King of Code

by CD Reiss

  “I can’t reveal that.”

  “—is occupied by women.”

  “I promised to keep it secret.”

  “What does she want? She humiliated us for a reason.”

  “Relax. We opened it up for hacks to test it.”

  “In a controlled setting.” Keaton’s voice shredded in his throat. “That was the deal. This was an attack. A direct attack timed for the most attention. It was meant to kill the demand for a product that was set to revolutionize computing. And we do not sit still for it.”

  There was only one way to deal with Keaton when he had vengeance in his voice. Calm authority.

  “We are sitting still for it because we see the big picture. We don’t get revenge because we’re butthurt.”

  “We will discuss this when I see you.”

  “When are you unlocking it?”

  “When I see you.” He hung up.

  Harper was outside the pantry door, looking more frightened than I’d ever seen her. If she was scared, I wasn’t doing my job.

  “They say Alpha Wolf is a military contractor,” she said. “They say he’s a sociopath.”

  “They say a lot of bullshit.”

  “He already knows I’m here from the landline call.”

  “No. He knows I’m here—and possibly the hacker. If we cloak right, and we will, he won’t know you and the winner of the challenge are the same person. Once he unlocks the system, we’ll open up the Harperware. He won’t find you.”

  She didn’t believe me. Not one hundred percent. Twenty percent. All I had to do was fill in the other eighty. I took her hand and led her back to my bedroom, where we wouldn’t be interrupted.

  “Do you know why I took Keaton’s money?” I sat on the bed and took her hand.

  She stood between my legs. “He offered the most?”

  “No.” I counted on my fingers, index to pinkie. “It was in Bitcoin. He’s Alpha Wolf. It gave me dark web credibility. It gave the impression I was watching hackers as much as they were watching me. Which…” I made a fist and dropped it. “That’s half the story. The other half is weirder.”

  “Oh, I’m intrigued now.”

  “Let me tell you a story. I was once a teen hacker who grabbed what he could. I could have gone the rest of my life like that, until one day, Keaton and I cracked Luhn’s formula. I was conflicted about it, but Keaton was already setting up a route for secure wire transfers. Then the FBI ended up in my parents’ living room.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Her eyes widened, and her posture leaned forward slightly. She held onto the edge of my shirt as if she didn’t want me to leave until I finished the story.

  “They took me to a secure interrogation room where I told them it was me, all me. They knew someone else was involved. Someone with ties to US Intelligence.”

  “Keaton?”

  “Yes, but no. Maybe his parents. Point being I didn’t flip on him. I said it was just me. And because I hadn’t taken anything, I could convince them I was white hat. Which made even more trouble. Because then I had to be one. They tried to recruit me, and you know, I thought, sure. Whatever. Could be cool. But my mother didn’t want anyone to decide anything for me at that age and flew into this…” I pressed my fingers into my eyes and let out a nervous laugh. “God, she could be scary when she wanted to be. She had a constitutional lawyer in the room in two hours. They fought hard, man.”

  “They were going to forgive the other exploits?”

  “If they could take me to Quantico right there, yeah. After two days, the lawyer cut a deal. Show them how I turned the credit card company’s formulas against them, stay clean, and stay available if they needed me. I covered for my friend. My father never spoke to me again. The FBI comes around every once in a while with some easy shit to help with and a job offer with shitty pay. But Keaton’s walking around because I didn’t flip on him, and that counts for something. He owed me, and he still owes me. If he finds out it’s you, I’ll call that favor the fuck in.” I kissed her just enough to let her feel me. “You’re safe. I’m going to fuck you every day between breakfast and lunch. Then I’m going to eat you for dinner.”

  She turned to straddle me. I slid down so my erection met the damp crotch of her pants. I pushed her against me, and she let loose a breathy ah.

  “That’s it?” she asked.

  “And teach you how to think in quantum trinary.”

  “I already hacked quantum trinary.”

