Page 39 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
Owen laughs, but it’s a dry, humorless sound. “Gotcha.”
“There is no lipstick,” I snap, dropping my hand. “Because nothing happened.”
“But you checked,” Owen points out. “Which means you wanted something to happen. Or you got close enough that it could have happened.”
“Drop it, Owen.”
“I can’t drop it,” Owen says. “Because I’m the one who took her to lunch and held her hand. You look at me like I’m the one flirting with the line. But you? You just sprinted across it.”
“I didn’t cross anything,” I argue, though the lie tastes like ash in my mouth. “I pulled back and walked away.”
“You walked out on her,” Asher repeats. He turns away from the window. “Did you make sure she was okay?”
“She’s a grown woman, Asher. She can handle the aftermath of a meeting.”
“She left the building,” Asher says, his voice flat and clinical. “She bypassed her desk, went to the bathroom for three minutes, and then likely took an Uber home. She’s gone.”
I stare at him. “How do you know that?”
“I track everything,” Asher says simply. “It’s my job.”
I rub my hands over my fac. “God. We are a mess. We are a complete, absolute mess.”
“We’re human,” Owen says. “For once.”
“We can’t afford to be human,” I snap. “Not right now. We have investors who think we’re machines, and a launch that’s going to define our entire future. If we get distracted… if we get involved in a messy office romance with our sister’s best friend… we lose the edge.”
“Maybe the edge is overrated,” Owen suggests.
“The edge is the only reason we aren’t still sleeping in a van in Oakland, eating expired canned goods.”
Silence falls over the room. It’s heavy. Owen looks away. Asher goes completely still.
We don’t talk about the Oakland years often. The years after the military, when we were discharged with nothing but shrapnel scars and an idea Asher had scribbled in a notebook. We lived in that van for eighteen months while we wrote the codebase. We made a pact back then. Survival first. The mission first. The unit first.
Attachment was a liability we couldn’t afford in the sandbox, and we decided we couldn’t afford it in the boardroom either. Feelings are variables that introduce chaos.
“Women were always temporary,” I say, my voice low. “We agreed. No wives. No girlfriends. No divided loyalties.”
“We shared,” Owen reminds me quietly. “Back then.”
“Because we had to,” I counter. “Because we were too broken to offer anyone a whole version of ourselves. Sharing wasn’t a kink. It was a necessity. It was the only way to feel something without having to explain the nightmares.”
I look at them. “But we never kept them. We never let them inside the circle. Tessa is already inside.”
“The call,” Asher says, breaking the tension. “It’s 11:55.”
I nod, exhaling loudly. “Fine. Let’s get this done.”
The call is a bloodbath.
Mr. Sterling, the lead partner at Sterling Capital, is in a mood. He hates the timeline. He hates the burn rate. He hates that we haven’t officially announced the leadership team.
“The market needs faces,” Sterling’s voice crackles over the speakerphone. “The ‘Phantom Trio’ gimmick was cute for Series A, Mr. Branson. But for Series B? We need accountability. We need to know who is driving the bus.”
“You know who is driving,” I say smoothly, leaning back in my chair. “You have our vitals. You have the code audit. The anonymity builds hype. It drives curiosity.”
“It drives uncertainty,” Sterling counters. “And frankly, the branding feels… sterile. We are investing in a social platform, not a bank vault.”
