CHAPTER 7
“Melody, are you feeling all right? I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you been getting enough sleep, lately?”
It was Friday, and two weeks had passed since the Saturday on which she had learned of Cookie’s death. They were having lunch at a café just off campus, she and Adele. Adele was Doran’s younger sister. Melody had no particular problem with Adele. She was a sweet girl, and they could spend time together, but they had nothing in common. She was not one with whom Melody would have been friends in any other context. To Melody, she seemed a little too close to the stereotype of the vapid co-ed, a girl who took nothing seriously but her online photo albums and her appearance. Today, Melody’s judgmental strain was running a little strong. She had not been getting enough sleep, lately.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just been… a long week.”
“Oh, tell me about it. School work? School’s been killing me lately.”
Melody coughed.
“Is it your thesis project? The AI thing? I bet that’s a ton of work.”
Melody nodded. “It is. A ton of work. And stress. Honestly, it’s nice to get out, get away for a bit.”
“Oh!” said Adele, putting her hand on Melody’s from across the table. “Any time! Any time you need a break, you just let me know. We should really spend more time getting to know each other. You know, go shopping, go to some bars—though, I don’t know. Are you a bar person? I guess I don’t see you as much of a bar person.”
“I guess I’m not, really.”
“Not that I’m, y’know, a real big drinker myself. I’m, like, a total lightweight. I used to drink—like, really drink, in high school? But I just can’t do that anymore, you know? I don’t do hangovers. I remember this one time, I was so drunk. I was at this party—I was dating this guy, right? And we were at this party…”
Melody zoned out. This conversation had nothing to offer her. She was being her worst self, right now, and somewhere inside she knew that. This was Doran’s sister. If ever she was going to step outside her little niche, her little introverted bubble, it should be with the sister of her maybe-possibly-The-One most important guy in her life. Still, she had reasons for being her worst self, right now.
That first Saturday night, after absorbing Nailoo’s tragic news and coming to dire conclusions about the position in which she found herself, she… did exactly nothing. What could she do? What was there to do? The only proactive option was a police report. Go to the cops, tell them what she believed, that Cookie’s death had not been an accident. For her to do that without sounding like a loon, though, a conspiracy crackpot, would require evidence, and evidence meant pushing everything about their project into the limelight. Putting this project in a limelight was what had gotten them in trouble in the first place. It was only because they had announced what they had found, had put together that site, that someone had gone after Cookie, and had stalked her at her parents’ home. If she tried again to make the issue public—even more public than a site for comment by hackers on the anonymous dark web—well, they had already killed. What more would they do? How many more people would be in danger?
Sunday she spent in her apartment, doors locked, blinds closed, computer mostly off, while she tried to think through a haze of fear. Late that day, in the afternoon, she finally began to succeed. She had a tool for this: She would just think of whatever the stupid TV show characters would do, and do the opposite.
The first thing a stupid character would do would be to carelessly tell anyone and everyone around her, so Melody first reaffirmed her commitment to control information. They had identified Cookie, and they had identified her, but had they identified anyone else? Well, if they understood the nature of the work—which surely they did, if they were targeting her for it—and they understood her association with it, they almost certainly would know that she was part of a team. They would almost certainly have figured out that her discovery had arisen from her school project, and it would be no challenge for them to identify her teammates. Besides, she had supplied the contact, but it had been their joint decision to have Cookie put what they had found on the Net, knowing that it was probably someone’s secret. Another thing dumb characters would do would be to shoulder all the burden alone, so she certainly would not do that. She would inform her teammates of their situation.
Having resolved to consult with them, she felt well enough that night to sleep a little. On Monday, she woke up wondering if she was overreacting, if it all was not just a big, terrible coincidence. After all, these things did not really happen, to real people. Conspiracies like these were the stuff of fiction. All the more reason to discuss it with the team, she decided. She needed an outside perspective.
She spoke to Chris in person (they shared a class) and had him put out a group text calling for a meeting. He texted her the time and place once he had it—which she had explicitly told him not to do, but so be it—and they met that evening in one of the labs.
She told them everything that had happened.
They absorbed in somberly.
“I think it’s probably just coincidence,” said John.
“Gotta be,” said Chris.
“Still,” said Ian. “The server goes down—‘gets wiped,’ according to our hacker guy, and then our hacker guy dies a few days later? That’s a lot of coincidence.”
