Page 26 of Slick Trip

“Leave.”

“No.”

I turned back to the screen, trying to ignore him. A rookie mistake—silence was an invitation for him to escalate.

“You know,” he went on, leaning over my shoulder so his hair tickled my neck. “If you made your characters less ugly, more people might actually play this.”

I prayed for strength. “They’re not ugly.”

“They look like monkeys with jungle anxiety.”

A pause. Then—a click. Slowly, I turned. Cooper stood there, hand still near my keyboard.

“What did you just press?”

He blinked. “Nothing.”

I watched the screen. Everything seemed normal at first, but then the interface glitched. Something deep in the system broke loose. The code was unraveling in ways that shouldn’t even be possible.

“No, no, no—”

I lunged forward, trying to undo it, to stabilize—

Error.

Error.

ERROR.

“What did you do?” I snapped.

“I didn’t—I just—” He stepped back. “I pressed one thing—”

“You don’t press things, for fuck’s sake!”

He flinched, his whole body recoiling as if I’d struck him. The damage spread. Days of work, hundreds of lines of logic—gone.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and vibrating with rage. Cooper froze. I’d snapped at him before, but never like this. Never with so much anger that the room shrank around us.

“I’m sorry, Jon, I—”

“Out. Now.”

He turned and bolted.

I didn’t sleep. I rebuilt. Recovered what I could. By morning, my eyes were burning and my hands were shaking, but the build was stable. The launch could still happen on time.

When Jack woke up, he found me slumped over the desk. “Jesus. You look like a corpse.”

“I feel like one.”

He leaned against the doorframe. “You know he stayed up too, right? I found him at three in the morning, crying over his own laptop, googling how to fix code.”

My grip tightened on my cold coffee. “He doesn’t know shit about coding.”

“No,” Jack said quietly. “But he stayed up anyway. He thought he’d ruined your life.”

I found Cooper in the kitchen later, staring into a bowl of cereal. His eyes were puffy, and those ridiculous curls were sticking up everywhere.