King of Code

by CD Reiss

  Or she was a complete whore and I didn’t care.

  Maybe the question wasn’t about her. Maybe the question was about why I thought I had to ask myself who a woman slept with and why. Or why it mattered. Or why some behaviors were good and some were bad, because I’d done some shitty stuff people could get on my ass about.

  I didn’t know what I thought about anything anymore. I was all turned around. These guys out here? A guy who let himself be called Butthead as a sign of affection and Orrin, who’d nearly taken my face off because he didn’t like how I was touching Harper? Were they involved in what she was doing? Did they see some greater good?

  I couldn’t imagine they’d allow my voluntary abduction, but there were so many moving pieces to this puzzle I didn’t think any one human could do it alone, no matter how smart and capable.

  “How did you guys find out Fitz was coming?” I asked.

  “Fanny the realtor,” Butthead said. “Over in Doverton.”

  “She’s pretty connected.” I finished my beer. Debated having another. I wasn’t pleasantly buzzed. Just slow and tired.

  “I thought it was the Badger,” Orrin said.

  “The Badger?”

  “Mayor. He looks like a fucking…” Butthead waved it away as too obvious. “But nah. He stopped bothering to even leave town after we couldn’t get Pepsi to move in.”

  “Yeah.” Orrin sipped his beer.

  Whatever part in it they had, I believed they didn’t know Harper was talking to Fitz on Chaxxer.

  “You spray paint the Caddy, Orrin?”

  “Why you asking?”

  “You were around that day.”

  “You think he did it?” Butthead laughed. “Dude, that was me. All me.”

  “What did you do with my laptop?” The anger was a transparent wrap around the hope that I’d get it back.

  “Harper’s got it.”

  “Did she say why you should do something so fucking stupid?”

  His laughter clanged to the floor as if I’d cut a chain of tension. “Nah. Just said it wasn’t a big deal and it was a joke on some rich guy. Said to make an E into a three to pretend I was an uneducated rube, and, you know, she kinda got me going. But you’re all right. I don’t feel good about it.”

  Apparently, it was okay to victimize some people and not others. People you knew and liked, you left alone. Strangers, especially ones who fit a certain mold, were crimes waiting to happen. I was mad at the idea of a Butthead, a guy whose morals operated on a vector. But to his face I couldn’t be, because I suffered from the same relativism.

  “How did she know I was coming?”

  “Internet.” He shrugged and hid behind his beer.

  “Same as how she knew Fitz was coming?”

  “Told you that was Fanny,” Orrin interjected.

  “Fuck, Bernard,” I said before finishing my beer. “I’m surprised you wrote ‘Nice Caddy’ instead of ‘titties’ all lowercase.”

  “I had to stop myself. Harper’s a lady.”

  I must have been drunk, because I laughed, and Bernard aka Butthead laughed with me. Even Orrin got that look an older man gets when he has to reluctantly admit the kid got off a good one.

  I went to bed on my thin little mattress and stared at the cracks in the ceiling. The noise lessened downstairs. Doors opening and closing. Water pipes rattling. Chatter. Children. I hadn’t been around that many children since I was a child myself.

  When everyone was gone, Catherine started crying.

  If Harper came back, the sound of her would have been lost in the chaos. I needed to apologize or tell her it didn’t matter or something. I needed to tell her I meant it, and I didn’t. We could do this together.

  She doesn’t have to—

  —maybe she wanted to—

  —she’s not a fuck-for-riches type—

  —you don’t know her—

  —you know she’s a decent person who—

  —has been on Chaxxer—

  —but she doesn’t have to—

  Around and around it went.

  She was gone too long. Way too long. She could have been lying on the side of the road or in trouble or miles away at some rapist’s second location.

  I got out of bed and started putting pants on when there was a break in the wailing through the walls. I could hear better. A sound from the hall was coming through, then Catherine started again, and it was gone.

  Was it clicking?

