I woke up the next morning before the alarm. I felt shivers over most of my body, so it was safe to assume that the person nuzzling my neck was Nate. Sadly, the dream I'd been having featuring the aforementioned person had left off at exactly the same spot. It was bad to have those kinds of dreams, at least weekly about someone you didn't like. Okay, maybe I liked him a little, but he really needed some attitude adjustments.
"How quickly after I fell asleep were the pillows thrown off the bed?" I asked, rolling over to face him.
He leaned down and gave me the most thorough kiss I'd ever received. It even surpassed the show off kiss after our fake proposal. In my still sleepy state, I had no defenses for it. After about a full minute of locking our tongues in a battle, he gave me one last kiss and lifted his head back on his pillow. The tingles that were just on the surface of my body made their way to the pit of my stomach.
"Now that is a great way to wake up in the morning. About the pillows, sorry, they went immediately after I was sure you were asleep."
He could claim it was a great way to start the day, but I would counter that it was more than a tad frustrating.
"Do you have no bounds?" I asked, raising my voice. "I keep giving in a little here and there, hoping that sometime you'll meet in the middle and we can have an actual decent relationship. I really do want to try to like you.
"For some reason I'm sadly attracted to you on some level, but the way you act like you have some mysterious claim on me makes that really hard. You came storming into my life and have been trying to dictate every second of it ever since. It needs to stop if you're planning on anything happening between us."
I was certifiably in a tizzy. Acting like boyfriend and girlfriend was going to be impossible for me if we didn't work something out.
"My sweet, sweet little butterfly," he said as he stroked my cheek. "I'm sorry you feel that way about how I treat you. I've felt a connection between us from the second I laid eyes on you and I may have been pushing a little hard to solidify our relationship because I'm afraid of losing you.
"I know you won't understand, but I can't lose you. I'll try to back off a little and give you a chance to breathe. We still have to act like a loving engaged couple, but I can work to not be quite so domineering. It's clear you don't feel the same way that I do, at least not yet, and I really don't want to miss any time we have together."
There were certain times Nate said something that made me feel a little melty inside. He made it seem like he knew something about me that I didn't. I couldn't explain why or what it was he knew.
"You don't have to go changing everything about yourself to try to appease me, but please just don't push the romantic part of our relationship as hard. Waking up in bed with you trying to give me a hickey is too far, by the way." I felt better about getting that off my chest. If he wasn't going to leave, we had to come to some understanding. "Eventually, I may be ready for something like that, but it needs to be on my terms."
"That I can do and I'm sorry about this morning. I got a little carried away, but I'll try to keep the testosterone in check." He kissed my cheek. "That's still okay, right? I've done that from the first night we met and I had a feeling then that it was okay."
"Yes, the cheek kisses are fine. For our act around others, cheek, forehead, hands, and lips, as long as tongues stay out of the kiss, are okay. Hugs are fine. Handholding is fine. Terms of endearment are mostly fine. I'm used to being called your little butterfly, so you don't have to change that.
"I think that about covers the okay items. Not okay items include signs of affection above what I already listed, getting grumpy when I've spoken to someone of the male persuasion and generally just dragging me by my hair back to your cave."
I was sure there are other things that were off limits and should be listed, but the last item about covered my main issues with the man. There was a certain appeal about the caveman mentality, but I didn't like having my hair yanked.
"Am I allowed to just throw you over my shoulder since the hair dragging is out? I really like pulling your hair, but I suppose we could try something different." He sounded so serious that I had to smack him
"No," I laughed. "See, I don't mind teasing like that. You just sometimes take the possession thing too far. When you do that it makes me want to be anywhere as long as it's far away from you."
The alarm started beeping, signifying the actual start of our day. I reached over and turned it off. I stretched out my limbs, even though it didn't feel like they needed it. I may have accidently hit Nate in the head with the back of my hand.
"I'm going to head for the shower. I want to get in early to talk to Hank about some issues I found in their code." I wanted to have that conversation out of the way in case the eight-thirty test left me disjointed again.
"Sounds good. I could start looking over some personnel files I have access to as part of the security team. I can see if anyone has anything in their history that might flag them for further investigation."
He got up and grabbed some clothes. I hadn't noticed that he went to bed in only a pair of sweats. As he walked to the closet, I admired his tattoos and wondered again what the symbols meant. I'd tried to do a little research on them, but I hadn't found a language that matched them.
After showering, throwing on some clothes and grabbing quick bowls of cereal, we were out the door. Only one song played on the radio before we hit the parking lot. Since they didn't seem to have a gym anywhere in town, I thought walking to work could be an alternative to my usual weekly visits.
