The Hero and the Hacktivist

by Pippa Grant

“Disgusted.”

  I slug him in the arm, and not just because it’s what I’m supposed to do.

  I’m honestly fucking pissed at him. He doesn’t know Eloise. He can’t insult her.

  He grins bigger.

  “If you two wreck my taco bar, I’m telling Mom both of you have grandchildren you’re hiding from her,” Parker announces.

  Fuck.

  None of us have secret kids, but she threatens it every time one of us crosses the line, and it’s serious shit.

  If Ma thought any of us had ever had a kid and not told her she was a grandma, we’d be dead.

  Worse than dead.

  I’ve seen shit on operations for the Navy that hasn’t scared me as much as the idea of my mom on a mission to locate a grandchild, and I was a fly on the wall in a terrorist arms deal that went south once.

  Literally. I was on the wall.

  And that’s all I can say about it.

  I look at Knox. “Brooks will give you two million dollars to knock Parker up.” Because then Ma will have a grandkid and it won’t be such a threat to make her think she might have more. Also, I happen to know Knox is looking forward to being a stay-at-home dad. The dude was practically made for the job.

  “Yeah, and Rhett will knit you another one of those unicorn blankets you two use for foreplay,” Brooks agrees.

  Fucking fuckballs.

  He got me again.

  “Those unicorn blankets are sexual magic,” Knox’s granny announces. “You should’ve seen the boner—”

  Brooks and all the women groan and clap their hands over their ears.

  Knox sighs.

  I fist-bump Nana again. “You go, girl.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” she replies.

  I fix myself a plate of tacos and take a seat far, far from Eloise.

  She was a wedding hookup. That’s it.

  The fact that I’ve been dreaming about her tight, hot pussy—and what it might actually feel like to come inside her, because we got interrupted before I got off—for the last two weeks doesn’t mean I want more.

  Just means my life’s in the shitter.

  That’s all.

  4

  Eloise

  I’m headed down to the parking garage to get my Hummer after book club, and I’m running out of creative ways to say fuck.

  I’ve already gone for fuckity fuckwads and fuck fucking McFuckerson and about a million other combinations, and it’s not helping.

  Parker’s brother isn’t at some secret military base in the land of sheep and genetically modified crops and experimental gnome warriors.

  He’s here. In New York. For at least two years.

  I need to move. Find a new band to drum with. Find a new book club.

  I didn’t even have a book club until a year ago, and now I need a new one.

  Dammit.

  This is what I get for having sex with the hottest guy who’s ever shown me his salami. Now I have to see him again. And he kept staring at me like he wanted to have sex again, which is really weird, because he seems normal—and with those muscles and tats and intense eyes and chiseled jaw, he also qualifies as hot as hell—and he’s related to Parker, which by default only puts him at a seven on the one-to-one hundred crazy scale, but he could have some other quirks beyond being related to Parker that might put him higher.

  “Fuckerella,” I mutter.

  “You forgot fuckballs and spaghetti,” a low voice says from in front of my Hummer, and I almost jump out of my skin.

  “Fuck on a cracker,” I yelp.

  “You’re ignoring me.”

  I put a hand to my hammering heart. “I’m not now, you jackass. Don’t you know not to sneak up on a woman when she’s fucking?”

  “You’re not fucking. You’re walking.”

  “I’m walking and saying fuck. That’s fucking.”

  “Want to fuck for real?”

  “Bang,” I correct, merely to be annoying, because being annoying is generally the fastest way to get rid of a guy you shouldn’t be attracted to. And yes. “And no. Your sausage didn’t fill my bun. It was undercooked and dried out at the same time. You should go to remedial banging lessons.”

  “That’s not what your pussy said. Or your mouth. You said I had a triple dick.”

  “Hello, I was stroking your ego.”

  “You were salivating over my dick.”

  “And if I bang you again, it’ll be a pity bang, and then I’ll never be able to look your sister in the eye again, and you’ll be responsible for her losing one of the best friends she’s ever had. Did your dick think about that before you came down here to stalk me?”

