Chapter 15
fifteen
BEN
“It’s not the sensor, Kellerman. It’s the code.”
As Anya’s pen taps the oscilloscope trace, her voice is tight with the kind of exhausted frustration that comes from three weeks of failed maze trials. She’s perched on a lab stool, her long dark hair pulled back in a ruthlessly efficient ponytail, her glasses slightly askew.
She sighs. “Look at the voltage output—it’s all over the place because the algorithm isn’t compensating for the noise.”
I move closer to the screen, my eyes tracking the jagged waveform. It looks like the EKG readout of someone having a panic attack, with erratic spikes and drops that make no sense. But it’s not random chaos. There’s a pattern buried in there if you know where to look.
“No, it’s reading noise because the power supply is fluctuating,” I counter, my own frustration mounting. “There’s a half-volt drop every time the motor draws current, and that noise is propagating through the whole system, throwing off the sensor calibration. It’s not the code…”
Anya adjusts her glasses, squinting at the trace like it’s offended her. “So you’re saying we need to redesign the power distribution?”
“I’m saying we need to isolate the sensor from the motor’s power rail.” I’m already crossing to the whiteboard, grabbing a dry-erase marker. “Separate regulator, clean ground path, and making sure we keep the high-current stuff away from the precision analog.”
The marker squeaks against the whiteboard as I sketch out the new circuit—a 7805 linear regulator, an LC filter on the output, low-ESR caps to kill the switching noise. It’s elegant and clean, the kind of solution that makes everything else fall into place once you see it.
“That’s another few weeks of work, minimum,” Anya interrupts, crossing her arms over her chest. “We don’t have time.”
“We don’t have time not to,” I shoot back. “If the sensor keeps drifting, Theseus is going to plow into walls like a drunk freshman at 2:00 a.m., and we’re fucked. You want to explain to the review panel why our ‘autonomous’ robot needs a babysitter?”
Her jaw tightens. “I want to explain why we’re late because you insisted on gold-plating the power supply.”
“It’s not gold-plating.” I sigh. “It’s the difference between a robot that works and a robot that’s a lawn ornament.”
The argument continues, our voices low and intense in the empty lab. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a question forms: why the hell can I talk to this girl, here, about this stuff, when to talk to any girl romantically involves a 180-degree turn and retreat?
The answer is as clear to me as the robot’s power supply.
This is the world I understand. Problems have solutions. You can trace every fault back to a root cause. And this is a girl I understand and who understands me. We’re colleagues, not lovers, and we both operate in predictable ways and respect the opinions and the interests of the other.
“Kellerman,” she says, cutting through my thoughts. “It’s 8:15.”
I follow her gaze to the clock mounted above the lab door.
The second hand ticks past the three.
8:15 p.m.
“Didn’t you have to go at eight?”
Oh, fuck.
The realization doesn’t hit all at once. It’s a cascade failure—the kind where one component trips, then the next, then the whole system crashes in a beautiful, unstoppable chain reaction—because Cass’s gig started at eight, the venue is a twenty-minute sprint across campus…
…and I’m already late.
She kept her end of the bargain perfectly, and I promised to show up. What if she’s scanning the crowd right now, looking for me? What if some asshole said something or touched her and I wasn’t there to step in? What if she thinks I just forgot?
“I have to go,” I say, the words coming out strangled.
Anya stares at me. “We’re not done—”
But I’m already moving, grabbing my backpack off the floor. “I’m sorry!”
I don’t wait for her response.
Bursting out of the room, I take the stairs down two at a time, and as soon as I’m outside, I start running. Not jogging—running—my backpack slamming against my spine with every stride, my breath coming in sharp gasps that burn my lungs in the cold evening air.
The South Campus quad blurs past, the streetlamps streaking into orange lines as I cut across the frost-stiff grass instead of sticking to the path. My boots slip on an icy patch near the library steps, and for a terrifying second I’m airborne, but I save myself, barely.
Keep moving.
The guilt is a physical weight in my chest, crushing and suffocating. It’s not the abstract shame of failing a test or disappointing my mom—it’s the specific, surgical pain of betraying someone who trusted me and went out of her way to help me.
My lungs are screaming and my legs are burning, but I don’t slow down. The North Campus gate appears ahead, the wrought-iron bars slick with condensation. I don’t slow down, just vault the low stone wall beside it, my shoes crunching on the gravel as I land and keep sprinting.
When I get to the bar, I’m officially twenty-four minutes late.
I burst through the doors, a sweaty mess, and the wall of sound hits me.
It’s a physical thing, a raw, distorted guitar riff layered over the thundering crash of drums and a bass line that I can feel vibrating in my sternum like a second heartbeat.
And then I see her, on stage and clearly not in any danger, and the sight leaves me breathless for reasons that have nothing to do with the sprint.
She’s a force of nature, her choppy blonde hair dark with sweat and plastered to her forehead and the sides of her face. Her expression is pure, fierce concentration as she tears into a blistering solo, her fingers flying across the fretboard.
But it’s different from the last time I saw her. There’s an anger to this performance, all coiled energy and defiant power, her body moving with the music in a way that’s both primal and controlled. And the crowd is into it, heads bobbing, fists pumping, and the mosh pit churning.
She’s in her element.
She’s a fucking rock star.
And I’m lucky to have a ticket to watch her.
I edge along the back wall, trying to make myself invisible, and my attention drifts to her amp. It’s the one she’d spoken about, telling me it was special and her bandmate—Joel?—wanted her to replace it. It’s scuffed to hell, and the grille cloth is torn at one corner.