  “Without that poison pill it’s going to be ten times harder. I can help you. There’s plenty you don’t know about QI4.”

  “That’s cheating.”

  I moved her body against the length of me. Hotter, wetter, harder. My dick wasn’t going to stop until it was inside her. “You want to win or not?”

  “I want to win.”

  I pulled her T-shirt over her tits. The tips were hard and pink, bending under my thumb, salty on my lips. I yanked on her waistband.

  “Off.” She stood and pulled her jeans down, and I took out my cock. “Turn around.”

  Hesitantly, she turned her back to me. Stroking her ass with one hand, I got a condom out of my wallet with the other and cracked the package with my teeth. I spit the edge and rolled it on.

  “Tell me…” I guided her onto me and put downward pressure on her hips. “Tell me how much you want to win.”

  When she was all the way down to the base, I reached around and opened her legs.

  “Ah. God,” she groaned. “I want to win.”

  “Everything. You want to win it all.” I moved her up and down slowly.

  “I want to win it all.”

  “No matter what it takes.”

  “Yes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  My hands ran over her inner thighs and landed between her legs. I opened her, exposing her clit to the air. “Fuck me, goose.”

  She moved faster. “Like this?”

  I touched where our bodies met and rubbed her hard little clit. “Like you mean it. Fuck like a winner.”

  She took two more slow strokes, and I ran two fingers over her pussy.

  “Yes,” she said as if understanding for the first time. She moved her hips hard, deep, in a quick rhythm.

  I kept a hand between her legs and took a fistful of hair in the other to steady her. She slowed down when she started coming. I tightened my grip on her hair.

  “Win, goose.”

  She sped up through her orgasm. Her guttural unfs went with the rhythm of her thrusts until I gave in to the pressure and came right after her.

  She collapsed against my chest, and I held her steady, staying inside her as long as I could.

  “You’re going to get everything you want.” As she turned to face me and put her arms around my shoulders, I held her on my lap. “You’re not going to know what to do with yourself. Success is trickier than failure.”

  “You going to help me with my success problem?”

  “Once I solve my own, yes.”

  She laughed a little. Just enough to keep steady on my lap. She put her head on my shoulder, and we stayed like that for a while.

  I’d been called a genius and a game-changer, a harbinger of the future and a once-in-a-generation mind. I’d walked in the halls of power, met with titans of industry, had my name mentioned in the same sentence as historical figures.

  Yet holding this woman was the greatest honor of my life.

  I was losing my once-in-a-generation mind.

  L

  The first time we came downstairs together during daylight hours, Catherine was on the couch, facing the rain-soaked windows with a blanket over her legs. She glanced up from her sewing or needlepoint or whatever the fuck long enough to say hello, then she looked back down. I caught a little smirk. I didn’t know if it meant she approved or if it just meant she knew.

  “There’s a pot of soup on the stove if you’re interested,” she said.

  “Thanks!” Harper bopped off to the kitchen with her ponytail sw
inging and her ass swaying in a pair of little pink shorts. She already had the lid off the soup when I joined her.

  “Bleh,” she said, putting the lid back on. “Chicken.”

  “You don’t like chicken soup?” I took the lid off. It looked fine to me. “What kind of person doesn’t like chicken soup?”

  “She puts peas and carrots in it. Frozen. It’s gross.”

  Catherine’s voice came from the doorway. “If you want to chop carrots and shuck peas all day, you’re welcome to.”

  “No thanks. Complaining’s easier.” She lifted a corner of foil from a covered plate. “Is this cookies?”

  Catherine slapped her hand. “For church.”

  Then she turned to me, and I was caught between guilt at looking at Harper’s ass and the awareness that her pussy was still on my lips.

  “Are you coming?” Catherine asked.

  “Uh, where?”

  “Church,” Harper said, getting the spoons out and knocking the drawer closed with her hip.

  “Sure.” I said it without thinking. I wanted Catherine to like me. I was fucking her baby sister in her house and eating her food. Saying yes was the least I could do.

