Thick As Thieves: A Romantic Comedy Read online

  Ethical hacker. That’s me.

  5 Owen

  I have a bone to pick with Emma the second we get into our rideshare.

  She’s too busy gazing down at her nails and biting the inside of her cheek, lips tilted up in a side smile, to give me the satisfaction of telepathically sending my disapproval her way.

  “What did you do?” I accuse.

  “I’m magic.”

  “Emma,” I say, lowering my tone so she knows it to be a warning. With the way she rolls her head over onto her shoulder and bats her eyes, I can tell she isn’t the least bit disappointed in herself.

  “Oh please, you’re welcome. It was chance I ran into her—or maybe New York wants you to find love.” Her eyes practically sparkle at this. “Or, maybe Taylor is right and I have voodoo magic.” Emma wiggles her fingers in my direction, and I swat them out of the way, only eliciting a small giggle from her.

  “She’s my partner in HA.”

  Her high-reaching eyebrows rise in the air. “Oh, is that so?”

  “A coincidence?”

  “Sure.”

  I might have been inclined to believe her, but the way her eyes narrow, I know better.

  The thing is, I have trouble believing in coincidences because they simply do not exist. Everything has intention, purpose, and I’m the man who finds out how to circumnavigate them. Unfortunately, bypassing coincidences is Emma’s day job as well, which is why I tilt my head to the side and stare at her for a few seconds longer before she exhales a large gust of held air.

  “Fine, yeah, that was me. I bribed Randy.”

  “Randy your partner?”

  “Round glasses guy. Event organizer.”

  “That guy’s name is Randy?”

  “Fits him, huh?”

  “Okay.” I close my eyes, feeling every bump of the zooming car taking corners and braking much too fast. I’m going to be sick. This is why I generally walk home. “You can’t meddle in my life like that.”

  Emma laughs, a light but sophisticated sound as if to say, ‘You’re so cute.’ She and Taylor have been hanging around each other too long. She pulls out her phone from her tiny doll-sized backpack and flicks open the screen.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, eyes darting to the lit phone shining on her face, slight dimples illuminated by the screen’s light. “Come on. This conversation isn’t over.”

  She sucks on her teeth, clicking her tongue against them, and opens a new app, swiping this way and that. After a moment of my hands suspended in the air, trying to bring this moment back to the present, I see her lips twist to the side and, yep, she’s finished. Emma won, and we both know it.

  We don’t speak of Francesca for the rest of the ride. Emma talks about how excited she is to go out drinking and asks if we can share locations just in case things go crazy. Par for the course.

  “And please turn off the location when you’re done,” I say. “Can’t have you showing up at my door with cupcakes again. Though, that was nice.”

  “I’m chaotic, but good,” she responds.

  I sigh.

  Only when she gets out at a nightclub does the rideshare driver let out a snort of laughter.

  I arrive back at my place, immediately resenting the stale scent of humidified air, the space lacking any discernable characteristics of a home with human touch. If I had time for a dog, I would get one in an instant, but as it is, I’m hopping from one thing to another too much.

  I plop onto the couch, laptop already open and the email loading screen with its copyrights zipping by like a lover greeting me at the end of the day.

  I poke through messages. Issue here, a small question there…nothing interesting enough, nothing challenging. Then my mouse pauses on a new email from Ryan. I click it open.

  To: @eowen

  From: @ryanreed

  Subject: RE: Opportunity

  Owen,

  Just checking in to make sure you got my last message. According to my read receipt, it says you did, but I figured I would be polite and pretend you weren’t being an ass. I need you as my front man on this project. Hit me up.

  Love you always,

  Ryan

  I smirk and roll my eyes.

  To: @ryanreed

  From: @eowen

  Subject: RE: RE: Opportunity

  Ryan,

  You know where I stand on these contracts.

  Best forever,

  Owen

  Okay, so maybe I could stand to use something tamer to take my mind off things. I check in on a ticket sent from a new client, a security company with firewall issues. Oh the irony.

  The keystrokes fall from my fingertips like a first language, trailing faster than my thoughts, acting on intuition alone until BOMP!

  The noise halts me mid-keystroke.

  I squint at the screen. The sound was an error message—a small window popping up to alert me that I’ve hit a firewall.

  Okay, I can bypass this.

  BOMP.

  What the—

  The keyboard takes the brunt of my feverish, heavy typing, the clacking echoing throughout the apartment as I receive ridiculous BOMP after BOMP after BOMP until the screen starts to blur.

  I avert my eyes from my laptop, the rest of the apartment shrouded in empty darkness with every edge of the countertops in the distance fuzzy and unclear. How long have I been sitting here? How much longer until the teasing error message embeds itself into my brain? I take my glasses off, running my hand over my face, and close my laptop. I set it aside, roll over, drag the blanket off the back of the couch, and drift off, dreaming of the error message with the subject line Opportunity flashing over and over, and Fran’s gentle smile beaming through it all.

  I learn the next morning that Emma’s silence in the cab was not golden, as the moment I tug open our double doors into the office, I’m met with the brazen stare of Taylor shooting at me like darts from the kitchen, and if the stare didn’t hit me, the heavy huffs of air did. She slowly steeps her teabag in her mug as I cross to my desk.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  A few more huffs indicate that I should be addressing something else.