  Pants on, I went into the hall and stood at the foot of Harper’s stairwell.

  Definitely clicking. She was at the keys.

  I stayed at the bottom of her stairs, listening. Was she typing filthy things? Was @Flow_Bro calling her a slut? Or a whore? I’d done the same to hurt her feelings, not get myself off. Did that make me a better or worse person than him?

  My bones ached. She could be doing anything up there. Re-hacking me. My brain could barely complete a thought except that she was safe at home, not twisted in a knot on the side of the road.

  Bursting into her room, no matter the reason, was going to make it worse.

  I crawled into bed and let the crickets lull me to sleep. Not even Catherine’s crying could keep me up. I thought I’d slept for a few minutes, but when I woke, the crickets were done and the moon had moved across the sky into the frame of the French doors. Catherine had quieted.

  A dark figure stood over me silently. The moon caught the blond edges of her hair.

  “Harper?”

  She didn’t answer, but her shoulders shook, and she swallowed so hard I could hear it. I sat on the edge of the bed.

  She held out something. It glinted in the moonlight, clattering to the mattress when she dropped it in the space between my legs.

  “My watch.” I looked at it but didn’t see much but a dark circle. The ticking vibrated against my fingers. “Thank you.”

  “You have to know how to ask Johnny for things.”

  “Yeah.” I put it on my wrist. The ticking was louder than my heartbeat, but barely. “I’m sorry about what I called you. I knew it would hurt you.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m a stranger here. In my own hometown. It’s always been that way. Then I drag you here. It’s been less than a week, but I have moments with you where I feel like you and I, we’re strangers, but it’s temporary. Like there’s about to be knowing between us I don’t have with anyone else. And then you’re so cruel.”

  She sniffed. Her shoulders hitched. She pressed her fingertips against the insides of her eyes.

  “But I have it coming,” she said. “I know I do. I fucked with your life. I’m still fucking with it. You don’t owe me anything.”

  What did she want? Besides returning my watch, was there something else?

  “What brought you down here?”

  She shrugged, waving in the general direction of her room, her computers, her Chaxxer account. “I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit.”

  “So you came to me?”

  She coughed a short laugh. “Go figure.”

  Turning to the moonlight, raising her hand as if she wanted to say things she couldn’t, her breathing got thick and shallow. When she blinked, tears were displaced onto her cheeks.

  I wanted to ask her where my laptop was, but it could wait. Everything that kept us apart could wait. She needed me more than I needed answers.

  I leaned on an elbow, swung my legs back on the bed, and held my hand out to her. “Come on.”

  “I can’t.” She was fully crying. Not as unreservedly as her sister, but her voice was wet and broken.

  “Clothes on. No sex. I won’t even get hard.”

  She laughed a little and stepped forward. “Yes, you will.”

  “All right. I might get hard.” I turned back the covers. “Come on. It’s warm.”

  Tick-tick-tick, my watch counted the time it took for her to decide.

  Knee first, then hand, then shoulder and last leg, she crawled into bed and turned onto her back to look at t
he cracked ceiling and the bald, dark light bulb.

  Everything about that was wrong. I put the covers over her and was overcome with tenderness. It overrode all my good sense. All the brain power I’d wasted and some that I’d used. She was the enemy. She had my life in her hands. She was the reason I was trapped. If I wanted to get what I needed from her, I had to keep my distance.

  All those things were true.

  But in the moonlight, with my body aching and her silent sobs breaking the crust of my hostility, they became false. Her tears spoke to a different part of me. A part I had no control over. A part I hadn’t known I had. A part of me that she’d been prying away since the minute I met her.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  Sure as I was that she was too emotionally guileless to break my guard down intentionally, I was also sure I could put my battle gear on again tomorrow.

  She tried to get control of her breath, and covered her face with her hands as if she didn’t want me to see her crying. I gently turned her until my face was at her shoulder and we were spoons.