  Harper’s reaction was immediate. “God, no!”

  “God, yes,” Catherine said, opening a cabinet. “It won’t kill you. And now you have to go, or Taylor’s going to have to listen to the sermon without you.” She pointed at an empty shelf. “Where are the bowls?”

  “We can use the white ones,” Harper said, opening another cabinet.

  “Harper,” Catherine scolded, “did you hide them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to sell them. Where are they?”

  “Can’t we just use the white ones?” She handed me three white bowls and the spoons.

  “Where are they? I need to know you trust me.”

  “It’s—”

  “Tell me.” Catherine’s voice dropped an octave. “Where are they?”

  Harper cleared her throat. Catherine crossed her arms. I stood there with a stack of bowls in one hand and spoons in the other.

  “They’re gone,” Harper whispered.

  “Where?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Later? Later meant “when Taylor can’t hear” as far as I was concerned. I put the bowls down and held my hand over the soup pot so she couldn’t open it. “Now is good.”

  Harper crossed her arms and ankles, rolled her eyes, and put her tongue in her cheek. “Johnny pawned Taylor’s watch and so I got it back. It’s not a big deal, and if you make a big deal about it, I’m going to knock this soup all over the floor.” She snapped up the spoons. “Do you want to eat or not?”

  I moved my hand from the pot, and Harper slid a ladle out of the drawer.

  “Those were really expensive bowls,” I said.

  “He’s a lousy pawn broker. And I might have had a bracelet I didn’t like hanging around.” She pressed her lips together as if holding back what she wanted to say, then she said it anyway. “I couldn’t get your laptop back. That was a straight sale.”

  “My laptop?”

  Catherine gasped. “That was Taylor’s?” She held her hands up, looking me with raised eyebrows and a half-open mouth, the words “I didn’t know” written on her tongue.

  “It got sold to a guy in Florida.”

  I didn’t care about the money, and I was way past needing it to break a hack. But if the wrong person found out it was mine and they took enough time and energy, there was QI4 code inside I didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands.

  “Tell me you cleared the hard drive.”

  “I nuked it.” Harper looked me in the eye when she said it, and even though I believed her, she held up her right hand. “Swear. It was clean. And I’m sorry for that and all the other things.”

  “Is that the last of it, goose?”

  “What other things?” Catherine asked as she sifted through a rack of envelopes.

  “The other things. Now.” Harper bumped me with her hip. “Get out of the way.”

  I moved and let her ladle out the soup. She did it carefully, making sure we each had the same.

  Catherine looked up from stuffing the envelope.

  “You better ask for forgiveness at church,” she said, licking the flap. “For whatever it is.”

  “I will.” She lowered her voice. “I’ll make it up to you. I don’t know how, but I will. If I have to sell my own machine, I’ll give you back what I took.”

  I was silent. An inconsequential speck on a tiny boat surrounded by continuous horizon, humbled in the sea of her generosity. I’d felt that insignificant before, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t fear it would crush me.

  We ate the soup, I tried to teach her some tricks coding within QI4, but as soon as I got to anything she couldn’t learn on her own, she put her hand on my dick. I used my last condom on her. I didn’t mention the bowls or the watch or the mystery bracelet she didn’t like. I’d buy her bracelet and her grandmother’s bowls back and raise her up on a throne for her selfless kindness if it was the last thing I did.

  LI

  After showering and finding my best shirt laundered and ironed on the doorknob, I got into the passenger seat of the shimmymobile and let Harper drive me to church.

  She pulled up in front of the grocery store where I’d first met her.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Condoms. Go.”

  I started to get out but stopped myself when she made no move to join me. “Are you blushing?”

  “Shoo,” she said, checking her face in the rearview.

  I kissed her pink cheek and went into the grocery store. I was the only customer, and Pat wasn’t working. A bored girl sat behind the counter, reading a full-color newspaper with red headlines. She cracked her gum as if it were her job, and maybe it was.