There were a few cars scattered around, but thankfully not everyone else was an early bird. We made our way through both sets of doors and into the elevator. Nate hit my floor and walked me to my door.
"You know, I don't know what floor you're on in case I need to find you," I said after he gave me a chaste kiss on the lips.
"I have an office on the first sub floor, but will be roaming around throughout the day, keeping my eyes open for anything suspicious. If you need anything, just give me a call. I don't think there's anywhere in the building that would keep me from getting to you within a couple minutes."
"I'm sure I won't need any rescuing today, just thought I should have an idea of where your base is. Have a good day; I'll probably see you at lunch." I gave a little wave and then walked into my office area.
Looking around, I saw Hank was already there. Jake and Kim were also in their pods. The coding issues must have had them working overtime to find solutions. I headed over to my desk and grabbed my notes before making my way to Hank's cube.
"Hey, Hank," I started when I got there. He didn't acknowledge me standing there, so I said it again. After standing like a fool dancing around trying to get his attention, I finally noticed little earplugs in his ears and guessed he couldn't hear me.
Apparently, he was so focused on his code that he couldn't see me either, which was a very good thing after the scary dance moves I'd attempted. I tapped him on his shoulder, which obviously startled him because he jumped before looking up at me.
Removing the ear plugs, he said, "Oh hey, Peggy. Sorry, I was listening to some music while I tried to tackle some code."
"Those are earphones and not just earplugs? They are so little," I said, trying to get a look at the little pieces he had in his hand.
"Yeah, nothing really spectacular, just wireless earbuds," he said as he tossed them on his desk. "What can I do for you?"
"You mean besides telling me where I can get a pair of the earbuds? I was going over the coding you guys have written for the latest release, way cool stuff by the way, and when reading through the code, I noticed about ten spots that didn't make sense and I thought you could walk through it with me and we can see if any of them are the problem." I grabbed a chair, hoping right then was a good time.
"That's great. We may be on the road to fix this sooner than I thought if you think you've got something. We've been pouring over it for weeks, not seeing anything that would cause
a malfunction. It's taken long enough that I see code whenever I close my eyes."
"I can relate to that predicament, as I've had many dreams filled with lines of characters that most people wouldn't understand. I have my notes, if you want to bring up these files." I handed him a piece of paper with seven file names on them. "Then I can show you what I've noticed."
The process was a little slow as I encouraged Hank to explain things that I knew weren't the problem, but wanted to know more about how they'd come up with the methods used. Most of the things I'd found were just little things that wouldn't amount to any kind of large issue, so the others easily overlooked them. There were two places, though, that by themselves the errors wouldn't cause a huge concern, but when combined, caused havoc to a few of the core functions.
"Thank you so much for finding this. I don't think the code was like this to begin with, but when we started looking back over things, we broke things up since we were only looking for something that would cause the bugs we were seeing," Hank said, extremely relieved. "Now we can just fix this real quick and try a new test on Monday."
I was surprised no one had gone through the code as a whole. In any code there was always cause and effect based on any number of external calls and commands. As interconnected as each function was to the next one, you had to get a look at the big picture to figure out where the trouble was hiding.
"That's great. I haven't gone through everything, but this does seem like the root of the problem. I'm going to head back to my desk and look at a few more files." As I left, he walked over to talk to Jake and Kim, giving them an update. Even if I totally sucked at being an undercover agent, at least I could say when the mission was over that I'd accomplished something.
Back at my desk, I decided it was time to start diving into the computer network and see if I could find any irregularities there. After helping the others, I was hoping I'd be on a roll. I looked at the time and saw that it was already nine o'clock, which meant I'd made it through the reactor test.
I inserted a flash drive into my computer to bring up a little program that I built to use in situations similar to the one I was in. Essentially, all I had to do was pass the things I wanted flagged to the program, and then it searched the network for anything that matched. There weren't many people there, but they did have a very large network with all the research going on.
I typed in my flags of either emails going outside the building with large attachments or frequency and the same thing for file transfers. As far as the program was concerned, file transfers included anything transferred from the computer to either a plugged in device or disk and anything transferred electronically via a website or file transfer program. Once the results made it onto my screen, I'd be faced with judging who the bad guy was and who was just taking their work home with them.
With a network the size of the think tank's, it probably wouldn't have results back to me before the end of the day, so I'd have to get them on Monday. Once the program started, and I made sure it didn't hit any initial walls, I navigated back to the code files. I was pretty sure I'd found everything, but you never knew what could be lurking.?
CHAPTER 11
Welcome to the show, the fun is about to begin