  I barely heard her whisper, “You don’t have to be nice to me.”

  “I know.” I held her. I knew she was awake from the way her eyelashes brushed my arm.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  Johnny making that bet while I was too drunk to remember. The gears and watch guts on his table. My dealer getting a “cheap” Langematik from a guy he’d never met before.

  “It was my watch, wasn’t it?” She didn’t answer, but I was sure she knew what I meant. “All this time I thought… my God… it was me. I was bringing the transmitter in and out of the cage.”

  “Johnny thought you’d notice the watch was slow before we got all the data.”

  “Who tells time with their watch?” I stroked her arm. I was the weak link. I was the one who’d had to have the sweetest mechanical piece. It was my ego that had brought the whole thing crashing down. “Who else is in on it? The whole town?”

  “Just me and Johnny. Butthead with the spray paint. They wouldn’t… they’d freak out if they knew. Johnny’s the only one who believes in karmic social justice. That because my father owned this town and destroyed it, I’m the one who has to fix it.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” She wiggled and turned around until she faced me. Her hands were folded flat under her cheek. The sobbing had abated. “I used to believe in forgiveness. I used to read Sherlock Holmes because they were such good puzzles. When I got to The Blue Carbuncle—”

  “Is that the one you left in the comments? With the geohash?”

  “Yes. Did you finish it?”

  “No.” I’d skimmed for more clues once I knew what they looked like, but I hadn’t read for story. Ego again. I’d thought I knew what the hacker was trying to tell me, so I’d ignored the rest. A stupid, sloppy mistake.

  “This regular guy steals a valuable gem. It’s famous. Everyone wants it. People have died to own it. Holmes says…” Her tongue flicked over her lips, and her eyes went to the side as if thinking. “‘Every facet stands for a bloody deed.’ He, the thief, hides it in a goose and gets caught. But when Holmes figures it out, well, the guy wasn’t a lifelong criminal. He was terrible at it, actually. Holmes realizes there’s no use in turning the guy in. He lets him go.”

  I touched a half-dried tear with my thumb. “He hid his treasure in a goose?”

  “Yeah. And Holmes ate it. He broke the spell,” she continued. “By forgiving a thief, he changed someone’s world.”

  “So it’s not karmic justice or cultural social whatever?”

  “No. It’s different. Not that it matters. I’m the one who can do what has to be done. But I like to think that my father is forgiven. Someday my family will be off the hook.”

  “There’s no hook, goose.”

  She spoke again after a few deep breaths. “Then why can I feel it?”

  Her shoulders shook, and she sniffled. She was going to cry again, and I couldn’t take that either. Crying women scared me. They made me feel as if I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean, sun up at the top of noon, without a marker to know where I was.

  But I had to steer the fucking boat this time. There was no grown-up to make it all right. That was me. I was the grown-up, and I had to commit to a direction.

  I held her as tightly as I could without crushing her, but I wanted to crush her. Hard. Into a tight ball I could tuck away someplace safe.

  “It’s okay.” My words were stupid and ineffective, but they were all I had. “You’re going to be all right.”

  “I want to accomplish something. I just want to win again, you know?”

  Seeing her weep for validation punched a hole in the world. She was brilliant and compassionate. She worked hard for everyone around her. I’d never met such a genius in my life. Things were supposed to be easy for people like her. She was supposed to have the world at her feet. How could this be true? How could it happen?

  “I surrender. You’re going to win this. I’ll do whatever you need me to.”

  Her nod was so slight I barely felt it against my shoulder.

  I was only human. I was ambitious and callous, but I wasn’t any kind of sociopath. She’d hurt me, opened me, then asked for sympathy with her body against mine.

  Of course I dragged my lips against her throat then her cheek. Of course they sought out her breath and her voice. And when I kissed her, of course I wanted to get inside her.