  Produce took up the center aisle. Tomatoes. Bananas. Oranges. Apples. Iceberg lettuce. The basics. Five other aisles of prepared foods. The personal bullshit section was all the way in the back, and there wasn’t a birth control method in sight.

  “Hey,” I said to the girl at the register.

  “Hey.” She smiled and closed the celebrity rag. “Sorry. Not much else to read around here.”

  “Yeah. I hear you.” I jerked my thumb toward the back wall. “I was looking for condoms.”

  “Trojans? Sure.” She got up from her chair. “How many you need?”

  A billion. “Twenty-four pack would be great.”

  “We don’t have any ribbed in a box of twenty-four.”

  “That’s fine.”

  She peeked her head up. “We do have the ultra large, if you need it.” Her voice was thick and syrupy.

  I leaned on the counter. “Do you know I can get my whole arm in a regular size without breaking it?”

  “But it’s tight, right?” Her eyelashes fluttered. They were fake. So much effort to work in a grocery store. “On your arm, I mean.”

  “I don’t need to show off.”

  She stood with a twenty-four box of regular lubricated. “Fourteen ninety-nine.” She rang it up as I took a fifty out of my wallet. “You’re staying at the Barrington place?”

  The bell above the door rang. It was behind a wall of chips, so I couldn’t see who had come in. Did I want to answer truthfully in front of someone I couldn’t identify? Or at all?

  “Can you break a fifty?”

  She plucked the bill from my fingers. “There’s a bedroom with a painting on one of the ceilings.” She opened the register and made a production out of checking the bill’s authenticity. “Have you seen it?”

  Not everyone who had ever seen the painting had fucked Harper Barrington. It seemed like a safe truth. “Yes.”

  “My uncle Reggie painted it.” She flipped the fifty under the drawer and counted out the change.

  “Is that the same Reggie with the trucker hat? And the reddish hair?” How many Reggies could there be in a small to
wn? Plenty. The Reggie I’d met didn’t seem like much of a pink peony kind of guy, but hell, I’d been wrong before.

  “That’s him! He worked so hard. Showed us all the sketches he did before. I was twelve, and I thought he was the best artist in the world.”

  “It’s a nice painting.”

  “Uncle Reg sold paintings sometimes but nothing as big as that ceiling. Mr. Barrington paid him five thousand dollars. It was, like, wow. That was so much. I thought Uncle Reggie was famous and rich, but he never painted another big room like that.” When she handed me the change, she touched my hand. “I’m glad it’s still there. I thought it must be gone by now.”

  “Still there.”

  “I’d love to see it again.”

  I folded the money and put it in my wallet. “I’m sure Harper or Catherine would show it to you.”

  Harper’s voice came from behind me. “Oh, please.” She stepped out from behind the wall of chips and smacked her hand onto the condom box. “Cynthia saw it at my birthday party in last December. Remember, you were smoking weed up there with your boyfriend?”

  “Oh, right!” Cynthia faked a memory jog.

  “Right.” Harper picked up the box as if the shame over the condoms was nothing compared to the desire to shove the box up her friend’s ass.

  “Nice to meet you.” I pulled Harper out of the store. Once we were in the parking lot, I took the box from her. “What was that about?”

  “She’s a famous boyfriend stealer.”

  “Okay, one”—I held up a finger—“I’m not your boyfriend. I’m half of your binary pairing.”

  She pushed me so hard I had to take a step back or fall over. “You’re the one to my zero?”

  “I’m your mate. A boyfriend can be stolen. A mate can’t.” I held up a second finger. “Two, she’s not my type.”

  She crossed her arms and leaned on one hip. “Is there a three?”

  “Three.” I made a W.

  “Knew it.”

  “You need new friends if you can’t trust the ones you have.”

  “Did you text the kettle to tell him he was black, Mr. Pot?”

  I laughed. She tossed me the box. I caught it, and we went to church.