But the sound—God, the sound.
I can hear the beautiful, warm breakup of those vintage tubes, the natural compression when she pushes them just past their limit, the way the notes bloom and sustain with this gorgeous harmonic richness that digital modeling can never quite replicate.
But underneath it, like a persistent infection, is the hum.
I could fix that.
The thought is immediate and vivid. Her amp on my workbench, the chassis open, my hands tracing the ground path with a multimeter, isolating the fault and making it clean. Give me an afternoon and a soldering iron, and I could make that thing sing without the hum.
And then the thought shifts again, darker and hotter. Her on that same workbench, wanting to say thanks. Her legs wrapped around my hips, those fierce blue eyes locked on mine while I fuck her against the scattered tools and spools of solder.
My hands gripping her thighs, feeling the heat of her legs through torn fishnets. Her nails digging into my shoulders as she gasps my name, because she wants me filling her, making her feel as good as I’d make that amp sound, utter perfection.
The fantasy is so vivid I can almost feel the bite of her teeth on my neck, taste the salt-sweat on her skin. But even as the thought forms, something darker swallows it whole, putting me right back on my ass the way it always does when I talk to—or think about—girls I like.
You can fix broken electronics, but you sure as hell can’t fix whatever’s broken in you that makes you think a girl like that could ever want you. Because you’d fuck it up, Kellerman, you always do. You keep quiet, or you say too much, but never do the right thing.
The fantasy vanishes, and I realize my mind—the bastard—is right. Because watching her command the stage with a confidence I can’t even begin to comprehend, seeing the way the crowd moves for her like she’s some kind of punk rock conductor and they’re her orchestra, I see it’s true.
A girl like that could never want me.
She lives in a world of stages and spotlights and raw, unfiltered emotion, a world where vulnerability is currency and fear is just another note to hit. She can walk into a room full of hostile strangers and make them love her with nothing but a guitar and her voice.
She’s up there, and I’m down here.
And that’s exactly where I belong.
I grip the edge of a sticky table, the wood grain rough under my palm.
You’re the scarecrow. You’re here to do a job. Feel things on your own time.
But my body doesn’t care about the verdict from my brain.
She shifts her weight, her hips swaying with the rhythm as she transitions into the bridge, and a hot, aching coil of pure physical desire tightens low in my stomach. It’s immediate and visceral—the kind of want that bypasses thought entirely and goes straight to the gut and the groin.
I watch the way her torn band shirt clings to her torso, damp with sweat, the fabric outlining the curve of her breasts as she leans into the microphone. The way her throat works as she sings. The fierce, focused intensity in her eyes as she scans the crowd, looking for something.
Trouble, maybe, or just confirmation that they’re still with her.
Or maybe she’s looking for me, realizing I never showed up.
I want to feel that energy coming off her skin. To have that fierce, focused attention turned on me again the way it was at the party, when she’d kissed me like it mattered. To kiss her without an audience, without a script, just because I want to and she wants me to.
Jesus Christ, Kellerman. Get it together.
I force myself to take a breath. Then another. I brutally tamp down the desire, the suppression a physical effort, a mental wall built brick by brick over the traitorous ache in my gut and the hardness pressing against my zipper.
She did her part at the party. It’s my turn to repay the debt.
My focus narrows with a new, desperate resolve as I straighten up, forcing my gaze away from her and into the crowd. Because, I try to kid myself, I’m not a mess of feelings. I’m an engineer, and she highlighted a problem that needs to be solved.
I scan the room.
There’s a bouncer near the front of the stage—a big guy in a black shirt, arms built like he lifts kegs for cardio, currently scanning the mosh pit with the bored vigilance of someone who’s seen this sort of scene play out a hundred times for a hundred different bands.
There’s a guy in the front row with his eyes locked on Cass. Mid-twenties, polo shirt, frat-boy haircut. But even as his gaze slides up and down her body in a way that makes my jaw clench hard enough to hurt, I’m not getting any sort of threat vibe.
Just an asshole. She can handle assholes.
This is what I’m good at. Systems. Patterns. Problems. Solutions.
I might not be able to talk to a girl without stammering, but I can identify variables, predict outcomes, and calculate risk. And, as I do, the songs blur together and the crowd keeps shifting like a living organism, contracting and expanding with the rhythm of the music.
Between songs, during brief pauses when she steps back from the mic to adjust a pedal or take a sip of water from a bottle at the edge of the stage, I try to catch her eye. But even as her gaze sweeps the crowd—over the front row, the bar, the back wall where I’m standing, she misses it.
My wave.
Each time, she returns to the music, attacking her guitar with renewed ferocity. And through the whole show, I realize she’s playing angry. I can hear it in the snarl of her voice, in the way she punishes the strings, in the sharp, percussive stomp of her boots on the stage.
But it’s not just that. The songs are faster, harder, the tempo relentless. Joel, the bassist, keeps glancing at her, confused, even as he struggles to keep up. The drummer is locked in tight, but clearly struggling to follow her into whatever chaotic territory she drags them.
They sound incredible, but I know something’s wrong.
With her.
Did someone say something to her? Touch her? Is that why she’s playing like she’s trying to burn the whole building down?
I shift my position, angling for a better view of the front rows, scanning for the source of whatever set her off. But I can’t escape the inescapable logic that she’s probably pissed off at me, because she kept her end of the bargain.
And I fucked up mine.