Voss (Van Doren #4)

Chapter 1 Voss

VOSS

The magnetic disks rubbing together is a noise akin to something scraping on a chalkboard, though not as grating. It’s the same scratch, but it’s not deep and doesn’t make you want to claw someone’s eyes out.

At least, that’s what nails on a chalkboard make me want to do.

The disks are rectangular, one by two inches.

One side has geometrical squares, while the other has small, round, raised bumps.

In my right hand, I rub them together so the geometric side rubs against the bumps.

The opposite poles give it some resistance, which keeps me pushing against it back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

My knee bounces slightly. Because I’m alone, I don’t try to calm it.

Actually… looking over the top of my phone, I realize it’s not my knee bouncing so much as my foot.

Wiggling? Shaking? Spasming? Whatever that constant, rapid rhythm is called, that’s what’s going on. It just reverberates through my knee.

I turn my attention back to my phone as I scroll through the documents on my screen. Not exactly useful documents, but I still scan them slowly.

Footfalls on the stairs make the corners of my lips tick up. There’s a reason I’m sitting in the vestibule of the big house instead of at my office. That reason comes into view exactly sixty-one seconds later.

Albrecht Holleran is Clark Kent in real life. I’m not saying he has a Superman alter ego, but he has that raw appeal that’s fucking effortless. Even now, when he’s in black slacks and a polo shirt, haphazardly untucked from his pants.

He glances in my direction before dropping his bag on the couch across from me. In my peripheral vision, I watch him as he sticks his hand into his pocket and pulls out his phone, tossing that onto the couch too.

We don’t exchange any words. The sounds in the area are largely my magnet sliders, though I consciously try to stop my leg from bouncing now that someone is here.

No one has ever truly cared that I can’t stop moving.

Well, Mom cared. She brought me to the doctor several times, trying to get them to surgically remove the constant movement from my body.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating. I don’t remember what she wanted them to do except fix it.

I wasn’t a perfect boy if I couldn’t sit still.

She didn’t want to acknowledge that ADHD wasn’t something you could simply take care of.

That’s not how life works. Their suggestions fell on deaf ears, except maybe that they could drug it out of me.

Dad didn’t allow that, and I wasn’t about to keep it a secret when Mom tried to convince me not to tell Dad when she made me take medication. I didn’t want meds. I just wanted to be left alone to do my own thing.

“Brek? That you?”

Brek pauses on his way to his bedroom to glance at Jessica’s open door. “Yeah.”

“Come here a minute.”

He stops, pulling his shirt from his pants the rest of the way, and adjusts his trajectory to head into Jessica’s room. I watch his back retreat, and then my eyes drop to his abandoned phone. His is the last that I need to infect—and it’s been a fucking long time coming.

It’s not that he has his phone in his hand all the time. It’s simply that there’s always someone around. Always. I’m never left alone with his damn phone.

I study Jessica’s open door. Two minutes, tops.

I drop the magnets and cross the room for his phone.

I’ve known his password for eight months now, having worked it out through a series of observations when he unlocks it.

I tap the four digits and quickly navigate through the interface until I’m pulling up the operating system dialog.

Using my phone, I tap the two and hold them together, waiting for mine to connect to his. It only takes twelve seconds, but when I know Brek could return any moment, those twelve seconds feel like twelve minutes.

Finally, the box flashes that the files were received.

I keep our phones together so mine can send all the necessary commands.

I need, like, thirty-eight more seconds of phone-to-phone contact before my phone can access his from across the room.

I can finish the programming without having his phone in hand after that.

It feels like it takes ages, but it’s done in less than a minute.

I close the operating system interface and turn the screen off before returning it precisely where it was.

I’m exactly where I’d been, with magnet sliders in hand again, when Brek steps out of Jessica’s room.

He glances in my direction before heading a little further down the hall to his own room.

No longer am I scrolling through a useless document. I’m now programming the app installed on his phone, attached to the OS.

None of his friends had been this difficult to get their damn phones.

