“Hmm?”
I set down the coffee, stand, and pull him up out of his chair just so I can wrap my arms around him properly. He makes a surprised sound but recovers quickly, his arms coming around me, his face burying in my hair.
“Thank you,” I say against his chest. “For fixing it. For not letting me spiral. For—” I pull back enough to look at him. “For being my person.”
“You’d do the same for me. You’re my forever human, you know.”
I want to laugh, because it’s the dorkiest thing anyone’s ever said to me, but it lands so hard it makes my throat tight.
“I like that,” I whisper, reaching up to wipe the smear off his jaw with my thumb. “I like the idea of forever with you.”
“Good. Because you’re stuck with me now. I’m not going anywhere.” A smile ghosts over his lips.
We just stand there grinning at each other like idiots for a few seconds, both too battered by the night to bother with pretense. I tip my forehead to his, our noses almost touching. “You know? You look like you’ve been in a fistfight with a server rack.”
“The server rack started it.”
I laugh, and something in my chest loosens. We’re OK. The server’s OK. The submission is going to happen.
We’re going to be OK.
“All right,” I say, stepping back and squaring my shoulders and checking my watch. “We’ve got sixty-seven hours and a submission package to compile. You ready?”
Logan picks up his coffee and takes a long sip, then sets it down with a decisive clunk.
“Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER 32
Audrey
The living room of my childhood home is currently a sensory overload of domestic chaos. The television is blaring a White Sox game. The air smells like pepperoni and lukewarm beer, and my brothers are yelling at the screen with a fervor usually reserved for religious miracles. Dad is in his favorite La-Z-Boy nursing a beer.
And in the center of it all sits Logan.
He looks like a high-end server placed in the middle of a disorganized hardware store. He’s dressed in a crisp button-down—sleeves rolled up to the elbows—clutching a beer bottle like he isn’t entirely sure of its structural integrity.
Life is feeling a little less frantic these days. After the chaos having the servers going down created, we got our FDA submission in with two hours to spare. Since then, it’s been a waiting game. But two days ago, we got the call that our application had moved to the final review. We’re quietly hopeful. But we’re also both so nervous that we agreed to beer, pizza and a game with my overbearing family.
“No, see,” Logan says, leaning toward Tony. “If you analyze the pitcher’s historical performance against left-handed batters in high-humidity conditions, the probability of a curveball here is actually sixty-eight percent. The angle seems... inefficient.”
Tony blinks at him, a slice of pizza halfway to his mouth. “Logan, buddy, we don’t use math. We usevibes. And the vibe right now is that this guy sucks.”
Logan tilts his head, genuinely considering this. “But the numbers factor into the vibe. That’s what makes it predictive.”
Tony chews, thinks it over, and points at Logan with his pizza. “OK, then, brainiac. What’s the call here?”
Logan pushes his glasses up and peers at the screen with a level of concentration usually reserved for our lab simulations. “It’s a wasted opportunity not to bunt, but the manager is risk averse to an irrational degree. Expect a grounder to short.”
Tony points at the screen, eyes big. “If he grounds out to short, I’ll eat a goddamn anchovy.”
The next pitch comes. Batter swings. Grounder, right to shortstop’s glove. Double-play, inning over.
The living room explodes.
“Holy shit, he’s a wizard,” Mike hollers, and Logan lets himself smile. Not the polite social version—something real and a little wild, like he’s just realized the world is less hostile than he thought.
This is the man who believed he was fundamentally broken. Look at him now.