“And what about this guy stalking Mel?” added Anika.
“Okay, I admit it’s pretty scary. Like, really scary. But an actual conspiracy? Murder? Are we really saying we believe that?”
“Raise your hand if you think it really is a conspiracy.” Anika raised her hand. The rest hesitated.
“Okay. If you think it might be a conspiracy.” More hands went up.
“Yeah, I think we should at least be careful,” said John.
“That’s fair.”
“So what does that mean?” asked Kyle. “What does ‘be careful’ look like in this context?”
“Well, I think for one thing we don’t do any more with the second data stream,” said Anika. “Leave it alone. Whatever it is, whoever’s doing it, it’s not our problem.”
“Will that be enough, though? If someone’s really willing to kill to keep it secret, will they just let us go because we drop it?”
“What other choice do we have? What else can we do?”
“Well, what are our options?”
“Go to the police.”
“How?” asked Melody. “How do we bring something like this to the police? What cop would even understand it? We would have to explain it, and somehow not come off looking like crazy conspiracy nuts.”
“Fair point. The project itself is…”
“Esoteric.”
“Yeah. And who would even have jurisdiction?” Melody continued. “Who would we talk to? Cookie lived half-way across the country. If it is a conspiracy, and they can find him there, and me at my parents’ place, does that make it a federal crime?”
“I have no idea. Maybe we need to research that.”
“At the very least, it seems like the feds would be the way to go.”
“Unless it’s our own government behind it.” Everyone was quiet.
“There’s no way,” said Ian, eventually.
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“But—”
“Look, it’s a possibility, but let’s agree that it’s unlikely. And even if it is our own government, it’s not going to be the whole government. The government is too big.”
“So you’re saying we should go to the feds.”
“I’m saying that we should consider, possibly, an anonymous tip.” Another moment of silence passed amongst them.
“I’m okay with that,” said Melody. “How?”
“There are anonymous tip lines, right?”
“Let’s assume we’re being watched. We don’t want them to know we’re submitting anything, or taking any action. We want them to think we’ve let it drop.”
“So how do we contact them? And how do we contact them in a way that will actually draw any interest? That’s believable?”
“Well, federal agencies have cybercrimes divisions. You have the data, right, Mel?” She nodded.
“They should have people who are able to understand it.”
“So we deliver the data—”
“And direct them toward Cookie’s death.”
“And the Tor site. They should be able to do forensics on that, if they think it’s a real case.”
“Okay, so all of that. We make a package, and deliver it anonymously.”
“I would say online. Anonymous email. But we’ve already seen them break through Tor security.”
“So, physically? Deliver a thumb drive?”
“Maybe. Maybe the best way is the old-fashioned way. Just frickin’ mail it.”
“If there is a conspiracy, they’ll be watching Mel for sure. They’d check her mail, right?”
“One of us could do it.”
“No. We have to assume they’re watching all of us.”
“Who else is there?”
After a moment, John said, “We’ll have to use someone who doesn’t know anything. Or who can be trusted not to say anything or ask questions.” They sat for a while in thought.
“I don’t like this,” said Melody. “We decided to do this. It’s one thing for us to put ourselves at risk. But bringing in someone innocent?”
“I agree.”
“Is there another way? Anyone?” Silence.
“So we proceed with this plan for now.”
“But if someone does come up with a better idea, definitely say so.”
“For sure.”
“So who could we use? Who can we trust?”
“Whom.”
“Really?” said Chris wryly.
Several grinned, despite the gravity of the moment.
“I could hand it off to a friend,” said Kyle.
“Your friend would not ask questions?”
“I’m, like, ninety-five percent sure he wouldn’t.”
No one had to say out loud how much ninety-five percent was worth to them at the moment.
“What about Dr. Leeman?” Eyes went to Ian.
“John meets with him every week, as our thesis advisor. He’d deliver it. If we put a note on it telling him what to do, he’d do it.”
“I agree.”
“Me too. I think this is our best option, at least that we’ve come up with so far.”
“Same.”
“All right,” said John. “We’ll push forward with this, if no one comes up with anything better. Mel, can you get me a thumb drive with everything on it? Like, quietly?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“It doesn’t have to be too quietly. We are all going to keep meeting. We have to, to continue the legitimate side of the project—which we have to do, right?”
“It’s kind of too late to change our thesis.”
“Yeah.”
