Page 48 of Handful

So when I turned my head and found Sarah on the pillow beside me — on top of the blanket, tank top, blonde hair fanned out like she’d arranged it — there was no math to do.

Dumb bitch, I thought, and there was nothing soft in it. Thinks she can play me.

“Morning.” She’d been awake before me. The smile was already locked.

“Get out.”

“You don’t remember?” Two fingers walked across the blanket toward my arm. “You were sweet last night.”

That was the tell. I hadn’t needed one, but there it was. I’d never been sweet in bed in my life. Not once, not with anybody. Whatever else a woman might say about a night with me, sweet was not the word she’d reach for.

Then the anger hit. Last night I’d stood on that sidewalk outside Velvet and told Austen we weren’t done. This morning I woke up to this. What the fuck would Austen think? I was so fucked.

“I was out cold last night, with the TV on, by myself. Nothing happened, you know nothing happened, so don’t lie there and try to sell it to me.” I swung my legs off the bed and stood, putting the room between us. “Get out, Sarah.”

Sarah didn’t argue. She picked her jeans up off the floor and pulled them on without another word. On the way out her eyes ticked up to the corner of the room for half a second — the ceiling, the vent — and then she was gone, bare feet quiet down the hall.

I went to see Glitch.

The ops room was Glitch’s private domain. He’d built it out in the new wing when the gun money turned clean — monitors banked along one wall, towers humming under the desk, a giant whiteboard. He was mid-something when I came in, so I stood there and waited.

The whiteboard was half network diagrams and half what I could only describe as Glitch’s own personal shorthand — strings of letters and numbers that could’ve been IP addresses or could’ve been the ravings of a man who’d had too much coffee. I stood there squinting at one line, trying to find a word in it, and came up empty.

Then I spotted the other handwriting. Tighter, rounder, with two hearts after it, which told me it was from Wren. Can’t wait for later…LMSYDUYCDMT.

I stared at it for a solid ten seconds. Got nowhere.

Below it, in Glitch’s crawl: RMDUICIYP.

No idea what that was all about.

Glitch saved whatever he was working on, leaned back, and looked at me. “What can I do for you?”

“I woke up with Sarah in my room. Want to know how long she was in there.”

He didn’t ask why — just read my face and turned back to the keys. “When did you go up?”

“Eight thirty, give or take.”

He pulled it, ran it forward at speed, the timestamp spinning — ten, midnight, one, two — and then he dropped it back to real time, because something had moved.

Two-forty-seven. Sarah, up the stairs and along the hall and into my room. Didn’t even slow her stride.

Two forty-seven. The bitch had been in my bed for fucking hours. I’d been lying there next to her, dead to the world, while she played house in my room. The thought made my skin crawl — made me want to go scrub myself with something that burned. Still, I’d seen what I came to see. I pushed up off the desk to go.

Glitch didn’t look away from the screen. He lifted one finger off the keyboard — sit — and muttered, half to himself, “Let’s go back further.”

“Further? She’s right there, Glitch, that’s—”

“Sit down, Handful.”

He ran it back. Past midnight, past the evening, the corridor flickering by empty, empty, empty — and then he caught it and dropped to quarter speed.

Tanya first. Then Sarah behind her. Sarah was carrying a gym bag. They went to my door. Tanya pushed it open and the two of them went in.

Glitch let it run - the timestamp climbing. Every few minutes the door cracked and one of them put a head out into the hall, looked both ways down it, slow and careful, and pulled back in.

“Half an hour,” Glitch said quietly. “They’re in your room half an hour, Handful. You don’t spend half an hour in a brother’s room to leave a note.” On the screen the door opened a final time and they came out, the bag under Sarah’s arm now, and they walked off down the hall easy as anything, like they’d been borrowing a fucking charger.