Page 48 of Play the Game

I lay back on my pillows and closed my eyes. If he was going to be a while longer, I might as well get some sleep. But thoughts of his voice in my ear and his hands on my body and his mouth tasting every inch of me flooded through my brain until I was wide awake. And worse, desperate. I sat up and kicked off the covers, sweating. Maybe I could masturbate, get off fast, then pop into the bathroom to clean up before he arrived. His knock at the door ended that plan.

I climbed out of bed and opened the door.

“Should I stay out here?” he asked.

Like last night, he didn’t need to add. That was probably a good idea, given my current state of arousal, but I didn’t know how long our discussion would take, and despite our longstanding friendship, our current rift might make it seem strange to be whispering in the dark hallway. I stepped back and opened the door wider.

He stepped inside and closed the door but didn’t come any closer. “Sorry, I know this is weird, and now it’s late.” He ran a hand through his hair, obviously distressed.

“Jason, what is it?”

“It’s just...” He indicated my body with his hands. “Those short shorts and that T-shirt are... It’s not your fault. I can control myself. It’s just a little distracting.”

I glanced down at myself. My white, sleeveless sleep shirt was almost see-through, and my nipples were still hard from the illicit thoughts I’d been having about him before he knocked on my door. Thoughts I was going to play in my head while I got myself off. I blushed and turned away from him. I yanked the comforter off the bed and wrapped it around me. I sat on the edge of the bed and pointed to the chair near the window, which was as far away from me as he could get in the enclosed space.

“Tell me about this amazing lead.” I needed a few minutes to compose myself before we discussed anything even remotely connected to our relationship.

“It’s great news,” he said. “I was talking to my dad about what might be hanging up the software. Since it’s still in beta, time estimates aren’t that accurate yet. He didn’t realize why we’re using it, and I couldn’t tell him, but I did ask, kind of as a throwaway, if by chance he’d embedded a worm that could pick up ambient signal and work backward.”

I furrowed my brow. “You lost me at embedded worm.”

“Oh. That was the non-tech translation.” He leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs and his long fingers twined together between his knees. I snapped my gaze back to his face. “Okay, when we started Slogova 1, it pulsed out through the networks and grabbed Pasco’s signal. That’s how it works. That’s its first step. The problem is, the program doesn’t understand where the signal is that it’s holding until it backtracks and untangles all the mess it blew past when it homed in on the signal.

“But at the same time, it locked on its target—in our case, the breadcrumbs Pasco left for it—and it sent out another pulse and picked up all the surrounding signals. Six in total. It's been monitoring those, as well. Kind of a sneaky little add-on of the software that hasn’t been discussed, even in the more speculative corners of the internet.”

“Wait, are you telling me that program isn’t just looking for where Pasco was, but it’s also looking for the electronic signatures of any cell phones that were in the vicinity of him on Saturday morning?”

With the soft glow of moonlight through the closed blinds, I could see his wide smile. “Yes. We haven’t lost his goons, which means we probably haven’t lost him. As soon as we glom on to a few of them in any one place, odds will be high that’s where we’ll find Pasco.”

“Hot damn!” I jumped off the bed. “You’re brilliant! Your dad’s brilliant!” I threw myself into his arms.

He pulled me tight against his body, and I melded to him like we’d been made to fit together exactly like this.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against his chest. “I shouldn’t have done this. We can’t do this.”

“Can’t we?” He released his hold on me, allowing me to move, but kept one hand on my back and the other on my leg, asking me to stay. “I came here for a discussion about us. Now seems like the time for that conversation.”

“Does it?” I rocked gently, rubbing against his erection. “It seems like you might be distracted.”

He lifted his hand from my thigh and traced a taut nipple. “It seems like I might not be the only one.”

I groaned. “What are we going to do? It’s only been forty-eight hours since we last touched each other, and we can’t keep our hands to ourselves.”

“It’s actually just a little over twenty-four hours if you count that interlude in the car.”

I nodded. “We definitely have to count the interlude in the car.”

He helped me slide off his lap and sit on the corner of the bed. Then he sat back down in the chair and took both my hands in his. “Tam, I don’t want to keep my hands off you. More importantly, I don’t want to ignore feelings. Honestly, I don’t think I could if I tried.”

Yes!my heart screamed.This. Exactly this.I leaned toward him but resisted the urge to crawl right back into his lap. “We talked about this. We can’t do it.”

“I remember the speech. Friends, colleagues, lovers. We can only pick two.” He squeezed my hands and leaned closer, whispering. “Tam, you picked the wrong two. And yes, we talked about this last week, before we started down this path. And then we went barreling down the road anyway. That should tell you something.”

“That neither of us gets laid often enough.”

He smiled. “Nice try. We both know it’s more than just sex. We’ve both had a lot of sex in our lifetimes. Have you ever experienced anything like we felt Saturday night?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t lie about that. “So, now we have a bigger problem than we had a week ago.”

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