“Hello, this is Magnus Lancaster. I have a phone I found, and I’m wondering if you have any students who might need some lab hours willing to work it up.”
“Oh! It’s you! I mean, hello. Um.”
Trent joins me as she’s stumbling over her words. “Hey,” I tell him, and point to the phone.
“Hi,” Amelie Alves replies. “I’m sorry. I’m just a big fan of your vlogs. You and Trent are super cute together.”
“Thank you. I hope you are participating for my research purposes, but even if you don’t, I appreciate your support.” I watch Trent pull the phone off the door and slip it into a Ziploc bag. “So, do you have a student willing to do a work up on the phone?”
Trent gives me a curious look. “Who are you talking to?”
“Amelie Alves,” I reply.
He holds out his hand and I put the phone in it, and he takes over the phone call. “Amelie. Yeah. Oh, thank you. I think my partner forgot that I’m a criminology minor. Yep. Thanks. Ok, see you later.”
He ends the call and hands me back my phone. “I’ll do the work up on the phone,” he tells me. “How do you know it belongs to the stalker?”
“I texted him. He took over the projector in my Sociology 311 course and put up the image he sent you. I emailed Mehcad and Dean Heimus, but the stalker emailed the Board of Trustees, and now we have to attend an emergency meeting this evening. I’m going to make sure you’re protected no matter what, but I’m also going to force them to make the best decision, which isn’t going to be shutting us down. This university isn’t going to be known for victim-blaming if I have anything to say about it.”
Trent’s crooked smile appears on his lips. “Ok. Are you going to tell me when and where this meeting is?”
“I’ll forward the information to you as soon as I get it,” I promise. “Are you going to work on that now?” I point to the phone.
“Yeah. I’ll have as many answers as I can get in a few hours when the meeting starts.”
My stomach flips and nervousness gives me butterflies again. It’s weird how I can ignore my anxieties until I’m around Trent. I guess it’s nice to know I think he’s a safe person to be vulnerable with, although I think I knew that when I proposed getting naked with him regularly.
“I think I’d like a hug,” I tell him, stepping in close without waiting for an answer.
He responds exactly like I expect him to: he wraps me up in a warm hug and I press my nose into his neck where he always smells faintly of a cologne I got him for our first Christmasexchange. The scent alleviates some of the nervousness, and I breathe him in for several long seconds.
When I pull back, his affectionate smile lifts his lips, and I think it might be my favorite Trent-smile. “I’m going to prepare the presentation for the board. Let me know if you find anything interesting.”
Trent nods. “I will. Let me know when and where to meet you.”
I assure him I will and walk him as far as the sidewalk where our paths diverge, then I head to my office in the math building. It’s the only private space I have on this campus, and if I’m going to prepare to take the board to task, I’m going to need a distraction-free environment. Outmaneuvering the political entities of this campus takes more skill than I usually put toward my machinations, but money equals power, and I have that in spades. Or at least, control of funding the university needs, and I’m not above using my power to keep the board in line.
Chapter 21
Trent
I didn’t really expectto get much from the phone, but finding Magnus’s spyware cracks me up in the middle of the criminology lab, drawing attention from some of the other students in here.
Luis, the grad student who’s always in here for one reason or another, looks over curiously. “Sup?” he asks, up-nodding my workstation.
I wave to the phone. “Magnus doesn’t do anything by halves,” I explain vaguely. “I found some of his code on this thing and it’s ridiculous.”
“Can I see?” he asks, scooting his stool closer.
I pull up the code on my computer, highlighting some of the more interesting lines that I see. He points to some, whistling through his teeth.
“He ain’t fucking around,” he comments, shaking his head. “Was this phone broken before his code got in here?” he asks, eyeing the cheap device.
“Yeah. It’s the pay-by-the-minute kind. If it’d been attached to a carrier service, Magnus wouldn’t have wanted it processed.” Unfortunately, the phone had only been used to message me and him, no outgoing phone calls at all, and it didn’t even have the decency to have any liftable prints. I didn’t even find anyskin cells on the damn thing, and I’ve never met a phone that didn’t carry at least a few flakes from their owners between the buttons.
“He’s intense,” Luis grunts, still scanning the code. “He wrote this?” He pushes his dark hair off his face, biting his lips before glancing at me with curious dark eyes. “It’s more delicate than I would have expected from him,” he explains with a little smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “He didn’t study computer science, did he? I’ve had a few classes with him, but he was always studying Chinese and neuroscience.”
I didn’t know Luis knew him that well. “He says computers were his first love, but the information for how to make them work is so easily accessible that paying a university to teach you is a waste of education dollars,” I reply with a shrug. “You friends with him?” I don’t know why I ask that, except that maybe I’m wondering if I misread Magnus at some point. I thought I was his only student friend.