  He frowns like I’ve actually made a good point, which we both know I almost have, which is also mildly terrifying, because the closer you let people, the more they let you down and the greater possibility you’ll let them down too.

  Also terrifying? I’m oddly not appalled at the idea of doing the Ass of Glory again.

  He gave good O. And I’m not entirely certain he got his O, which really makes me wonder about him, because I never go back for a second round with a guy who doesn’t get me off, so why’s he back here propositioning me again?

  Unless he has a thing about finishing what he started.

  Dude. Has he been walking around with blue balls the last two weeks?

  Jeez, maybe I should sleep with him again.

  It’s not like it would be a hardship, the whole I might lose a friend if I do thing notwithstanding.

  He’s weirdly attractive with all those muscles under his stretched white T-shirt. And who the hell can eat that many tacos while wearing a white T-shirt without evidence all down his front? The fact that he’s not wearing guac or taco sauce right now is a serious insult to the tacos.

  Or something.

  Also, I really want to know what the rest of that tattoo on his left arm looks like up close. All I’ve got right now is a mermaid tail, and I want more.

  I’m also curious if his hair would feel like velvet or sandpaper with how short it is.

  “We’ll have to be friends,” he announces.

  “Friends don’t bang.”

  “Friends with benefits do.”

  “Not this friend. And maybe I don’t want to be your friend. Maybe I’m only friends with girls.”

  He points to his nose, which is just this side of off-center, which is oddly endearing too.

  Who am I, and what have I done with my normal brand of common sense? I don’t go for big-muscled military dudes. They can snap me like a twig without even trying, and I can’t hack my way out of that.

  “You see this face?” he says. “This is the face of a guy who respects his friend enough to not ask if he can watch you being friends with girls.”

  Okay, truth?

  I’d bang him because that was a good line.

  But I don’t have time to bang him tonight because I need to check on a project I got rolling this morning, and it’s actually more exciting than sex.

  Maybe.

  Normally.

  Sex with the Ass of Glory was really kind of amazing. It’s a good thing I didn’t let him kiss me, or who knows what kind of thoughts I’d be having right now?

  “You’re friends with Knox,” Rhett points out. “So you’re friends with at least one guy. And I hear the Berger twins tolerate you.”

  “Yeah, but they’re all married. So no banging. Plus, they turned me down.”

  “You asked Knox to bang you.” His statement makes his hazel eyes narrow in a way that has probably made a terrorist or two shit their pants, and I swear his jaw goes a little more square.

  “Yeah. At the rehearsal dinner. He said no, so I let him live and marry Parker.”

  He ducks his face, but since I’m often mistaken for an elf because of my stature, he can’t hide his smile by looking down. It’s like he’s smiling on my head.

  Weird.

  Most guys don’t think I’m funny.

  Come to think of it, most girls d
on’t either.

  “So you pretend I’m married, and we can be friends,” he says.

  “What’s it matter to you if we’re friends?”

  “If you refuse to be my friend, Parker’s going to think we’re still fucking, and she’ll tell our mom, and then Ma’ll start coming to book club meetings and asking when your last period was and emailing me sex columns on different positions to try, and I’ll be forced to forward them to you so we can both be tortured by the fact that we’re not friends.”

  He says sex and positions, and there go my engines, getting all greased up and ready for a rod-and-piston jam session.

  I don’t even realize his logic doesn’t make sense.

  “Lay it out for me,” I say. “What’s wrong with you? Are you dying and I’m your last shot at sex? You’re looking for someone for pony play and think I’d make a good jockey? You have gambling problems? I’m the last box for weird sex bingo? What?”

  He lifts a shoulder. “It was good.”

  “Like steak at a fancy restaurant good, or like I’d drink horse piss because I’ll die of dehydration if I don’t good?”

  “Like I was in a mood for pizza, and you were pepperoni and mushrooms.”

  “I hate mushrooms.”

  “So you’re wrong. It happens. We’re all human.”

  Dammit, now I’m smiling.

