Page 44 of Hacking His Code

“I think she’ll be great at it.”

“The bed is that way.” I gesture wildly like I’m assisting a landing plane.

“I’ll take the couch.”

“Nonsense. You’ll take the bed,” I insist.

“Your couch is probably way more comfortable than my rock-hard mattress back at my apartment. I’ll be fine.”

“But I won’t be,” I say quietly. “Please?”

She gets up, and unlike every other woman that’s come before her, hesitantly walks over to my bed, casting an anxious glance over her shoulder at me before climbing onto it, cartoonishly flopping around in exhaustion from the effort.

“I know the bed is a bit dramatic, but so are you.”

“Damn, if I were your lover, I’d just go for the couch. I think I pulled my calf scaling your tower of mahogany.”

“If you had trouble scaling that tower, my other one would probably throw your back out.”

Fuck, I may have just gone too far…

Arinessa blinks at me from the bed. “Seriously?”

“You see, waking up in a stranger’s bed isn’t the only thing you need to work on. Sharpening those flirting skills would do you good, ya know.”

Her brow shoots up in disbelief. “You call that flirting?”

“What would you call it?”

“I don’t know—vulgar? It’d be like if I was talking to a man and pushed my boobs together.”

“That’s advanced level flirting, right there. I wouldn’t mind a demonstration.”

Arinessa throws her hands in the air dramatically. “It was a joke! But if that’s what it takes, I guess I’m doomed to be single forever.”

I cross the room, closing the distance between us. When I make it to the bed, she squirms uncomfortably, pulling the comforter over her body.

“Are you really that uncomfortable around men? Or just around me?”

Her shoulders slump, and she looks like she wants to crawl out of her own skin.

“Something happened,” she whispers. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Fire ignites in my veins at the thought of anyone hurting Arinessa, but I force myself to remain calm. I don’t want to scare her or make her any more uncomfortable than she already is.

“Care to talk about it?” I say in a tight voice.

“In high school, I was a recluse. Then suddenly, I went to college, and it leveled the playing field a bit. I wanted so badly to be normal and fit in. I ended up meeting a guy, but halfway through the year, my mother got sick, and I had to return home. Teachers let me go remote for some of my classes. Everyone was very accommodating.”

“I really hope that this little story doesn’t end with me wanting to knock to block off the guy you met.”

“He seemed nice enough. He’d bring me schoolwork and listen to my troubles. He kept asking me to go out, but I couldn’t. There was too much on my plate. I didn’t want to lose what little I had with him, so I grew bold. We started flirting by text, and one thing led to another…” She downcasts her eyes, biting her full lower lip.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s fine. We sexted, which may not seem like much to a guy like you, but it was kind of a big deal for me. It was the only reprieve I had from the hell my life had become. Texts led to pictures, which were thrown into various chats the freshmen boys had showcasing their conquests.”

“Jesus Christ—men are such idiots. Scratch that, those idiots aren’t men—they’re slugs.”