“So that brings up another point: Are we agreed that we stop collecting the second data stream?”
“Absolutely.”
“So we change the CL to only track our transactions?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Fine. Let’s do that,” said John. “Mel, get me the thumb drive tomorrow.”
“Does anyone have one? I don’t think I even have a thumb drive.”
“Yeah, I got one,” said Kyle. “Here.”
“Anything on it?”
“Just school-work backups. I’ve got everything in the cloud, too. You can wipe it.”
“Okay.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“So that’s the plan. Anyone have anything more to say?”
They looked at one another. No one had anything further.
“All right, then. We press forward, and hope for the best.”
“Truth is, we’re probably looking way too deep into this, and it’ll turn out to be nothing.”
“Hopefully. But if not, we did the right thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
That was how they settled on a plan. Melody delivered John the flash-drive the next day. On it she had saved a complete copy of everything Cookie had rescued from the server, plus his read-me file and one of her own, outlining the timeline of events and everything she knew about Cookie. She considered popping on the channel and asking Nailoo for more information, but she decided against involving him or the others from her Guardians team any further. They were, truly, innocent in this matter. The circumstances and date of his death should be enough for authorities to identify Cookie, she decided.
Come Wednesday, all that she could do was done, and henceforth she could only wait and see. The trouble was, there was no end to the waiting and seeing, as she soon realized. There was no point at which she would ever know if she was in the clear. For those three days she had hardly slept. Speaking to the rest of the team on Monday, having a plan, executing that plan, all had made her feel a little better, but come Tuesday morning she still had no way to know if any of it was real, and if she was really being hunted. For those three days she had been looking over her shoulder for any sign of a stalker, of anyone watching her or following her, but she had seen none. What did that mean? Was it all in her head? Or were they good enough to go unnoticed? Or was she simply so out of her depth that they could be standing right next to her and she would not know it? She went to class. She worked on the project. She adjusted the code in the “Consciousness Layer” so that it would categorize only positively marked traffic.
On Wednesday night, she had a nightmare about the thing she had seen in her parents’ back yard, glimpsed by the light of her father’s flashlight.
The following Thursday and Friday passed likewise. She saw no sign of anyone pursuing her. She continued to have trouble closing her eyes at night, but ever so slowly she began to think there might not be anything to fear. There might not be anything for which to watch.
Over the weekend, she went out with Doran and she actually enjoyed herself. She convinced herself to fire up Guardians, and found the team all assembled, with Cookie’s notable and keenly-felt absence. “Maaaaal!” they said. “Hey, guys,” she said. It felt normal and comfortable. By Sunday night, a week following her return to school, she began to put her fears behind her.
The next Monday, as she stepped out of her apartment in the morning, she noticed a truck parked across the street from her unit’s parking area. It had a view of her door on the second floor, and when she returned home that night, it was still there.
On Tuesday it was gone. She tried to dismiss it from her mind.
One Wednesday it was back.
On Thursday morning, it was still there when she stepped out. She spoke to a clerk in the leasing office before going to school. Thursday evening, when she returned home, it was gone. She went to the leasing office to see if they had learned anything about it, but the office was closed.
On Friday, she noticed a vehicle following her during her drive to school. It joined on her tail shortly after she left her apartment and broke away shortly before she reached the university parking lot.
Saturday found Melody in her apartment, hunched over her computer with her head in her hands. She breathed in and breathed out, trying not to let the tears come. After a few minutes she clenched down with her fingers, pulling on her hair. “I hate this so much,” she said to herself.
A few times in the past she had felt this kind of paranoia. No girl reached her third decade without at least some scary experiences involving the opposite sex. Once, as she had walked alone to a car in a dark parking lot, she had noted several men loitering across the way, and she had noted the way they watched her. They had made no move toward her, but the incident had made her keenly aware of how completely she had failed to be aware of her situation until she was deep into it. Once also, on a cross-country drive, she had blown a tire many miles from the nearest habitation, and a man had stopped to help her. He had been a ragged, greasy figure, had smelled strongly of cigarettes, and had looked at her with an expression she had never seen before, as though she was a specimen. She had stood back from him while he changed her tire for her, and then he had gone on his way, and she had been left shaking and wondering if she was guilty of inexcusable profiling or if she had escaped a hideous fate by virtue of some unknowable inner decision on his part.
This was like that, like those incidents, except worse and constant. Was any of it even real?
