Page 13 of Hacking the Holidays
Which would have been a brilliant plan if I hadn’t completely forgotten about the cables snaking around Sam’s workspace like digital spaghetti. My hasty retreat immediately encountered a snag, literally, when my foot discovered the printer cable. It wrapped around my ankle with the enthusiasm of an aggressive python.
“Careful there,” Sam said. “You’re making it worse.”
“I’ve got it,” I announced, just as I absolutely did not have it.
In fact, I was now performing an interpretive dance called “How Many Cables Can One Person Get Tangled In?”
The answer was all of them.
“Wait—don’t do that!” Sam launched himself toward me in his rolling chair like a knight charging into battle, except this knight had terrible depth perception and crashed into my legs with the grace of a runaway shopping cart.
Matter, motion, force, and energy took over from there with malicious glee as I toppled forward onto him, and of course, why not, with my breasts smashed in his face.
“I can’t breathe,” Sam said, his words muffled.
I pushed off his chest, trying to gather my bearings—and my boobs. For one crystalline moment, we were frozen, our gazes locked, teetering on the edge of physics.
Two people.
One chair.
And gravity is making executive decisions.
That was exactly when our situation got upgraded from “embarrassing” to “someone should probably warn the Red Cross—a disaster is about to happen.”
The chair executed its dramatic backwards death spiral, taking us down in what could only be described as a catastrophic ballet of flailing limbs. I landed flat against Sam’s torso like a deflated superhero who’d crash-landed mid-flight, my calves and feet suspended in air behind meas if I was perpetually diving into an invisible pool that had mysteriously relocated.
Sam lay underneath me, eyes wide, mouth gaping open, completely and utterly speechless. The cables draped over us both like party streamers celebrating our mutual destruction of dignity.
That was the exact moment Eleanor investigated the commotion, finding us arranged on the floor like we were posing for the world’s most awkward Christmas card.
This was the reason I didn’t want to do undercover work. It was why I should never be let out of the house. And above all, it was precisely the justification for my needing a warning label hanging from my neck that says: “Danger: appears normal until activated by human contact.”
Chapter Four
SAM
My orderly life had just been exposed to a catastrophic system vulnerability, and the bug in question was currently using me as a human landing pad. I blinked rapidly, my brain attempting to reboot while simultaneously trying to catalog exactly how everything had gone so spectacularly wrong in the blink of an eye.
Error 404: Coherent thoughts not found.
All I could register were the immediate sensory inputs: Rose’s body draped across mine, the soft sleeve of her gray sweater pressed against my cheek, the faint scent of vanilla, and the way her breath came in short, startled puffs against my skin.
Unfortunately, Rose’s dismount strategy from my body appeared to involve channeling the graceful athleticism of a drunk penguin. She pushed up using my shoulders as leverage, wobbled in both directions, slipped, elbowed me in theribs, over-corrected, then somehow ended up in an even more precarious position than before.
“This printer cable has trust issues,” Rose said, contorting again to free herself, but failing. “It’s clearly not ready to let go of our relationship.”
“No worries,” I wheezed, while my internal systems ran emergency diagnostics for structural damage and organ displacement.
“Well, this is certainly more excitement than the reference section usually sees,” Eleanor finally spoke, her professional concern barely masking what was clearly the highlight of her week. “I don’t see any blood, so that’s a good sign.”
She stood there like a connoisseur of confusion, drinking in every detail of our cable-wrapped disaster with the appreciation of someone who’d just discovered premium entertainment that didn’t require a subscription fee. I was surprised she hadn’t pulled up a chair with a box of Peanut M&M’s.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Eleanor asked.
“We’re fine,” I announced with the convincing tone of someone who was definitely not fine. “Never been better.”
“Completely fine,” Rose confirmed, completely missing my sarcasm. “We just had a minor disagreement with the fundamental forces of nature after getting tangled up in the cables.”
