Colleen nodded. “No one will ever again. I know it’s going to take a while to wrap my brain around it, but I won’t stay around people who say that about me.”
“Good girl.”
Warmth suffused through Colleen, and she closed her eyes, resting in his arms. “And look, while we’re on the subject of things that were said? That was a great comeback with my dad when you said, ‘I’m the man who loves her.’ But I know that’s what it was, a great comeback. And it was impressive. I mean, wow, that was amazing. I’ve never seen my dad sputter like that. He just could not believe that a guy like you could ever fall in love with a girl like me, and it was like a slap in the face. That was great.”
Tristan’s shoulder shifted under her cheek, and his voice was quiet when he said, “It seemed to be the right thing to say. It felt right when I said it.”
“Well, it was amazing. But I don’t want you to worry about it. I’m not about to get all stupid and fumbling and try to hold you to it. We’ve been through a hell of a lot these last six days, but it’s only been six days. No one can fall in love in six days.”
Tristan was frowning and nodding slowly. “I guess today is only Friday. Seems like longer.”
The blanket and Tristen’s chest were warming her up. The air conditioning had chilled her skin when she’d jumped right out of bed to answer the door. That must be it. “Right? The Devilhouse seems like a lifetime ago, but it was just last Saturday night.”
“But we knew each other online before that,” Tristan said slowly, as if he was searching for the right words. “We’ve been sparring on the Sherwood Forest stock market boards for over a year now.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t count.”
“Why wouldn’t it? When we were interacting on the forum, it was a true meeting of the minds. One could argue that it was the most intimate thing we’ve ever done.”
She snorted a little as she chuckled. “I hardly think flame wars about meme stocks are the most intimate thing we’ve ever done, Tristan.”
“But it feels like we’ve known each other a long time. I knew how clever and brilliant your mind was by the iron butterfly tutorial and the other educational materials you put together. I knew your kindness from the way you calmly explained things for new people who were just starting to invest and how you protected the small fish from the Killer Whales.”
She wormed her fingers out of the blanket beside her neck and flipped them around by her shoulder, trying to mime how insubstantial those things were. She’d just typed a few answers out, and then she’d saved them and made copy-paste files to explain the basics. “Yeah, but I could have been anybody. I could have been a seventy-year-old guy sitting in the basement of his ninety-year-old mom’s house.”
Tristan nodded. “But you still would’ve been a good person, and I still would have wanted to call you my friend.”
“Okay, fine, so we’re friends. I guess you can say that we’ve known each other for over a year and that we’re friends.”
Tristan nodded. “I guess we can say that.”
They finished writing the computer program the next afternoon, and that’s when the problems began.
26
Speed
Colleen
“It’s ready,” Tristan said, watching the graph scroll across the screen.
Colleen wandered over, wrapped in a blanket and munching a wonton left over from their lunch delivery while she admired the deep dimples on the sides of his muscular, naked butt as he leaned over her computer desk. “You were right. It did take about forty-five minutes to run.”
“I have a knack for these things.”
She wrapped her arms around him from behind. “Heck, yeah, you do.”
“We have a problem. We need to talk.”
Colleen dropped her arms and inched backward. To some extent, she’d been waiting for this conversation ever since they’d had coffee at Starbucks. “Oh, okay. Do you have a girlfriend or something? I’m cool. It’s been fun. Please, tell me you’re not married.”
Tristan had twisted away from the computer screen to look at her, one side of his lip raised to expose a perfectly straight tooth. “No.”
“Because I’m cool with it, man. I can dig it. A guy like you has to be taken. I didn’t know I was just a side piece, and that’s something you really should’ve told me, but I’m not going to make waves. It’s fine. I can’t continue this, but I’m not going to go all Fatal Attraction on you. It’s no prob.”
Tristan turned and gripped her upper arms. “I wasn’t seeing anyone before I met you, princess. And now, I’m seeing you.”
Oh, wow. Colleen’s anxious insecurity that had popped out as a disclaimer had turned into a fishing expedition, and she’d accidentally caught a whale.
Time to joke her way of this. “Yeah, you just saw a whole lot of me, nudge-nudge.”
Tristan turned back to her computer. “The problem is your internet speed.”
“What?”
“I ran a test, and it’s slow.”
“Dude!”
“We need much faster internet than you have here to upload this version of your program, which I’m calling Anonymity Plus,” he said.
Colleen’s jaw dropped. What kind of a casual hacker did he think she was? “My internet speeds are just fine, thank you. I have never been so insulted in all my life!”
“No, I mean, it’s a complicated program. It’s such a data hog that it’s taking up almost as much room on your drive as MS Office.”
“I don’t care. There is nothing wrong with my speed. I mean, it’s a little slower than it would normally be because I’m running the double-VPN and the chunky firewall. But it’s fine.”
Tristan was blinking like he was a little panicky. “I completely agree. It’s fine for anything that you would want to do. Absolutely. Additionally, Anonymity Plus probably has some bloated code. I should refine it at the first available opportunity, especially since I wrote some extraneous subroutines for future endeavors.”
Even so, this was just insulting. “Yeah, I wrote a few extra lines in there, too, just in case we need them later. But that shouldn’t be a big deal. There’s nothing wrong with my internet speeds.”
“It’s probably my fault. But right now, for uploading Anonymity Plus 1.0, maybe we could find somewhere just a skosh quicker?”
“Fine,” she huffed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with my setup.”
“Of course not. Your setup is perfectly capable of any reasonable task. My bloatware just needs faster internet to upload it.”
“Okay then.”
“So,” Tristan said, grabbing the trailing half of her blanket and tossing it over the seat of the computer chair before he sat his bare butt down. He tugged on her hand, and the blanket swaddled Colleen’s legs so much that she tumbled into his lap. “Where do you think we could find faster internet speeds? Do you have a friend around here with a server farm in their basement?”