He nodded. “When was this?”
I shook my head. “I … really don’t remember. But it’s at least a year.”
He nodded again. “Cisco says Sly’s busy. He’ll be free in a couple of hours and he doesn’t have anyone else available. Neither do we. Though I suspect Boone just freed himself up. But that means, in the meantime, honey, get dressed. You’re goin’ to the office with me.”
Oh boy.
I was curious about where he worked.
But this wasn’t how I wanted to get my first tour.
“Axl—”
“Babe, I know you’re probably freaked. But I need you to get a move on. If he’s in Ryn’s laptop, I’m thinking less good thoughts than I was before. But a hack can be traced. If he left that trace, we can find him. I want on that right away.”
“Okay, I’ll be fast but, he finished.”
“What?”
“They both did.”
He took a quick breath, but it was big, expanding his chest, all this in an effort at patience, before he demanded, “Explain fully.”
“I know you told me not to, but I watched the end of the one for me. And I finished the one for you. And they both climax.”
“I see you think this is important, so I need you to explain that.”
“I think, I don’t know …but if he wanted to hurt me, or you, or freak us out, would he show them finishing?”
Axl didn’t reply.
“It’s like, again, I don’t know, but it feels like … flirting. Or a come-on. Or an invitation or something.”
“You think this whackjob genuinely has a thing for you outside being a whackjob who clearly has a thing for you?”
“For us.”
“Hattie, I can see wanting to think that in order to make it less disturbing, but I’m not sure it says that.”
“Okay,” I muttered, starting to get off the stool so I could go and get dressed.
“Babe,” he called, wrapping a hand around the side of my neck, so I stopped moving and looked up at him again. “You want someone, you approach them at a bar and hand them a line. You do not send them pictures and movies without even introducing yourself. Again, Boone doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but they find partners in the normal way. A lot of the time, they can just sense who is who and who likes what. They also have signals, like shit people wear, bracelets and necklaces and stuff. And they got their own thing going on where they can be around like-minded people and meet potential partners at bars, clubs, parties. They don’t find someone they like who they have no idea if they’re in the life or not, follow them, leave unsettling presents on their doorstep, and invade their lives.”
I nodded.
That made sense.
“Yeah?” he asked, even though I nodded.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“You okay?” he pushed.
I couldn’t shake something.
I nodded again.
“Tell me the truth, Hattie,” he said gently. “I wanna deal with this,” he indicated my laptop with his head, “but you’re more important so I need to know you’re good.”
“I’m good. I just think … ” I shrugged and finished, “Something is off.”
“Something is definitely off,” he agreed.
“Not just this guy being whacked. Something else.”
“We’ll get down to it.” He gave my neck a squeeze. “Get dressed, honey. We gotta go.”
I nodded again, he gave me another squeeze and then he let me go.
I ran and got dressed.
* * *
We were all standing around Axl’s workstation (and, by the by, Axl’s workplace was serious cool, precisely what you’d think of as commando central!).
All of us (though, I wasn’t standing, Axl told me to take a seat in his chair, which I thought was sweet).
That all of us included Axl, Boone, Ryn, Axl’s boss, Hawk, and the office manager, Elvira.
They’d connected remotely with some IT guru to Ryn’s computer and he had some diagnostics running.
But they were watching the montages sent to me on mine.
As was not in question, I liked porn.
Watching porn montages sitting at Axl’s workstation with our friends, his coworker and his boss?
Awkward.
“Well, not much you can say about this dude, ’cept he’s got good taste in porn,” Elvira remarked.
Ryn made a choking noise and I knew why because I was swallowing my own laughter.
“Vira,” Hawk’s deep voice tumbled from one side of me, where he was standing, to the other, where Elvira was, and I fought holding on to the arms of Axl’s chair so the force of his unhappiness wouldn’t knock me over.
FYI: pre-Axl, I would probably be apoplectic around Hawk Delgado (much like the semi-functioning apoplectic I was around Axl).
Yes, he was that handsome.
Then again, none of the guys were slouches, far from it.
But they’d been picked for my girls.
Hawk, though (even if he was very married).
Dayum.
I looked up at him.
Dayum to infinity.
His face was carved in stone.
One could say he did not like his boys dicked with, especially not through their women.