Page 99 of Reckless

“You’re bossy,” I say out loud, mostly for my own benefit, because I know she reads lips well enough to catch it anyway.

She grins, unbothered, and signs back without missing a beat. ‘Someone has to be. You’re both hopeless.’

‘I’m not hopeless.’

‘You learned an entire language because my sister mentioned that I was coming here.’ She tilts her head, daring me to argue the point. ‘You’re right, that’s not hopeless. That’s something else. I haven’t decided what to call it yet.’

I don’t have an answer for that, so I go back to the lesson module and pretend the correction I am making to my own hand shape actually needs that much attention. Piper lets me have the moment, but only for about ten seconds before she starts up again, because apparently that is the only length of silence she is willing to tolerate.

She spends the next twenty minutes running through a list of increasingly ridiculous questions clearly designed to see how much she can get out of me before I stop answering.

Whether I have ever been on a date that didn’t involve a mission briefing first.

Whether Sage snores, which I refuse to answer on principle.

Whether I own a single shirt that isn’t black. I tell her the shirts are practical. She tells me that is the most boring answer a human being has ever given and that she is embarrassed on my behalf.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I catch myself laughing, actually laughing, and Piper looks entirely too pleased with herself about causing it.

I like the kid. I didn’t expect to, not with the speed it happened, but there is something about the way she refuses to tiptoe around anything that makes the room feel lighter every time she is in it.

She reminds me of Sage in the parts that matter and nothing like her in the parts that make her easy company instead of a fight I have to choose to have.

Eventually, she stands, stretches, and signs one last thing before heading for the stairs with her water bottle. ‘Don’t mess this up, Ghost. I like having you around.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘You’d better. I don’t make friends easily.’

Friends. For some reason, the idea of us being friends makes me feel all warm and fucking fuzzy inside.

Get a goddamn grip!

She doesn’t leave straightaway. Instead, she leans over, uninvited, and studies my second monitor, the financial map, still open, still an ugly tangle of boxes and connector lines that means everything to me and nothing to anyone else who looks at it.

She makes a face.

‘What?’ I sign.

‘This is a war crime,’ she signs back, deadly serious. ‘Visually, I mean. Nobody can read this. There’s no hierarchy. Everything’s the same size, same color, same weight. Your eye doesn’t know where to land.’

‘It’s accurate.’

‘It’s accurate and unreadable. Those aren’t opposites, they’re just both true.’ She taps the screen, right on the tangle around one cluster of shell names. ‘This is what I do all day, you know. Not the crime part. The part where fifty ugly, confusing things all need to become one thing a ‘normal’ person can look at and understand in five seconds.’

I look at the map again, then at her. ‘You do brand work?’ I mock.

‘I’m a junior designer. Which mostly means I do the parts nobody wants to do… competitor research, digging through some other company’s entire online history to figure out who actually built their site, whether three ‘different’ companies are secretly the same lazy agency wearing three different logos.’ She shrugs, entirely unaware of what she’s just said. ‘It’s more detective work than people think. You’d be surprised what you can tell from a bad font choice.’

I don’t say anything for a second.

I let it sit, knowing damn well I won’t forget it.

‘Interesting,’ I sign.

‘Everything’s interesting to you. You’re a weird man, Ghost.’

She disappears toward Deek, and the clubhouse settles back into its usual late-night hum, low voices at the bar, the clink of glass, Koa’s television running some game nobody really cares about.