in the dark, looking toward her desk.
She’s there. She sighs, a long, frustrated sound, and rubs her face with her hands. Then she saves her work, grabs her purse, and stands up—wobbling slightly as she slips into her heels before walking exhausted toward the elevator.
I wait ten seconds, then follow.
The parking garage is a concrete cavern of echoes and fluorescent lights. It smells of gasoline and damp dust.
I walk toward my car—a matte black Audi RS7 parked in the reserved corner spot. I unlock it, the headlights flashing in the gloom.
But I don’t get in.
Across the aisle, three rows down, I see movement. Tessa is standing next to a beat-up silver sedan that looks like it survived a demolition derby. The hood is popped open.
She’s staring at the engine with her hands on her hips.
“Unbelievable,” she says loudly. Her voice echoes off the concrete walls. “You choose now to die? Really? After everything we’ve been through?”
She kicks the tire. It’s a solid kick. Good form.
I walk over. “Kicking it won’t fix the car,” I say.
She screams.
She spins around, clutching her chest, her eyes wide with fear. When she sees it’s me, the fear drains away, replaced by a flush of adrenaline and annoyance.
“Asher!” she gasps. “My God. You’ve got to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Appearing out of thin air like a… like a coding vampire.” She leans back against the dead car, breathing hard. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“Your heart rate is elevated,” I observe. “But you’ll survive.”
I step closer, clicking the flashlight on my phone. I shine it into the engine bay. The acid buildup is severe, thickly coating the battery terminals.
“Your battery is dead,” I tell her. “And the terminals are completely corroded. It won’t hold a charge.”