  I didn’t want to seduce her. I didn’t want to relieve myself and move on. She was neither project nor prey. She was Harper. Just Harper. She had hands that clawed and a mouth that groaned into mine. She had hips that pushed into me when the line of my cock was against her. She took my control and wove it into desire.

  “Fuck!” I snapped as I pulled away. “I said I wouldn’t.”

  She was under me, breathing from deep in her chest through parted lips. “Yes, but we can.”

  She wanted to. She’d said yes. What the hell else did I need? An engraved fucking invitation?

  “No transactions.”

  “Okay,” she said with a sharp nod and locked her hands behind my neck. “No trades. Just sex.”

  “No.” I gently took her hands from my neck. “It would be a trade. Every time we touch each other, it’s a transaction. I can’t. You didn’t come down here for that. And I’m not going to pretend I understand it, but I’m fucked in the head when it comes to you. I’m not going to take my fucked-upness about it and relocate it to you.” I kissed her because that crease in her lip needed to be kissed very badly.

  One of her eyelids drooped a little, narrowing her focus. “You have feelings for me.”

  “I said I didn’t understand it.” I got up on my knees and nudged her to her side. “It must be your powers of seduction.”

  “I’m amazing,” she said with a smile.

  I fit my chest against her back and pushed one arm under her neck, spooning her again. “You are. Now go to sleep.”

  I didn’t expect to sleep. Sleeping with another person in the bed was impossible—until that night. Her breathing got even and shallow against me, and her shoulder went limp. I planned on holding her until the sun came up, but soon after, my mind went into the weeds then cut to black.

  XLI

  I was on the boat again, but I was sitting alone on the stern. My watch was ticking as if it was pressed right up against my ear. Sharks circled the boat. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there, and I knew they were hungry.

  I wasn’t scared. I was irritated. My tailbone itched. When I reached behind to scratch it, I pulled back a wiggling salmon. What to do with it? If I threw it back into the ocean, the sharks would eat it, and I didn’t want that. I had to save it.

  I threw it in a water-filled red bucket. It splashed and swam the perimeter.

  My tailbone tickled again.

  Another salmon.

  Plop, into the bucket.

  It was crowded i
n there, but they’d be all right.

  But then, another prickled my tailbone.

  Still, I couldn’t let the sharks eat it. Couldn’t. These were my fish. I was responsible for them.

  When I dropped it in the bucket, all three fit comfortably, then four fit, as if the bucket grew bigger on the inside but not the outside.

  A fifth appeared with no sign they’d ever stop, and the five-gallon bucket increased its interior size.

  “Stay still.”

  Harper’s voice cut through my dream. I was on my stomach with my watch to my ear, and the pitching of the boat had been her shifting weight on the bed. She held me down when I tried to turn, and I let her because whatever she was doing to the place where my back met my butt was kind of nice.

  “What are you doing back there?”

  “Code number three.”

  “I thought we weren’t being transactional.”

  “We didn’t have sex. So it wasn’t a transaction.” With the click of the pen cap, she checked her work by counting on her fingers and checking notations in a little pad, then she nodded sharply. “Done.”

  I twisted around. “How am I supposed to see that?”

  “Tricky problem.” She took her cell from the night table. I was immediately jealous that she had her connection to the wider world while mine was cut. “I can take a picture, and you can call from here. You don’t even have to get out of bed.”

  “No.” I said it more harshly than I intended.

  “I promise to not post your butt on the internet.”

  “I’m not worried about that. My partner already located the house when I called from the landline. I don’t want him to locate your personal phone.”

  “You know I’m cloaked, right?”

  “Don’t test him.”

  “So how you calling this one in? Smoke signal?”

  I stood. “I already called from the kitchen phone.”

  She followed me down the hall. Downstairs, Catherine hummed to the whoosh whoosh of a broom.

  I stopped in the middle of the stairwell. Harper couldn’t get past me if I didn’t want her to, and I didn’t. “You don’t need to come.”

  “You’re reading the code on your butt?”