"Ugh, why did I do that?" I complained as I buried my hands in my face.

"It's ok. You don't know who he was or what his intentions were," my best friend Max consoled me.

"But he was so damn cute! Why did I act like such a bitch?" I cried even more.

"Like I said, it's ok. And stop your weeping, people are starting to stare," Max forcefully whispered her last few words and I saw her cold stare through her thick glasses and it sent a chill down my spine.

I sniffled down my mucus building up in my nose and took a swig of my soda. We were at the local mall's food court, which was bustling with preteens on their phones and guys that were obviously dragged along by their girlfriends, and I explained the whole situation to her (but earlier and not there, that would be suspicious). She kept repeating the same thing over and over again: it's ok and he was probably just trying to coax me to try to keep the ring for himself, but I felt like he was sincerely being himself because of how he stared and blushed.

I don't know anymore, and I only got his first name! God knows how many Flynns there are in the area. Oh no... he might not even be from here and he was only here for the ring! My mind ran in a frenzy while thinking a million thoughts going way to fast, giving me a headache. I slammed my face onto the table and my head hurt even more.

"Ash. Just calm down. You're fine. You'll probably forget about him in a week anyway."

I know she's probably right, though I just don't think that's the case.

I drew a sharp breath and slightly shifted my head so she could see my eyes and the bridge of my nose, "Can you use your connections?" I batted my eyelashes and indirectly begged. I could tell that she knew where this is going.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Fine. What do you want to find out?" The blatant annoyance in her voice didn't faze me and I told her while plastering a smile on my face and propping my head with my hands.

"A guy named Flynn. A hacker to be more precise. It sounded like he has a partner who usually does the actual jobs, but he wasn't there, I'm pretty sure he said he was sick."

"Any physical description?"

I then described how he was shorter than me, but with a mop of fiery red hair and hazel eyes that were almost cartoonishly big, but endearing, and how his personality resembled a puppy. I may or may not have looked like a ranting fangirl and went into a bit too much detail because of how she was looking at me with an eyebrow raised.

So scary...

"Eh, too much?" I looked at her sheepishly.

"You, my dear friend, have a problem."

"You're so mean!" I lightly punched her and started to laugh. I then noticed the time on my watch and hopped out of my seat, nearly knocking over the table.

"Oh shit! We have to run!"

"What now? Meeting up with some other dude that you just met? " Maxed retorted with a smirk. She looked like a mother scolding her child because of the way she was looking over her glasses, but you could tell she was being sarcastic because of the hint of warmth in her voice.

"This is your problem too! The group is meeting soon, it's quarter to 7!"

When I refer to "the group" (really original name, I know), I'm talking about four others, other than us, that meet up together to discuss new plans for more things to steal. We share new information on different exhibits, jewelry, different things that would be interesting to try to swipe, and how to go about it. The Iridescent ring alone took weeks to plan how to try to sneak in, but then when I went to go get it, all of the security systems were off and I thought that it was just Rhett (the "hacker" of the group) messing around, but he's not necessarily the best at his job, though I guess he does ok. For this particular job, he could only disable about half of the security measures and I would manually do the rest, but it was too easy when I was creeping through the museum to get to the ring, so I thought he somehow performed a miracle. That was until I saw him. Flynn was the only reason why everything was off. He did, after all, say that he was the one that disables this kind of stuff.

After a wave of realization came upon Max, she mouthed, "Oh fuck" and also bolted out of her seat. We grabbed our stuff, threw the garbage out, and sped out of the mall. We just hope that Mei was in a good mood or that we got there on time.