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He turns to me and pins me with a stare. “There’s no one I trust more than you. Find my daughter a boyfriend.”
* * *
Atlas
I’m at the kitchen table when Dad and Eric come home from their run.
“Hey, sweetie,” Dad greets me before looking to his friend. “Wait here. Let me get you the printout.”
“Yeah, I wanted to work on the weekend,” he mutters under his breath when my dad disappears up the stairs. For Dad, his work is his greatest passion. He can spend days lost in his projects.
“What are you doing?” Eric asks.
I’m working with an online friend to try our luck at rooting an Active Machine, basically hacking in an environment designed for newbies to learn.
I originally got into ethical hacking so I could impress Eric. But now I’m thinking of looking for a security-related job when I graduate next spring.
“Just chatting with a friend about cute guys,” I answer, looking up from my laptop.
Eric’s white t-shirt is soaked in sweat, making it transparent and revealing his tight six-pack underneath. For a moment, I wonder what it would be like to drag my tongue across his chest. Would he beg for more? Plead for me to stop?
To distract myself from the dirty thoughts, I close my laptop and cross into the kitchen. “I always make dad a breakfast smoothie after a run. Want one?”
I lean up on my tiptoes to grab the blender from the top of the fridge. That’s when I feel my t-shirt rise high on my broad hips.
I’m not wearing pants or anything down below because I only woke up a few minutes ago. It’s not like I was expecting Eric to come home with Dad anyway. He mainly avoids me.
Other than the time I called him when the transmission in my car gave out and I needed a ride or last year when it was mom’s angel anniversary.
I showed up at Mom’s grave alone. Dad must have forgotten but Eric didn’t. He didn’t say a single word to me that day. He just wrapped an arm around my shoulders and let me cry for the longest time.
“Well, do you want a smoothie?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder and trying to act like it’s completely normal for him to see me in just my underwear and t-shirt.
Eric is staring at my black tanga panties, heat flaring in his gaze. He claimed he wasn’t attracted to me that night. It’s what he said right before he walked me back to my room and told me he was writing the night off as a drunken mistake.
My nipples tighten in response to the longing on his face and I clear my throat, trying to get us back on solid ground.
Eric finally drags his gaze upward to my face. He swallows. “I have to go.”
Then he sprints from the room as if he’s on fire and I’m a can of gasoline.
I smile as I put the frozen fruit into the blender for my dad’s smoothie. Now I know Eric’s secret. He’s not as unaffected as he’s been pretending to be.
3
ATLAS
I lean back into the black leather limo seat and try to relax despite my pounding heart. My knee moves up and down in a restless rhythm.
I brought along a green backpack, telling my dad I wanted to have my laptop with me. But it’s not just my machine that’s in there. It’s also all the things I’ll need to transform into Miss Karma.
After helping my friend hack the active machine, I spent the rest of my day looking up flirting tutorials.
I figured it couldn’t be that hard, but I quickly realized I’m more comfortable looking for network vulnerabilities than I am trying to turn on a guy. Especially one as sexy as Eric.
“Is this your first black tie event?” Katie, my dad’s personal assistant, asks. She’s only a couple of years older than me.
She always seems so confident, cool, and collected while I’m over here trying to remember if I put on deodorant before I left the house.