Melody fished out her cell phone and opened its contacts app. She stared at it. Felt tears, blinked them back. Touched the phone icon.
It rang and presently connected.
“Hey, girlfriend,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Wow, okay,” he said.
She knew what he was thinking. That was exactly the sort of thing a TV character would say. He was right, and indeed she was doing exactly the sort of thing a TV character would do. To him she had said nothing yet of any of this. Just like every dumb girl in every dumb show she had ever watched, she was keeping him in the dark.
“Babe, is everything all right? What’s going on?”
“You’re out of town this weekend, right?”
“Yeah, why? What’s wrong? Do you need me to drive back?”
“No! No, I just—” She took a breath. “I think, when you get back, we’d better talk.”
“Okay…” he said. “Can I ask what about?”
“It’s, um… A friend died.”
“Oh, baby…”
“And there was that stalker, and… I’m just really scared.”
“All right. I’m coming home.”
“No, I don’t want you to…” Did she not? This was what they always did. Bring it up. Whine to the man, and then protest, “Oh, no, I don’t want you to come all the way back. I don’t want you to go through any trouble on my account.” But they did. They did want that, or they wouldn’t have said anything. She did or she wouldn’t have said anything.
“What do you want me to do, Mel? I’ll drive back tonight. You think someone’s stalking you?”
After taking a ragged breath, Melody said, “I’m scared. I don’t know if someone’s following me—if I’m just seeing things. I’m afraid I’m being paranoid. But I’m afraid if someone is stalking me, that if I ask you for help, that you’ll be in danger too.”
“Okay… Is this why you’ve been avoiding me since we got back?”
“Yeah,” she said. So he had noticed.
“Okay. I’m driving back tonight, and we can talk about this, okay? You don’t have to worry about me. I can handle a stalker or whatever. And if it is something serious, we’ll go to the police, okay? But I’m sure it’s nothing. That thing was pretty scary, at your dad’s place. I’m sure you’re just still a little freaked out, okay?”
“Okay. Are you… If you come back tonight, is that a big problem? Is that going to cause you any major problems?”
“None. Not at all.”
“Okay.”
“So you stay there. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
She choked. “I love you, too,” she said as best she could.
For those few hours she waited, and in her head she debated. How much to tell him? A partial story? Just enough to receive his help without burdening him with the risks of complete knowledge of the affair? That seemed so cliché. Honesty was the best policy.
Honesty is the best policy. Honesty is the best policy.
He texted her that he had arrived, and then she heard a knock at the door. When she looked through her peep-hole, it was Doran. She could see him looking around at the area outside her apartment.
She opened the door, and he looked down at her, and she thought his face had never been more beautiful.
Then she thought that that made her a little pathetic.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “About this.”
“No,” he replied, slipping inside with a bag. “Don’t be. What’s a guy for, right, but to protect his girl when she’s scared?”
She hugged him, because it felt as though she were obliged to do so. He hugged her back and kissed her on the lips. “Oh, man,” he said. “You are scared. What’s going on, Mel? Is it that thing we saw at your mom and dad’s place?”
Honesty is the best policy. “My friends and I may have discovered a secret AI operating on the Internet. We used another friend of mine to put our discovery on the Internet anonymously to let other people comment on it, and someone wiped our site and killed my friend. I think. They said he overdosed on insulin. And then there was the thing at my parents’ house.”
It took him a few seconds to process this narrative. Finally, he said, “Did you go to the police?”
“Yes. Sort of.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We put together everything we knew and sent it to a federal tip line.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the police?”
“Because! It…” …didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. She pursed her lips, and decided just to say that. “It didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. If they killed Cookie, they might come after us if they knew we were trying to get the police involved.”
“I’m sorry, Cookie?”
“The friend who set up the Tor site.”
“His name is Cookie?”
“That’s what he goes by on the Internet. I knew him from my Guardians team.”
“Okay…”
Suddenly, Melody realized they had come to a juncture she had been trying to avoid for the entire time she had known Doran. The one part of her life into which she had never admitted him was the video-gamer part, the online denizen, and for exactly this reason. He would not understand, and it would all seem stupid and ridiculous to him. He’d laugh.
She pulled away from him and went across the den to her desk, sitting down in her swivel chair there.
