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“Fuck.”
“What?” She peers at me over her shoulder and shrugs. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
She spins back and sits down grinning. “Is it worth staring at? I don’t see my butt much.”
She’s flirting with me?
I lean in so my lips are inches from hers. “Your ass is sensational, Kate. I want to see it naked.”
And with that one comment, I throw the whole friends thing right out of the window. Heat sweeps right up her cheeks. Even when I talked to her half-naked in the hospital, she didn’t blush like that. I’ve also let my leery thoughts spill out over our nice polite evening.Shut the fuck up, Fabian.
I sink back and shake my head. “Sorry, I’m not very good at …”
But she leans in and presses a finger to my lips, causing a shiver to run all the way to my toes.
“Don’t censor yourself. I like who you are. I like the compliments.”
There’s nothing quite like the buzz of hearing a girl you like say something like that to you. We are careening down a new path now at a hundred miles an hour. What am Idoing? I kiss her finger, and she raises an eyebrow at me, so I give her my best cocky grin, trying to ease the syrupy tension.Come on, Fabian, you can do normal chitchat.
“I forget to eat most of the time so I’m starving. I hope you don’t mind if I order half the menu.”
She nods. “Likewise. We see too many patients and too much trauma in the hospital to spend time eating.”
Perhaps, in some odd way, her days are just like mine.
“How was it today?”
She puts her head on one side and purses her lips. “I often go home with a mountain of diagnoses buzzing through my head and the worry that they could all be wrong. I keep thinking: Will I always think like this, or will I be more confident and care less when I’ve got more experience?” She waves a hand, her silver bracelet catching the light. “Today I’m not too worried, so that makes it a decent day. How about you?”
“Well, I didn’t try any interesting drugs today.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
And I raise my eyebrows. She’s not passing judgment here.Interesting. She was the same in the ER. “It’s goodandbad.”
I don’t want to explain why I experiment with my body, why I want to get out of my head, so I’m going to stick to what loosely passes as work for me.
“I’m working on a complicated hacking project that has a few problems at the moment.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?” she says, and the intense expression on her face makes a smile creep around the corners of my mouth.
“Without having to kill you, you mean?” I say, and her lips twist to the side as she wrinkles her nose. She’s earnest, Kate, but in the best way. Perhaps you don’t realize when you first meet her, but the fun is bubbling away under the surface like a geyser looking for an escape valve. I take in the tousled hair and the pink cheeks and straighten my cutlery. How much should I divulge about what I do, the state of my finances?
“I hack because I love it, and I like projects that are challenging or interesting, rather than things that pay well. Unfortunately, that doesn’t cover the bills, so I also need to do paid contracts. This is one of those.”
“Illegal?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“I don’t do stuff like that for other people. Well …” I correct “ … I have sometimes. For organizations where I believe in what they’re doing: exposing corruption, criminals, bad environmental issues people are lying about. That sort of thing.”
I’m often hiding behind the scenes. The difficult jobs come to me eventually, as other people try and fail. But I’m not special: I’ve just got a good head for it and a lot of experience and, surprisingly, patience for this type of work. People like me are hard to find: Everyone is motivated by money.
“Some of it I’ve done outside the States, but occasionally I’m asked to do stuff on criminal cases here. This one is all about corruption in South Africa. Knowing which side is in the right is harder than you’d think. Sometimes people aren’t guilty even if the FBI or CIA would like to think they are. Having said that, I can usually prove it either way. People leave a trail of evidence a mile wide. Even the best people struggle to close down the kind of digital footprint we have nowadays, and tech companies make it difficult. I’ve worked for a couple of celebrities who were being hounded … That was pretty interesting.”
This is the longest explanation of my work I’ve ever given, and, when I focus back on Kate, her eyes are round.
“You realize how thrilling all that sounds?” she whispers, and I get the feeling she’d take more risks if she ever allowed herself to.