  I let my bag fall from my shoulder next to my swivel chair, landing with a thud on the concrete floor. “What?”

  “Emma’s meddling?” she asks, manicured eyebrows rising.

  “Did you want news or just the constant state of my life?” I ask.

  Taylor rolls her eyes, removing the teabag and throwing it in the garbage can. “Oh, stop grumping around.”

  “I’m not grumping.” I cross my arms only to look down and immediately uncross them.

  Taylor walks to her desk, steaming cup between her hands. She blows on it before casually sitting down and swishing her mouse back and forth to unlock her screen.

  The whole scene bothers me more than it should.

  “Say what you really want to say, Taylor.”

  I’m only barely finished with the sentence when she turns the chair around, swiveling into position like a villain poised to announce her evil plan. Though, maybe it’s just the skull tattoos trailing up her arms that give me the impression of someone ready to be argumentative. Or maybe it’s my knowledge of Taylor as a whole.

  “How was it?” she asks.

  “How was what?”

  “Being social.” A smile tugs at the edge of her mouth as she tilts her head to the side, absentmindedly reaching for the tea set on her coaster, feeling for it until she finds the handle and pulls it in close. The action lessens her intimidation factor by a margin.

  My breath catches on the next inhalation as I recall every bit of last night. It’s not the basement musk that draws me back as much as it is the flowery scent and sharp comments from Fran. It’s the way her eyes rolled when I made a joke, the way her lips curled inward in confusion and apology as we navigated through the crowds, and the way she finally scrunched her nose in that cute way when she wanted to resist laughing.

  “It was o
kay,” I lie, smiling at the memories.

  “Oh come on, you couldn’t stop talking about Fran when you first meet her and now you hush up? Emma already told me everything.”

  I reflexively run my fingers through my hair, letting the strands land wherever they wish.

  What is it about Fran that I no longer want to share? Fran is new, different, and such an unheard-of commodity that even comparing her to exes seems inappropriate and unfair. Am I being selfish with my memories?

  “I don’t know. Not much happened,” I say.

  Taylor looks less than impressed.

  I’ve thought about texting Fran every moment I haven’t been wrapped up in work. What would I even say? How would I approach it? Would she even care?

  “It’s okay to have fun,” Taylor says. “You’re too obsessive with all this.” She gestures to the office and I laugh, knowing my endless thinking doesn’t stop there. “Don’t get overworked.”

  My phone dings and I see a text.

  Ryan: Let’s get lunch. I’m serious about this. This is the big one. I want you on deck. You’re the best guy for the job and we both know it.

  “No,” I say without realizing her statement was not an either-or question to begin with. “I’ve got this.”

  I prefer not to be on the keyboard end with Ryan’s projects—that’s the end that gets people in prison. I don’t know why he’s pushing it.

  “Did you not hear me?” Taylor says. “Obsessive.” She sounds out the word slowly as if I’m incapable of understanding the English language.

  “I’m fine.”

  Light hacking—that’s what we did in college. We found bank accounts and laughed at the fact that we could even get into them, but ultimately we did nothing with the information. I distanced myself from the danger and risk but enjoyed the rabbit chase, everything before the kill, the thievery. That said, I know for a fact Ryan journeyed farther than I did. That’s why he left our company. For ‘the big one’: a long-lost idea we shared back school. The ultimate exposé. The largest piece of justice pie capable of being served. Our Snowden.

  I got into penetration testing for one reason, to help others and do good, but I would be a filthy liar if I said that was the only joy I got out of it.

  Taylor stares at me. Or maybe she doesn’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t know. I glance at my phone, reading the text from Ryan over and over.

  Work—where my brain always goes. And curiosity, where I’m always a willing slave to the unknown. Like a carrot in front of a rabbit or cheese for the mouse, I look at Ryan’s email once more before flipping back to his text then to Fran’s thread with the simple message I sent yesterday.

  If I texted her, what would it matter?

  It’s odd which things draw me in. The challenge. The chase of something new and exciting. We’ve discovered information from the underbelly of corporations—nasty, obscene blackmail, and sometimes I can’t even begin to understand how it was hidden for so long. I research how to infiltrate, and Ryan executes and exposes it. He releases the information, and justice is served.

  The end results do drive me. I like to see bad men lose. Sure, call me a softie at heart because it’s not untrue, but I know better. I know my true intentions. Ryan and I started my ethical hacking company to help people, but it wasn’t enough for him. He needed the risk and equivalently high-stakes reward. I had the obsession with justice, but never enough to drive me to something that could send me to prison, for God’s sake. Still, I know me, and the question remains: is it the end result that drives me or the chase—the ambition to experience a world outside the day-to-day drone of ethical hacking?

  I open the program from last night and hear the same BOMP once more. My eye twitches.

  I know my answer, which is why I respond to Ryan and then text Fran.

  6 Francesca

  So much for being the good girl.

