Ihaven’t moved from the edge of my bed.
The server log waits on my screen, every timestamp glowing like evidence. Each line of text looks worse in the daylight. I scroll through them anyway.
She doesn’t know I was the one she spent the night with. That should make it easier, but it doesn’t.
She told me her name.
Eris.
It’s not just a username to cover her identity… It’s her legal name, and it helps me begin my search to find out more about her.
My shirt still smells like the faint trace of her perfume, triggering ill-timed memories of her skin on mine. I tell myself it’s just another data point. But it isn’t.
The night I spent with her is much more than data and lines of code.
I rake a hand through my hair. It’s still messy from where she pulled it. I didn’t even sleep. How could I while she was curled into my side, fitting against me as if she were the missing component in my life?
And she was. Is.
I read the HimLock thread again, watching the messages replay in the backend log.
Eris:
Hungover.
Locke:
Or guilty?
That second line was Silas. Of course, it was. He’s direct. Precise. Too cold for his own good. I didn’t stop him, though I didn’t expect it to land like that either. When she answered, it felt personal in a way it shouldn’t have.
But she doesn’t deserve his ire.
I was still rumpled and slightly buzzed when I got back to the loft this morning. Silas was sitting at the kitchen table, breakfast barely started. He didn’t raise his voice or throw anything; he just looked at me like someone who had already predicted the fire and was watching it burn.
My matches. My uncontrollable flame.
“You shouldn’t have touched her,” he reminds me as I finally leave my room, showered and dressed, to join reality. “It was too soon.”
“Too late.” I toss the words over my shoulder, taking a seat at our workstation.
Now I sit in the same quiet, stuck in my thoughts, only this time, I’m also surrounded by the low hum of machines. The loft feels smaller than it did yesterday, less vibrant… Sort of gloomy in the way a rainy day feels. Except it’s sunny outside and the shades are mostly open…
I think about her laugh, the one that surprised us both. The way she looked at me right before she stopped pretending not to want it.
Me.
There’s no correlation in her mind between me and HimLock, but part of me is convinced she feels it. There was something in the way she watched me, like she recognized a word or phrase she had read from her chat with the app.
The envelope at the top of my computer screen shakes, unfolding itself into a notification for me to read.
Cipher:
Don’t respond to her for a few hours. Let HimLock do it. Give her some space.
I stare at the message from Silas for a moment before rolling my eyes and typing my thoughts.
Whisper:
