Page 15 of Glitches and Kisses (The Havenwood #2)

Noah

The boardroom at Apex Interactive’s Chicago headquarters was as sleek and sterile as ever, glass walls, modern furniture, and a massive conference table that made every meeting feel like a war council.

The city skyline stretched beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, but I didn’t care.

My attention was locked on the giant screen at the front of the room, where the latest build of our game was running.

I stared in disbelief as I watched the glitch unfold for the fifth time in a row. The main character, the hero we’d spent months developing, was supposed to execute a seamless transition into a new environment. Instead, he clipped straight through the terrain, falling into an infinite void.

Not exactly the immersive experience we’d promised investors.

“This is unacceptable,” my boss, Russell Trent, said as he crossed his arms. He was a former programmer turned executive, observant and perpetually unimpressed. “We’re less than three months from beta, and we’ve got a catastrophic rendering issue. What’s the plan?”

I shifted in my seat, forcing myself to focus. The room was tense, filled with the silent pressure of a team that had been pushing too hard for too long.

“Well,” I started, rubbing the bridge of my nose, “the issue seems to be in the environmental collision code. If we rework the rendering sequences and restructure the terrain mesh recognition, it should stabilize the transitions. ”

I barely finished my sentence before Adrian Clarke, my least favorite colleague, let out a low scoff from the opposite end of the table.

“Oh, should, huh?” Adrian leaned back in his chair, with unwarranted arrogance. “That’s really reassuring. We’re weeks behind schedule because of these ‘shoulds.’”

I bit back a sigh and kept my expression as neutral as possible. Adrian and I have never seen eye to eye. He was one of those people who thrived in drama, who thought aggressive brainstorming meant talking over everyone else until they relented. Unfortunately, his method worked on most people.

Not me.

Russell’s eyes bounced between us, reading the tension before it could get out of hand. “Enough,” he said, voice measured. “Noah, can we make this fix without delaying the beta?”

I hesitated. Because technically, yes. But it meant long nights, extra hours, and pushing our already overworked team even harder.

“It’s possible,” I said carefully. “But we’d need additional support to test the recalibrations. It’s not a one-person fix.”

“Then loop in whoever you need.” Russell’s tone left no room for argument. “I want a progress report by Friday. We will have a working build by next week.”

I nodded, already making a mental list of what needed to be done. The rest of the team groaned their acknowledgments, gathering notes and files as the meeting closed up. But before I could even stand my phone buzzed.

I shouldn’t have looked.

But I did.

Evan Mitchell : Thinking about you.

A simple text. Just three words.

But it hit me like a sucker punch to the ribs.

The room around me faded as my grip tightened around my phone. Thinking about you. It shouldn’t have made my pulse kick up. Shouldn’t have sent warmth curling through my chest. Shouldn’t have made it even harder to focus on the very real disaster unfolding at work. But it did.

I swallowed, forcing myself to tuck my phone away, unread.

I was in Chicago. I was here to work.

I couldn’t afford to get distracted.

By the time I dragged myself into the conference room at nearly midnight, the office had thinned out, leaving behind only the hardcore overachievers and the desperate.

The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, casting a sterile glow over the long glass table, the smudged whiteboards filled with frantic calculations, and the scattered remnants of too many hours spent trying to fix something that just wouldn’t cooperate.

The only other person still standing was Milo, one of our senior programmers and an old friend from college.

We’d pulled all-nighters together back then too, crashed classes, built half-functional game demos at 3 a.m., and somehow still graduated mostly sane.

We’d seen each other at our absolute best and lowest: internships lost, relationships imploded, codebases that nearly destroyed us.

Now, over a decade later, nothing had changed… except the setting.

He was hunched over his laptop like a man on the verge of a breakdown.

His desk was a war zone: an open bag of pretzels spilling onto his keyboard, two empty Red Bulls stacked beside him like offerings to the coding gods, and a half-eaten protein bar that had been abandoned hours ago.

His hoodie was wrinkled, sleeves shoved to his elbows, his glasses slipping down his nose as his fingers flew across the keys.

Somehow, seeing him like that made me feel steadier. If Milo was still fighting the good fight, so was I.

I dropped into the chair across from him with all the grace of a dying man. “Tell me we’re getting somewhere.”

Milo didn’t look up, still typing at a breakneck pace. “Depends. How attached are you to sleep?”

I sighed, rubbing my temples, feeling the dull ache of exhaustion sitting behind my eyes. “Fantastic. That bad?”

“Not bad, just unnecessarily complicated.” He finally leaned back and cracked his neck.

The chair squeaked under his weight. “I’ve been reworking the asset rendering sequence for three hours, and it’s like playing Whack-a-Mole.

One fix, two more problems. Every time I patch one section, another part of the environment loses its damn mind. ”

I groaned, letting my head thunk lightly against the table. “So, what you’re saying is, we’re gonna have to rewrite half the terrain code.”

Milo winced, rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean… probably? ”

I sat up. My spine cracked in protest. My brain already calculating the hours ahead of us. The thought of rewriting anything at this point made me want to walk straight into traffic.

“Great,” I said. “Just great.”

The room evolved into silence, the only sounds the distant hum of the air conditioning and the relentless clicking of Milo’s keyboard. I tried to refocus, tried to ignore the fact that I felt like a corpse running on caffeine fumes and stubbornness.

And then, instinct, muscle memory, something, I reached for my phone.

A new text.

Evan Mitchell : You alive? Or did corporate America consume you whole?

I stared at it for a moment, my thumb hovering over the keyboard.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about him.

I had. Too much, actually. The way he’d looked at me before he left, that almost-smirk lingering on his lips.

The way his tongue felt in my mouth. The way his long fingers had brushed against mine, just once, before he stepped back into the night.

The way he made everything feel like a goddamn game, except somehow, I didn’t hate playing it.

I swallowed, tamping down whatever that was, and tapped a reaction instead. A thumbs up.

Across the table, Milo barely glanced up from his screen. “Who’s got your attention at midnight?”

“No one,” I said, flipping my phone face down like that would somehow erase the message from my brain.

Milo’s grin was slow and knowing. “Uh-huh.”

I shot him a glare, but he only chuckled, returning to his work like he hadn’t just successfully planted the seeds of annoyance in my already exhausted brain.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling.

We were going to be here all damn night.

I am no longer a twenty-year-old undergrad who can pull an all-nighter fueled by cheap energy drinks and blind optimism.

I am in my thirties now, and my body made sure I felt every single second of it.

The stiff ache in my shoulders, the gritty burn behind my eyes, the way my brain lagged behind like a computer struggling under too many open tabs.

It was all a brutal reminder that my resilience wasn’t what it used to be.

The last twenty-four hours had been an unforgiving blur of problem-solving and rewrites through sleep deprivation that moved through my head like molasses.

Lines of code swam in front of my eyes. The same bug cropped up in new, more infuriating ways every time I thought I had it cornered. Milo had long since given up pretending he had control over his sanity, spewing strings of profanity under his breath as he pounded out new lines of code.

Sometime between what I assumed was afternoon and night, my phone buzzed.

A text.

Evan Mitchell : Havenwood is boring without you. I had to annoy Callie instead. They told me to fuck off in record time. Proud?

I let out a short laugh before I could stop myself.

Of course he had.

It wasn’t hard to imagine, Evan at ease, posture all charm, expression hovering somewhere between delighted and provoking, while Callie tried not to launch a fork at him. He probably had that hypnotizing twinkle in his hazel eyes.

But I didn’t respond.

I couldn’t respond.

I have too much work, too much stress, too much of this tangled mess in my head that I don’t have time to unravel.

Instead, I forced my attention back to the screen. My phone sat in the corner of my vision like a loose thread begging to be pulled.

Hours passed. I lost track of how many.

Then, another text.

Evan Mitchell : Just really missing you. Tragic, really. Can’t believe you’d abandon me like this. ;)

I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t stop the way my lips twitched just slightly.

Damn him.

I stared at the message, phone resting heavy in my hand. I knew exactly what Evan was doing. He was baiting me, pushing, teasing, trying to get a reaction.

And the most frustrating part?

It was working.

But I had work to do .

So, finally, I typed out a single response:

Noah: I’m really busy.

Short. To the point.

I figured Evan would get the hint.

And he did.

Because after that the texts stopped.

No more teasing messages. No more updates about his day. No more reminders that he was still thinking about me.

Silence.

By the time Friday night rolled around, I was exhausted. My body ached from days of tension, my brain foggy from too little sleep and too much caffeine. The fix was implemented, the build had stabilized, and Russell had finally signed off on the update.

But I wasn’t relieved.

I was restless.

Even as I sat in my hotel room, staring blankly at the city skyline beyond the window, a strange unease curled in my gut. The kind that rooted deep in my bones that something wasn’t quite right.

I tried to shake it off. Tried to remind myself that I should be happy the week was over. That I should be grateful I wasn’t going to be pulling another all-nighter trying to untangle a mess of faulty code.

But I wasn’t any of those things.

Because something was off.

I pulled out my phone, scrolling to the last text thread with Evan.

My message, I’m really busy.

No reply. No playful comeback. No smartass remark about how Havenwood had descended into chaos without me.

Nothing.

Which was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

I had asked for space. I had been clear. And he gave me just that.

So, why did it feel so fucking wrong?

I groaned as I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead, trying to will away the tension building there. Maybe it was just exhaustion. Maybe my brain was finally short-circuiting from the relentless demands of the week.

Or maybe…

No .

I didn’t let myself finish that thought.

Instead, I pulled up our text thread again, my thumb hovering over the keyboard. The cursor blinked at me, expectant. Mocking.

I finally typed out a message.

Noah: When I get home, we should probably talk.

I hit send before I could second-guess myself.

The message was delivered instantly.

And then, three dots appeared.

Typing.

Stopped.

Started again.

Stopped.

I sat up straighter, gripping my phone a little tighter.

What the hell was he doing?

What was he thinking?

The dots vanished.

A long, tense stretch of silence followed.

And then…

Evan Mitchell : OK.

Just that.

Nothing else.

I stared at the screen; a strange tightness settled in my chest.

Because I knew Evan well enough to know he didn’t do short responses.

Even when he was being stubborn, even when he was giving me shit, there was always more. A joke, a tease, a drawn-out dramatic retelling of his day, something annoying to get under my skin.

This?

This was worse than silence.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected.

But somehow, this felt worse.