  That’s not supposed to happen. I don’t smile at men after I’ve had their dingdongs in my cooter. It’s a rule.

  “You want to put your disco stick in my banana basket again, you have to earn it.”

  His lips are twitching again, and for a split second, I wish I didn’t have a rule against kissing, because his lips look like they were made for sucking.

  And now I’m thinking about him sucking on my love muffin, and hello, I’m way too young for hot flashes, but there it was.

  “So how do I earn it?” he asks.

  Is he serious? Guys don’t want to earn anything with me. “When you figure it out, let me know,” I tell him. Because I have no idea. And nothing personal against him, but the more confusing I can be, the faster he’ll back off.

  Even if I will miss his triple-dick-sized cock.

  “Now move, unless you think you can take my Hummer, because I have places to be,” I tell him.

  “Normal places?” he asks.

  “So normal it’s terrifying. Like in a horror flick kind of way. You’d scream like Parker when she’s subjected to vegan tacos, or like Knox when he sees his Nana’s ass.”

  He swipes his hand over his mouth like he knows he’s not supposed to laugh. “I’ll figure it out,” he tells me.

  It’s not until I’m almost home that I realize his last words were both a promise and a threat.

  But I push it all aside, dump my keys in the ashtray by my kitchen, and head to command central.

  It’s been twenty-four hours since I figured out how to access the ill-gotten gains of one Sadie McSanders, and I’m pretty sure I have a lead on where she’s storing the rest of the mother lode.

  If I do this right—and I know a thing or two about doing this right—it won’t be long before I proceed to phase two.

  Because Sadie McSanders isn’t the fashion guru/savior she claims to be.

  In fact, Sadie McSanders isn’t even a woman.

  Nope, she’s Dirk Lemonson, which is also probably a fake name, and he’s one manipulative bastard.

  And I’m taking him down.

  One leg warmer at a time.

  That’s right.

  One leg warmer at a time.

  5

  Eloise

  Band practice is usually the highlight of my week, because I might secretly actually like having girlfriends who have accepted me in all my weird glory. They don’t care how short or spiky my hair is, or how much money I inherited, or if I get a new tattoo, or if I try to bang their brothers.

  They even seem to like me.

  And sometimes they ask me for help with certain cyberspace-related things that normal mortals can’t help with, and as far as I can tell, none of them have betrayed me by selling my secrets to the FBI.

  It’s the stuff of friendship fairy tales. And so I love band practice nights.

  But when I get to band practice Thursday night, three things strike me at once.

  First, Chase, who belongs to Sia, our keyboardist, has redone the basement of his brownstone so that a wall-sized picture of her face is the first—okay, only—thing you see when you walk into our practice room. I didn’t know she had a freckle under her left eye, or that two of her eyebrow hairs have gone gray, or that she was getting a pimple next to her nose, but now I do.

  Second, once you’ve gotten over the ten-foot-high homage to Sia’s nose, which takes up like half the wall space, I realize Parker has two tag-alongs.

  Knox, because duh, and Rhett, aka the Ass of Glory.

  Who’s sucking on a Twizzler.

  I fucking love Twizzlers like I imagine most normal women love their children, except most normal women don’t eat their children, and I will eat the shit out of Twizzlers.

  I paid the ice cream shop around the corner from my primary condo to start carrying Twizzler-flavored ice cream. That’s how much I love Twizzlers.

  But for once, I can ignore the Twizzlers, because Willow’s wearing leg warmers.

  Familiar leg warmers.

  And that instantly puts my blood pressure around the pressure-cooker-about-to-explode zone. “What the fuck are those supposed to be, walruses trying to eat your knees?” I ask, because if I start shrieking Quit funding the douche-twat like a normal woman losing her brain, they’ll know something’s wrong, and they’ll try to stop me, and I absolutely will not be stopped.

  If I were going to accidentally eat banana-flavored pudding or tattoo one of their names on my armpit, then yeah, they can try to stop me. Although I do love Willow enough to put her name in my armpit, because it’s hard not to love her that much, even for me.

