Page 7 of Fangs with Benefits

Turning the screen so that it’s facing me directly, Molly points at a line that is just a series of nonsensical letters and numbers, no cipher or code so far as I can tell. Beneath it are two empty boxes, both reading password.

I blink at the screen. I do my best, I really do, but when I turn a blank stare at her, she breathes a long and heavy breath out her nose.

‘This is your username. You need it to get into everything, so write it down,’ she says.

I look around the room for something to write on, but other than this desk and the device atop it, the room holds very little. It could use some paintings, a bookshelf, or perhaps a mural.

Molly sighs again–an impressive amount of sighing from her–and stands easily from the rolling chair. She pulls open one of the drawers in the cabinet behind us. After rummaging in it for a moment she retrieves a pad of bright orange sticky notes. I’ve never purchased them myself, but Dylan has plastered them all around the house with general reminders about how the world has changed in my absence. These are not comprehensive as the apartment is rather small and there wouldn’t be enough room for everything a person needs to know to successfully interact with a digital world.

She tosses the pad in front of me, then pulls open a clever drawer I hadn’t seen beneath the desk and withdraws a plastic pen.

‘Is this your office?’ I ask, though Ryan had explicitly said it was mine. Ryan is a rather wearying sort of man, though, and I did not wish to listen to him speak for long.

‘What?’

‘You know where everything is.’

‘Yeah, I stocked it for you when I brought your computer in. This is your stuff.’

‘Mine?’ I ask, seeing the pad of Post-its in a new light. I pick up the top sheet, and it brings with it the one below, creating a sort of accordion of tangerine-coloured pages. ‘All of this? That too?’ I point at the computer.

‘Yeah, I mean, it comes with the office. And the computer is for your work, so you don’t have to use your personal one.’

‘I can take it?’ If I can take it home, I can practise on it when Dylan sleeps. I just need to make sure it won’t combust if I do something wrong.

Maybe I shouldn’t try to practise on it often alone, after all. Too many unknowns.

‘Home? Of course, if you want. But you probably won’t have to do work out of the office, so you can usually just leave it locked in your desk.’

‘And these?’ I point to the sticky notes. ‘I can take them?’ ‘You’re not supposed to, but sometimes it’s okay. Devi will get mad if we start running out of stuff, though. So don’t make a habit of it.’

Devi, the brunette, spritely creature who greeted me. She is human but looks vaguely like a nymph. Ryan looked at her like she was a prize he coveted instead of a colleague, which made my estimation of him lower still.

‘Thank you, then. For getting all this stuff for me. I appreciate it more than you know,’ I tell her.

She recoils slightly. ‘There’s a supply closet full of it. Did your last office not have a supply closet?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘Were you remote or something?’

I did live rather remotely, my home miles away from the closest town, and even further from the nearest city.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Right. Makes sense,’ she mumbles low, but I still hear her.

I’ve got impeccable hearing; I could hear her whole conversation in the hall with Ryan–her attempt to get this buddy duty handed off, his steady assurance not to be nervous. Her shoulders had been half up to her ears when she returned, a stiffness about her posture that betrayed her discomfort. I don’t know what to make of her reticence, especially when she’d been so helpful with the door debacle. Perhaps she’s just busy, or indeed nervous in close quarters with large men.

No matter, I will disarm her with my easy demeanour and easier conversation. To this end, I practise a soft smile in her direction.

She gives me a wary glance before she scrawls in an impressively straight script the letters and numbers that make up my username.

‘It’s easy to remember because it’s just the first three letters of your last name and the day you started, see? THO929.’

So there was a code after all; I was just not astute enough to discover it.

‘Now you need to make a password.’ She slides the keyboard in my direction.