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“And just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
An iron-like hand clapped over my wrist.
“What?”
“You’re breaking the rules!” Adrian admonished. Reaching out with his free hand, he deftly plucked the phone from my fingers.
“I— I was checking to see if there were any messages from the kids!” I pleaded. “What if they needed something?”
“And what if Oculus needed something?” Adrian countered. “Or SONY wanted a Zoom call. Or Meta needed to fly you across the country last minute again, to explain something to a panel of programmers, or Valve had a question about—”
“Alright, alright,” I conceded. “I get it.”
“Remember our rule? One weekend away, just the four of us. No business. All pleasure.”
He placed my phone back in the truck and closed the door.
“But if what if Brayden or Emma misses me?” I asked. “What if they need to say goodnight?”
“The kids are just fine with Jennifer,” he went on. “They’ll call to say goodnight in a little while. On Jax’s phone, or my phone, maybe. But even she knows… your phone is off-limits.”
I set my hand on my hip and sighed, then gave him the once-over. Adrian had dressed like a warrior for the Renaissance Fair, complete with faux leather boots, a plastic helmet, and a double-bladed broadaxe hanging from his very medieval-looking belt. None of his costume was period, like Preston’s archer cosplay for example. And this was a fact that some of the more experienced festival-workers had even pointed out.
Still, he looked pretty damned hot. Almost like a sexy Viking chieftain, with the longish hair and big golden beard he’d been growing for the past two months. I’d enjoyed that beard more than I thought I would, over the last several weeks. Even though it tickled the insides of my thighs; whenever he—
“Did you catch her trying to check her phone again?”
Preston stomped over, looking accusatory. Adrian shrugged and nodded.
“Unbelievable.”
Preston’s costume was a direct compliment of mine. He was a ranger, a tracker, and an all-around badass. Every part of his cosplay was not only historically accurate, it was handmade and hand-stitched, mostly by him. Right down to the quiver of arrows and maple longbow slung over his shoulder.
“I should shoot an apple off your head,” he wagged a finger at me.
“You can try it, but I shoot back.”
I slapped him playfully on the cheek three times, then stood on my toes to give him a kiss.
“Besides, there are much better things to do with me later,” I promised slyly. “Once we get the tent all set up.”
Each of us grabbed something from the truck, then headed back to our camping spot. We’d managed to score one of the more remote sites, although there were still other fairgoers camping all around us. Most of them, however, had the foresight to set up in the morning, rather than at the end of the day when exhaustion was setting in.
I intentionally lagged on the way back, so I could check the guys out from behind. It was an old trick I’d learned from them, of course. Besides the obvious benefits, it gave my mind a place to happily wander.
A lot had happened for my men also, in the past nineteen months. Not only had we moved in together, and into a much bigger place, but Adrian’s budding new project had turned into a full-fledged photography agency. At first he was flying out to photo-shoots, but things had gotten so lucrative that models were flying into Buffalo, too. He’d rented space downtown, and had contacts all over the world. Many of them were friends he’d made along the way, but he was picking up new connections so fast he could barely keep up.
Preston, on the other hand, had joined forces with me. He’d given up freelancing altogether in order to work on tweaking my VR software, and by now he was almost as familiar with the code as I was. On top of that we were developing a radical new project, even though we’d only scratched the surface on it. We knew one day, when the contracts were up and our licensing agreements had expired, we’d need something fresh and exciting to devote our efforts to.
We’d even sent back the computers we’d taken from Telengard, but not before checking all the machines for anything to do with my work. Fortunately, he hadn’t had a chance to move any files. Preston and I used formatting software to data-wipe the drives completely, overwriting every last bit and byte before packing them up and shipping them off.
“Where the hell have you slackers been?”
Jax’s voice carried from inside the tent. We found him sitting in one of the fold-out chairs, eating goldfish by the handful out of a Costco-sized box.
“You stole those from Emma, didn’t you!” I laughed.
“No,” he answered defensively. “I mean, well, it depends on your definition of stole. If I’m the one who bought the goldfish, I can’t really steal them, can I?”