Myro did the initial install of Jessica’s.

Loren did Oakley’s. Uncle Noaz did both Briar and Haze’s.

I did Levis’ when he began working at Van Doren Technologies, while giving him access to the office network.

That left Brek, but fuck’s sake, it’s been a damn challenge.

I’m not sure if I’m the one never alone or if he simply always has his friends close.

Most of what I’m doing is accessing Brek’s location, but I’m also installing the mirror ability so I can see what he’s doing on his phone if I choose. Why? Curiosity. The location is our primary objective, so we can keep an eye on where Brek might wander on the property.

We have secrets, and Brek is a little… Well, let’s just say his appearance might be Clark Kent, but he’s certainly not as confident and smooth as a superhero.

Isn’t there one that’s kind of bumbling?

Like they’re not quite comfortable in their own skin?

That’s Brek. He always looks like his life just doesn’t fit him right, and it begins with his body.

I take my bottom lip between my teeth when he walks back into the loggia where I’m sitting.

I don’t know what it is about him, but I’m strangely fascinated with Brek.

He’s just effortlessly hot and completely oblivious to the fact.

I’ve seen him get incredibly self-conscious when someone comments on his appearance, though. Every time.

Generally speaking, he dresses to be comfortable.

Out of his work clothes, he’s now in jeans with a hole in the left knee, rips over the right thigh, and loose on his hips, hanging lower than they should be.

Because he’s almost always wearing an open shirt of some kind, his low jeans mean the natural V of his torso does a damn good job of dragging your eyes south.

I’m driven by research. I like to know everything I can. When I was old enough to know what it meant to be attracted to someone and that three of my brothers were attracted to men instead of women, I took a deep dive into attraction.

From what I can find in the unbiased research, everyone has exceptions to their supposed strict gender attractions.

So many people report, ‘I’m straight except for this one person’ or ‘I’d go gay for this person alone’ or ‘In another life, I’d be in love with my best friend, but they’re [gender] and I don’t like [gender]. ’

For me, that read loud and clear that if there wasn’t some ugly stigma associated with orientations outside of heterosexual, everyone has a little bit of bi in them.

Like nature itself, it’s a spectrum, and even if you’re all the way to one side, that one exception means that perhaps you’re not 100% but 99%.

In a grayscale, it means that you’re so solidly one color that you can’t exactly see that your 000000 is actually 000001.

But that 1 is still there. It still exists.

From the time I was ten, I was trying to figure out what gender and attraction meant and why it was somehow tied to religion and politics.

For the latter, the bottom line is that it’s simply impossible for people to let others live their lives without having an opinion and trying to control them to fit into their own ideologies. It’s control and opinion.

Nothing is based on fact. Everything is based on faith, belief, and judgment.

However, gender and attraction can be seen as a spectrum all over nature, in every species of flora and fauna. Sometimes you click. Sometimes you don’t.

When I was fifteen, I began examining myself to see how it fit within me.

Where did I fall on the spectrum? That’s when I started the deep dives into gender and found all the craziness that is chromosome arrangements.

It’s not as simple as an X and Y, regardless of what the uneducated middle-school-level understanding would have you believe. It’s actually quite fascinating.

However, I quickly realized that the research on the social construct of gender wasn’t truly what interested me after all. Yes, I wanted to know, so I’d continue to learn, but it came down to attraction.

I stare at Brek now, as he gets comfortable on the couch opposite the one I’m sitting on. Over the last several months, I’ve realized that I’m attracted to him. Is it personality? Chemistry? The fact that he’s a little broken? Maybe because he’s kind of grumpy and inaccessible?

Whatever the case is, Brek has become somewhat of an obsession of mine.

Most people are like lab rats to me. I like to study them until I have them figured out.

But unlike his friends, with perhaps the exception of Levis, because he’s a pretty private person, Brek keeps most things bottled up.

I don’t think he’s careful about only talking to his friends when there aren’t interlopers around.

I think he keeps most of his feelings and thoughts to himself, even with them.