Page 29 of Bend & Break
“Yeah?” he says, sliding the USB into the port and flashing me a grin. “You gonna punish me if I fuck it up?”
God, I hate him.
And also I want to climb him like a rope in gym class.
I have no idea how I got here.
I cross my arms and start pacing. The laptop whirs softly, screen flickering as he pulls up some recovery program that looks like something out of a spy movie. Half a dozen file trees, blocks of code, folders with names I don’t understand, strings of numbers rolling past as if it's testing combinations. But he moves through them with practiced ease, fingers flying.
“This is weirdly attractive.” I must be sleep deprived, because I can’t believe I just said that out loud.
Mads doesn’t look up. He keeps typing, completely unbothered by the fact that I’m hovering behind him like a lunatic, wearing a path into the floor and clearly moments away from losing it.
“You’re going to try to kiss me the second this file opens, aren’t you?” His voice is maddeningly calm. I can’t help but feel like it might be a bit forced for my benefit.
He scrolls with one hand, navigating through layers of hidden folders, and I’m ninety percent sure he’s enjoying this. The drive, the mystery, maybe even my unraveling.
“Shut up.” I move in closer, watching the screen flash between directories.
My pulse kicks every time he clicks something new. I’m too close to him, but I can’t make myself back off. Not when he’s this focused. Not when my brain’s short-circuiting from the combination of heightened awareness and whatever weird chemical cocktail Mads Keller stirs up inside me just by existing.
“Just want to be emotionally prepared,” he adds, still annoyingly composed. “I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life.”
He glances up, and his mouth curves. Not quite a smile, not fully teasing.
I look away first. Pretend to inspect my cuticles. The tension between us isn’t new, but it’s pressing harder now, charged in a way that makes it hard to breathe sometimes. I’m supposed to be focused on what’s on that drive. Where it came from. Why?
And Iam.
But I’m also standing behind the one person who can piss me off and steady me in the same breath. And I can’t stop thinking about what would happen if Ididkiss him.
Not that I would.
Unless he kissed me first.
Probably.
He shifts into something detached, focused on the screen, typing with quiet precision as he moves through directories and buried files. I try to keep my breathing even. My stomach twists with every click, and my skin won’t stop buzzing. I tell myself it’s the energy drink I had on the way here.
But it isn’t.
It’s the not knowing.
I’m back to glaring at the screen. “It should be there. One video file. It looked playable, but?—”
“There it is.” He taps the trackpad.
A single file sits in the root:0x00000013_FILE.mp4
I stop pacing.
He double-clicks it. The screen stutters, then flashes black.
A pop-up window appears:No codec found.
He frowns, tries again. A new message:Corrupted header data.
“Okay,” he mutters, already pulling up another utility. “Could just be bad encoding. I’ll try it through a partition reader, see if I can trick it open.”
