I worked my mouth.
I don’t do that. I don’t meet strangers. I especially don’t meet them when they’ve hacked my account.
Three dots.
Okay.
Stop saying okay.
Three dots.
Why are you talking to me, Shay?
I swallowed, goose bumps rising at him using my name.
“Shay?” My sister’s voice pulled me back into reality.
“Huh?” I blinked, looking up from my phone. All three looked at me, waiting. “What?” I asked.
Olly cocked her head to the side. “What are you doing?”
“Oh.” I placed my phone down. “Checking on the delivery.”
chapter
seven
SHAY
Void hadn’t messaged me all week. His silence didn’t feel like a test or a punishment. It felt like he waswaiting, like he was giving me space to decide whether I really wanted this.
It was weird.
He was simultaneously respecting my boundaries while breaking them.
So I went about my week as usual. I went to work, I bought overly expensive Mexican food, and I argued about the difference between enemies to lovers and rivals to lovers at book club.
I could almost tell myself it was a fluke. That whatever had happened with Void was a figment of my overactive, kinky imagination.
Then, on Thursday, I carpooled with Eames and Olly and paused as they went inside, taking a selfie just outside my building. The red brick juxtaposed against the overcast gray morning.
“You coming?” Eames held the door open, waiting.
“Uh…” The black skull mask had popped up.
Void had watched it.
“Coming!” I shoved my phone into my bag and ran after them.
After once again exploding in a mess of pens and scrunchies, I got to work. Almost immediately, my computer froze.Weird. These computers were designed specifically to handle large processing.
Somewhere in the building was a supercomputer. Rows and rows of data towers, wires, coolant, all powered my little desktop.
I did the ol’ IT trick—turned it on and off again—and waited.
There were a few models I needed to run for Jenna. We were coauthoring a paper much closer to my area on standard dark matter interactions and systematic shifts in cosmic age determination. In normal talk, we were wondering if our assumptions about dark matter were biasing how old we thought the universe was.
I tapped my foot against the floor, legs jiggling, waiting for the computer to turn back on.
