At ten-thirty that night, while Colleen was staring at the lines and lines and lines of code on her computer screen that Tristan had written and then handed off to her to test and debug, the hotel room started spinning when she blinked. “Damn.”
“Yeah?” Tristan lifted his head from where he was sitting on the bed and typing. “What’s up? Jian and Anjali all right?”
“Yeah, as far as I know. I haven’t heard anything from your phone except the TV. I think Sergey is watching the Game Show Channel. I’m just getting tired. Do you always work with that drone music on?”
Dreamy waves of elongated tones emanated from Tristan’s computer’s speakers, veiling the room in drifting sound.
Tristan said, “It helps me concentrate.”
It wasn’t helping her concentrate any. As a matter of fact, her head wobbled on her tired neck every time she rested her eyes. “It’s kind of monotonous. You didn’t listen to it last week.”
“Yeah, just sometimes.”
She gestured at the dimmed lamps. “And the lights are so low.”
“Yeah. It helps with eyestrain if one’s screen is on dark mode.”
“Right.” She yawned. “It’s chilly in here. Did you turn up the AC?”
“A little.” He waved his hand at the laptop resting on his legs. “The CPU was getting hot. Why don’t you get under the blankets, princess?”
She flipped the white hotel sheets and duvet over her legs. “Okay. I guess I’m just getting tired.”
Tristan nodded sagely. “We’ve had a rough couple of days. I didn’t sleep well last night, either, due to the adrenaline of breaking into GameShack and then finding out your apartment had been invaded. Maybe you should lie down for a bit. Just to rest a little.”
But every keystroke was one minute closer to getting Anjali the hell away from Sergey and his Russian goons. “I can work a while longer.”
“You’re caught up with where I am. You can sleep whilst I get a few more hours of coding in, and then you can catch up with me again tomorrow morning.”
“It’s taking you a long time to code this. I don’t see how we’re going to finish by Wednesday.”
“Some of the other sections won’t take as long,” he assured her.
“Yeah, and it seems like you’re making a lot of mistakes. You didn’t make these kinds of syntax errors when we were coding Anonymity Plus.”
“Everyone does better work when they aren’t sleep-deprived.” Tristan stretched his long arms overhead and hooked his fingers on the top of the tall headboard, stretching his heavy pec muscles and arching his back. His tight tee-shirt strained over his thick triceps on the backs of his arms, and his abdominals traced rows of cobblestones under the black cotton.
Sadly, the trousers in Tristan’s emergency clothing delivery that afternoon had been black cargo pants, not gray sweatpants.
Also weird. Huh.
While stretching, he said, “Yeah, I suppose I should rest some, too. I’ll just finish this section so I don’t lose my place, and then I’ll nap for a bit.”
Colleen tucked herself under the covers. “Wake me up at two o’clock.”
He shrugged. “The next section after this is going to be a long one. Why don’t you sleep until five or six? There’s no way I can have this next part ready for you before that.”
She nodded sleepily as she warmed up under the blankets. Languor weighed down her limbs, and her legs felt glued to the bed. They had only slept a few fitful hours the night before after checking into the hotel at two o’clock in the morning, and then Sergey had phoned them at eight to demand his software ransom for Jian and Anjali.
And the entire last week had been tough, what with working on the Anonymity Plus program every damn minute of their waking hours, and now the Anonymity Minus program was eating their every waking minute.
And you know, all the sex.
So yeah, sleep deprivation caught up with Colleen. Within minutes, the steady clicking of Tristan’s keyboard became a flickering rattle and then faded away.
When she stirred at a quarter to one in the morning, the hotel room was entirely dark, and the bed beside her was empty.