“Mel…”
She took a deep breath. How could she proceed? How could she explain this—this whole world, this whole lifestyle, in a way that did not take her right back to high school? At their respective cores, she was a nerd, and he was a jock. He was normal, was good-looking, had girlfriends and real friends—had the whole typical experience. She was weird. She had online friends because she couldn’t make “real” friends. She played videogames because she couldn’t play sports or cheer or whatever. She was overweight and awkward and lived inside her mind, like the rest of her kind, and people like him laughed at people like her. Or if they didn’t laugh, they at a minimum saw people like her as having a… disability. A social disability, perhaps, but a disability. His most charitable view of her was of a girl he could “rescue” from being a nerd. Her being shy and playing videogames, rather than going to parties or the beach, was a shell, and she was just waiting for someone to break her out of it, to show her that she could step into the sun and be pretty and popular, and that people would like her.
“Mel,” he said again. She put a hand up.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
How much of that was wrong, though? Did she, and people like her, not turn to the Internet and games and the like for exactly that reason? Because they felt alienated from “normal” people, felt no place in the “normal” social structure? They were and mostly admitted to being socially awkward at best, incapable of normal social interaction at worst. Introverts all. Not to mention the prevalence of mental illness. Anxiety disorders. Oh, and obesity. Melody, being only twenty or so pounds overweight (as she charitably estimated), was on the healthy end of the spectrum of her social circle.
“Nerds,” as a rule, were not healthy people. They were not socially well-adjusted or physically fit. They told themselves they lived rich inner lives, that they exceled in the mental where everyone else exceled in the physical, and to some extent all of that was true, but it did not change the fact that they had weaknesses.
However, the fact that they had weaknesses did not make their hobbies less valid. Maybe she played videogames—"e-sports”—because she was never going to be good at real sports, and maybe that made her weak, but that did not make Guardians any less fun. And it did not make her teammates any less her teammates and friends. It didn’t make them any less people.
“We called him Cookie,” she said aloud, “because his online name was TheOneTrueCookie.”
“What?” he said, chuckling (as she knew he would).
She looked up at him, and he knew he had made a mistake. Melody looked at her computer.
“Why do you like me? What do we really have in common?”
He approached and sat down at the end of her couch. “Mel, we’ve been over this. I like you because of who you are. Because you’re not like other girls I’ve dated. You’re smart, and you make me think about things. And I don’t just like you. I love you.”
She snorted. “You don’t really know me.”
“Now come on—”
“You don’t really know me because I haven’t really let you get to know me. I told you I play videogames. You know I’m a computer scientist. You think I’m a cute nerdy girl, and you’re helping me break out of my shell.”
“That’s… a little unfair, I think.”
“No, it’s true. And it’s okay. I’m not… I mean, I would like to be less shy, and more active.” And more attractive. “But it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop being a videogamer. Or a nerd.”
“I would never ask you too. We talked about this. I don’t want you to stop being you.”
Melody looked up at him. “If you mean that, then you should probably learn what being me means.”
Doran sat still, gazing at her. She wondered what was going on in his mind at that moment. Did he feel like he was under attack?
“Please don’t feel like I’m attacking you, right now,” she said. He probably had no idea—no, he certainly had no idea, what it was like. How paranoid one could be, if one spent one’s formative years being picked on, being mocked as abnormal. Having to live the most important parts of one’s personal life in absolute secret, a hidden double life, just to survive high school. “Look, you can’t know what it’s like, to be picked on all your life. What it does to you. How insecure it makes you. I can’t tell you anything about what I do for fun, or who I hang out with, without you laughing.”
“I would never laugh at you.”
“You just did. You laughed at Cookie. That’s laughing at me.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry I laughed. I didn’t mean to. This… Cookie guy. He’s the friend who died?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d he die?”
“They said he died of an insulin overdose.”
“He was diabetic?”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t think it was an accident?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That’s going to take some explaining.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere.”
She laid it out. What they had found. What they had decided to do. Her Guardians friends, and Cookie’s hacking hobby. How he and she had cooked up the Tor site, and his note to her which she had discovered upon returning home from the holiday trip.
When she finished, he sat quietly for a long while. Finally, he said, “I can see why you’re scared.”
Melody looked down at her hands, which were not so much folded in her lap as gripping one another, as if holding onto one another for comfort.
“And I can see why you did what you did. But Mel, I think you’re probably overreacting a bit. We don’t really know if someone wiped your…”
“Server.”