  It’s been less than twenty-four hours, and my Boolean search is erupting into variations of ‘Elijah’, ‘Owen,’ and ‘hot black-haired mysterious penetration tester.’ My FBI surveillance must be very entertained.

  Thankfully for Mr. Owen, I’m a fantastic penetration tester, but my information security skills stumble and fall after simple social media stalking. If he isn’t featured in the top results of an app’s hashtag results, he’s practically invisible to me.

  However, I did find out some things through my limited use of internet search-fu. Like how, for one, Elijah Owen is the co-founder of a contract-for-hire ethical hacking company, notorious for having the other half of its founding duo leave—a man named Ryan Reed who has a questionable rap sheet for petty crimes here and there.

  I sigh. Yes, please let me count the ways I knocked my head against the wall thinking back to my stupid ‘I’m sure your boss is happy you’re not out networking’ comment from last night. Of course he’s a business owner. He’s Owen: hot man with scruffy hair. Hot man with ambition. Hot man with a business plan.

  I could Eminem a rap about him at this point. Can I make Eminem a verb?

  Another fun fact: Owen was apparently involved in furniture construction prior to this. His lopsided smile and classically arched eyebrow are eternally captured in a news article about a group of volunteers helping to rebuild low-income housing and interiors in New Orleans after the hurricane. Ugh, swoon, I know.

  And finally, I also discovered that Owen was state champion at his elementary school-level spelling bee. This must be the oldest article ever on the internet, but it is complete with a gap-toothed smile and good-natured thumbs-up from little eight-year-old Owen.

  He’s a damn near perfect man, so what am I missing? And am I even missing anything at all?

  It’s hard not to replay every moment, every situation, every dark eyebrow arch and boyish smile. He’s adorable like a puppy but as mysterious as a man with a dark secret. Is that weird? That’s weird.

  I lean back in my circular egg chair—which has now gone one week fire-free, thank you—and rub my temples.

  Why didn’t he mention he was the owner of a business? What is he, some mogul masquerading like the rest of us peasants in New York? Is this the reverse story of Aladdin where he’s Princess Jasmine and I’m just the street rat not buyin’ that? This isn’t exactly what I was looking for when I ventured into that Hacker Anonymous group, but that begs the question: what was I looking for? Adventure? Something out of the ordinary? Surely not a Disney romance.

  No, what I need is silence from people. From the world. From toxic men.

  The angel and devil on my shoulder continue to fight—Leia with an angelic halo and Owen with his devil horns (wow, that’s oddly hot). It’s getting interesting.

  Hmm…but what I also need is change. That’s why I moved to New York—for something different in my life. But is Owen the change I need? Is friendship the change? Maybe pixie princess Emma is keen on friendship, but Owen’s intentions seem less than…fantastical.

  It’s the hair. It’s the darn hair with its glorious color such a deep cocoa brown-black that’s like Willy Wonka’s warm, enticing pool of dark chocolate trying to drown me. And his glasses…who knew glasses could do that…deepening a gaze, overshadowing any good intentions that could have come with his stares.

  Leia leaps into my lap, and the movement startles both of us so much that my flailing arms scare her off. It only takes one minute, a very sad minute of me making obnoxious kissy noises, to coax her into my lap once more. I run my fingers through her thick fur until her snout is inches away from my face and the big kitten eyes are too big and obnoxious to ignore.

  “Fine, I’ll check your food,” I say.

  I climb out of the chair, practically rolling out because this thing is dangerously comfortable, and I want it to remain exactly as it is when I leave—bum dent and all.

  My fingers swipe through emails of their own accord as I walk across the apartment. Then my phone buzzes and I flip to my texts instead.

  My heart sinks, and it isn’t because Leia furball
-hacked on the kitchen floor. It’s because of the name that pops up.

  It’s a weird thing to get a text when you aren’t expecting one, or, to use a less polite turn of phrase, it’s weird to get a text when you have no friends. It’s too late for Natalie to be messaging me from London and…well, that’s about the extent of my social group at this point.

  No, the name that pops up is exactly the one I entered while giggling to myself on the subway just last night, the nickname I bestowed upon the man with two first names.

  Prick McGee: I’m slowly being driven insane by something and I’m taking advantage of this whole HA thing. Can you help?

  Weak. Men are weak. Women, never ever forget this. Elijah Owen is no exception to the rule with his silly glasses and model hair. Ah, but alas, what does it say about me that I’m already one sentence deep in responding?

  Fingers, you betray me!

  Fran: Why am I not surprised you texted me first?

  Prick McGee: I’ve got an error message invading my dreams now.

  Fran: That’s unfortunate.

  Prick McGee: I can’t sleep.

  Fran: Sad.

  I involuntarily find myself biting my lower lip while he types out a response. I like our banter, but the prolonged three little dots make me wonder if I was a bit too harsh in my response.

  Prick McGee: Lunch?

  Well, my stomach has dropped to my bum and my shoulders suddenly feel too hunched over, too Quasimodo, too…not ready for a midday snack—a ripe snack by the name of Owen.

  I contemplate for a moment, shifting my lips from side. My fingers hover over the screen, wanting to come up with something clever, but all I can think about is how I’m barely getting any work done today as it is with all my internet stalking.