Page 153 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
I stand up, smoothing my skirt over my stomach—flat, for now. I have to hide this. I have to figure out a way to magically save the company before my body betrays us all.
Taking a deep, grounding breath, I pull open the heavy glass door and walk right back into the lion’s den.
26
ETHAN
Silence has a weight.
In the military, silence usually means one of two things: safety or an ambush. You learn to distinguish the difference by the hairs on the back of your neck. Safety feels like a vacuum, a total lack of input. An ambush feels like a sudden drop in barometric pressure—the air heavy and vibrating, waiting for the trigger to be pulled.
For the last forty-eight hours, the silence coming from Tessa has felt like a goddamn ambush.
I sit in my office, staring out the glass walls that offer a panoramic view of the Mosaic floor. It’s buzzing with the frantic energy of a startup that just secured fifty million dollars but sold its soul to get it. We’re one month post-launch, but the workload hasn’t slowed down—it’s doubled. Developers are huddled in pods, finalizing the infrastructure scaling infrastructure for the Confessions feature, an anonymous posting tool that Sterling wants us to push aggressively.
But the one person who usually anchors the chaos is missing.
Tessa isn’t gone, technically. She’s in the building. I know she’s physically present because Asher tracks everyone’s badge-ins like a hawk, and Owen mentioned seeing her grab a bagel in the break room at seven this morning.
But she’s actively avoiding us.
She’s methodical about it, making sure it isn’t the kind of avoidance that would trigger an HR complaint or alert the rest of the staff. She replies to emails with one-word answers. Approved. Reviewed. Pending.
In the encrypted group chat—our absolute lifeline, the place where we’ve built this insane, beautiful, terrifying dynamic—she’s gone completely dark. No memes. No snarky comments about my tie. No “Red or Black?” callbacks.
I stare down at the paperwork on my desk—the Sterling contract, a fifty-million-dollar lifeline that currently feels exactly like a noose. The Morality Clause stares back at me, specifically Section 4.2 regarding “conduct unbecoming of executive leadership” and “deviant lifestyle choices that may negatively impact the brand image.”
We signed it. We agreed to hide what we were doing, and exactly what we are to each other, to save the company and the employees out there who have mortgages and families.
But ever since the ink dried, Tessa has been ghosting us.
Is she regretting it?
A harsh tightness grips my chest, and I clench my jaw until my molars grind together. Is the reality of hiding us too much? Have the reckless afternoons we spent tangled in her bed, the stolen nights in her apartment, and the desperate quickies in the serverroom lost their shine now that a billionaire investor is explicitly threatening to bankrupt us if we get caught?
My door opens without a knock. Owen drops heavily into the chair opposite my desk. He clearly hasn’t slept. His usual easy-going charm—that golden-retriever energy that actively balances out my cynicism—is completely gone. The edges of his composure are fraying.
“She’s canceling the lunch meeting,” Owen says.
“Which lunch meeting?” I ask, keeping my voice level.
“The strategy sync for the Confessions expansion. She sent a calendar update two minutes ago and changed it to an email update.” Owen drags his palms down his face, distorting his features. “She hasn’t looked me in the eye since Wednesday morning, E. She’s dodging me.”
“She’s dodging us,” Asher corrects from the doorway.
My brother stands there leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. His expression is as stoic as ever, but I know what he says. He’s tapping his fingers against his bicep in a rhythmic Fibonacci sequence, which he only does when he’s trying to solve a problem that lacks a logical solution.
“I checked the network logs,” Asher says, walking in and closing the door to seal the three of us in the soundproof glass box. “Her productivity metrics are steady, but her communication output with the three of us has dropped by ninety-four percent in the last forty-eight hours. Physically, she’s isolating herself. I walked past the bullpen, and she’s keeping her head down with her noise-canceling headphones clamped on, completely refusing to engage.”
“Jesus, Ash,” Owen snaps. “She isn’t a server crash. You can’t debug her.”
“I’m just stating the data,” Asher replies, though his voice lacks its usual detached cool. “The metrics suggest a pattern of withdrawal consistent with…” He trails off, frowning.
“With what?” I ask, my voice sharpening.
“Regret,” Asher finishes quietly.
The word hangs in the air, heavy and suffocating.