“…server. We are taking this other guy’s word for it that Cookie died of an insulin overdose. You said yourself, none of you know each other in real life. The leader guy… What’s his name?”
“Nailoo.”
“Yeah, this Nailoo guy doesn’t know Cookie. Not really, as far as we know. And what happened at your parents’ house—I admit, the timing was a pretty big coincidence, but why would they find you there and not at school? In all likelihood, that really was just some random crazy, some vagrant creeping around the woods.”
Melody had to admit that, while it seemed like a rather far-fetched set of coincidences, hearing him say that it was coincidences made her feel better.
“What I think we should do tomorrow is call your parents and see if the police learned anything more about the creep in your back yard.”
“Okay.” That was smart. That was a good idea.
“For now, for tonight, I’ll crash on your couch, if that’s okay.”
“Are you sure? You’re kind of… long. Is that couch long enough for you?” She thought about her bed. She thought about the thought of him in her bed. She felt her cheeks heat up.
“I’ll be fine, don’t you worry.”
“Okay. I’ve got a blanket you can have. Do you want a pillow?”
“These pillows are fine. I’ll take a blanket, though. And can I use your shower?”
“Of course.”
He slid to the edge of the couch, reached out, and took her hands in his, which sent a warm feeling down through her middle. “Mel, you don’t have to be embarrassed about anything with me, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. She was aware that she used that word a lot, especially around him, but that was how he made her feel. Okay. Like everything was okay.
He kissed her fingers.
“So tell me something,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you have an online name?”
She felt her cheeks flush again. “Yeah.” Please don’t make me please don’t make me please don’t make me—
“Well? What do you go by?”
It took her two tries just to say it out loud. It felt so foolish when she said it to him. “Malady.”
“Malady!” He grinned. She felt her gut clench. “I like it,” he said. “So… are you good?”
“You mean at Guardians?”
“Yeah, sure, or whatever. Games in general.”
“Pretty good, I guess. I’m one of the best on my team.”
“Ever play any Call of Honor?”
“Yeah, some.”
“I played some when it first came out. Maybe we could play sometime.”
“I have that on my GS4.”
“So, let me get a shower, and we’ll play a bit before we hit the sack.”
“Okay…”
He stood up and took his bag to her bathroom. She moved to her couch and turned on her console. She felt herself trembling, in her core, her chest. When he came back, she had the game up and running, and his controller set up. He sat down next to her, and he smelled like body wash—Spring Rain or something like that. He sat down right next to her, very close. They had touched tongues more than once, but somehow the thought of playing a videogame with him stirred her up almost as much—or perhaps even more, but in a different way.
Round one: “Wow. You are good at this,” he said when he saw the scoreboard at the end.
“I’m a little rusty,” she said.
Round two: He just laughed and shook his head. She had advanced a couple of ranks. He was still at the bottom, but that did not describe the difference. He had almost as many kills as deaths on the round. Her ratio was slightly over eight to one.
Round three: “Okay, I’ve gotta be done.” 0x00_Malady was sitting at third on the board, with 43
kills and four deaths, and he was still near the bottom. He set his controller down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She hadn’t meant to humiliate hi—
He took her face in his hands and kissed her rather hard on the mouth, which was a surprise, but she relaxed into it quickly enough. Then he advanced on her, pushing her down with his kiss, onto her back, against the arm of the couch. She opened her eyes wide in renewed surprise, but she could not muster any resistance. Quite the contrary. Melody could feel herself putting her arms around him, moving her body to conform to his, and she looked for that part of her that might tell him to stop, that part that talked about waiting, but she could not find it. That inner person was nowhere to be found, and the rest of her was falling over itself to give in—
Doran let her go and pushed himself up. “There you are,” he said.
“What?” she said. What? What? What was going on?
He put a hand on her cheek. “Go to bed.”
Melody lay on her back, looking up at his eyes, his teeth, his… shirt… and breathing hard.
“What?”
Doran sat the rest of the way up. “Believe me, this is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But you wanted to wait, and I want it to be right. So go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll call your dad.”
Melody sat up. She stared at nothing for a moment while gathering her senses. Eventually she looked over at him, and then she stood and walked to her bedroom. She paused in the doorway for another moment, staring at her bed, and then she continued in and closed the door. That night she fell asleep to the howling cacophony of the emotional cyclone inside her.