  But they cannot stop my leg warmer rage.

  “What?” Willow says, turning her tall, slender legs—yes, her legs are tall, for real, they’re like as tall as I am, and then there’s the rest of her on top of it—so that we can all see the gems and sparkly thread all over her leg warmers that undoubtedly have a label inside that says Made in the USA right underneath the Sadie McSanders brand logo. “They’re coming back in style, and my preschoolers love all the different designs.”

  “You have more than one pair?” I shriek.

  Then I remember myself. Mostly because Parker quits tuning her guitar and Sia quits sucking face with Chase and Knox quits staring at Parker’s boobs and even the Ass of Glory stops sucking on a Twizzler, and all of them gawk at me.

  “What’s the other one look like, a drowning rat?” I grumble with none of my usual charming sarcastic wit. Nope, the wit’s gone, and all I’m left with is sweat gathering on my scalp and in the creases of my elbows.

  “Is this because leg warmers don’t go with bellbottoms?” Sia asks.

  I pull a drumstick out of my back pocket and fling it at her, because we don’t talk about the fact that my inheritance came from bellbottoms.

  We just don’t.

  Unfortunately for me, because athleticism runs in her genes—not in her bellbottoms—she snatches my stick out of the air, spins it over her knuckles, and then tosses it back to me.

  I snag it from the floor, because of course I miss catching it, stomp over to where Rhett’s sitting, grab his bag of Twizzlers, and take them to my drum kit, where I hit the kick drum a few times for good measure.

  “I already asked if they’re made with organic, ethically-sourced cotton,” Parker tells me cautiously, “but you’ve never cared about that, so…what gives?”

  “I got attacked by an Easter Bunny wearing leg warmers when I was a kid, okay?”

  I didn’t even know the Easter Bunny existed when I was a kid, but anytime I throw them a personal bone, they back off.

  “Aw, that’s te
rrible,” Willow says.

  She’s so naïve I could probably convince her fish have lips, but I won’t, because she’s the first one to say she’ll cover me when we’re out for dinner and I forget my wallet, even though she’s a preschool teacher on a tight budget and I don’t have to work a day in my life with all the money my grandfather—whom I never even knew—left me.

  I don’t deserve a Willow in my life, which is why as soon as she dumped her idiot fiancé and started dating Dax Gallagher—yes, rock star Dax Gallagher from Half Cocked Heroes—I got her a monthly subscription box from Sunshine Sex Toys.

  And I let her think Dax sent it.

  I beat on my kick drum again. “We playing tonight, or are we trying to fling slime at Sia’s nostrils?”

  I could get along so well with her brothers if I wasn’t acting like a horny rabbit every time they came around.

  Chase too.

  He actually cracks up this time, but he chokes on his laugh when Sia glares at him.

  Rhett licks a Twizzler top to bottom, sucks it into his mouth to coat it even more, and flings it at the wall.

  The Twizzler gets Giant Sia Head in the eye and slowly slides to the ground, leaving a streak of wet red spit in its wake.

  My pussy throbs, because fuck, that was hot.

  “You missed,” Knox says.

  Chase leaves the basement in the midst of a coughing fit.

  I’m glad Dax isn’t here with Willow tonight, because while I don’t really care if I’m the only one of my friends not in a relationship, I also hate being the only one left to talk to me when they all get into making lovey-dovey faces and baby-talking each other.

  Which none of them actually do—the baby talk, I mean, because they’re all drunk on the lovey-dovey faces—except Chase sometimes to Sia just to piss her off so they can have make-up sex later.

  But my point is, two years ago, we were just us girls.

  Willow was engaged back then, but it didn’t really count, because her ex-fiancé was a douchewaffle of the half-cooked variety.

  Life lesson: if you’re going to be a douchewaffle, at least be the kind that comes off one of those griddles that makes cool shapes like cartoon mice or Captain America symbols. Don’t be a plain square douchewaffle that couldn’t even fill your waffle maker with batter.