Chapter 22 Logan
Logan
“Logan.” The concern in Audrey’s voice makes me look up from my computer screen immediately. “We have a problem.”
She’s standing at her workstation, staring at her screen with an expression I’ve learned to dread—the one that means something has gone catastrophically wrong.
In the two months since our first kiss, I’ve been living in a fever dream—vivid, overwhelming, slightly too good to be true.
And now, I get to wake up next to her every day.
I’ve memorized the sounds she makes when she’s close to coming, the way she steals sips of my coffee, the cadence of her laugh when I say something accidentally funny.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Knew it was coming.
Everything was just going too damn well
I roll my chair over. “Show me.”
“The penetration test results from last night.” She points at a cascade of red flags on her monitor. “We’re failing three of the twelve FDA security benchmarks. The data isolation protocols aren’t holding under simulated attack conditions.”
My stomach drops. “That can’t be right. We passed these same tests two weeks ago.”
“We didn’t calibrate for the new FDA security requirements properly. They added new penetration testing standards.” She pulls up a document—sixty pages of regulatory updates that neither of us apparently read closely enough. “They buried it in the fine print. I missed it.”
“We both missed it.”
“I’m the biomedical engineer. Security compliance is my domain.”
“It’s our project. Our responsibility.” I’m already scanning the data, looking for a workaround, a solution, anything. “How bad is it?”
She takes a breath. “We’d need to rebuild the entire data isolation framework. That’s weeks of work.”
“We don’t have weeks.” I stare at the screen as if willing the numbers to change. “We have twenty-six days until the FDA deadline. If we lose two weeks to security redesign—”
“I know what we lose, Logan.” Her voice matches mine—tight, controlled, barely containing frustration. “I can do the math.”
We stare at each other across the workstation, the easy intimacy we walked in here with this morning already fracturing under the weight of what we’re facing.
“Sorry,” I mutter. “I didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s fine.” But her jaw is tight, and she’s already turning back to her screen. “Let’s just figure out what we’re dealing with.”
Six hours later, we’re no closer to a solution, and the tension in the lab has thickened to something suffocating.
Every approach I suggest, she finds a flaw. Every workaround I propose, she shoots down. I know she’s right—she usually is—but the constant rejection is wearing on me, scraping against nerves already raw from stress and exhaustion.
“What about a modular approach?” I pull up a new schematic. “We isolate the most critical data streams first, get those up to standard, then tackle the secondary protocols in phase two—”
“That won’t work.” She doesn’t even look at the schematic. “The FDA requires integrated monitoring. If we isolate in phases, we lose the real-time correlation between device performance and patient outcomes.”
“Then we build a bridge protocol—”
“That adds latency. The whole point of the neural implant is instantaneous response. If we introduce even milliseconds of delay—”
“I know what the point is, Audrey. I designed the core architecture.”
“And I designed the biocompatibility interface. Which is why I’m telling you your solution doesn’t account for how these devices actually interact with human tissue.”
“Then what do you suggest?” The edge in my voice is sharp, ugly. “Every time I propose something, you shoot it down without offering alternatives.”
“I’m trying to think!”
“So am I! But it’s hard when everything I say gets dismissed before I finish.”
She spins to face me, fire in her eyes. “I’m not dismissing you. I’m pointing out legitimate concerns.”
“Are you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’d rather be right than make progress. It’s like you’re trying to shut me out, figure this out on your own instead of talking to me about it, problem solving together.”
The words fester in the air between us, toxic and sharp. I regret them immediately—I can see the impact on her face, the way she flinches like I’ve struck her—but I can’t take them back.
“Shit. Audrey—”
“That’s rich coming from a man who doesn’t talk to me about anything.” Her voice is dangerously quiet—and I can see the moment she realizes she’s said it. The flash of oh shit in her eyes, like she’d been holding that grenade for weeks and it just slipped out of her hands.
That stops me cold. I feel my jaw unhinge, the heat going out of my anger and pooling somewhere else, colder and deeper. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Audrey’s hands clench into fists on the armrests.
Her knuckles go white. “It means you keep things from me,” she says, voice steady, almost academic in its ruthlessness.
“I’ve let you into every part of my life.
My apartment, my family, my history—I told you about my mom, Logan.
I told you why I got into this field. I gave you everything.
And you can’t even invite me to your apartment. ”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. For a moment all I can hear is the faint whir of the air exchangers and the distant hum of the recirculating chiller. The silence is a vacuum, pulling at the edges of every word I want to say.
Audrey just watches me—the same way she’s watched me in bed, at dinner, on the dance floor—but now her focus is clinical, an assessment. I want to laugh, or yell, or hug her, anything to clear out the jagged glass that suddenly lines my throat.
“Why are you making this about my apartment?” I manage. “We’re on the verge of—”
“I’m not making it about your apartment. I’m making it about us.” She pulls her hands off the chair and folds them, tightly, in her lap. “You share your body with me, your ideas, your brilliant mind. But when it comes to real intimacy, Logan, you lock every door and throw away the key.”
“That’s not fair,” I say, but even I don’t believe it.
“You never invite me over,” she says quietly.
“You never talk about your childhood, barely mention your parents. I asked about your family once and you changed the subject so hard I thought you’d gotten amnesia.
Look, it’s fine if you’re private, but you don’t get to throw me the fuck under the bus for wanting the same standard of disclosure I’ve been giving you for weeks. ”
My hands are trembling. I want to walk out of the room, or launch my water bottle at the wall, or just crawl under the desk and hide.
But I don’t do any of those things because I can feel Audrey watching me, measuring out my every reaction, like she’s testing which version of me will survive the next round.
“My parents are there,” I say, then realize I’m out on a high wire, nowhere to go but down. I clamp my mouth shut, taste copper.
“In your apartment,” she clarifies, voice probing, “Like… as in, you live with them?”
“What? No. They live with me. No. Not really live. They live on one of the family estates. But they stay with me when they’re in town on business. And they’re here a lot.”
She goes very quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that isn’t a truce, but a crosshair slowly coming into focus.
“Your parents are in town,” she says, and suddenly it all clicks for her. I see it the moment she aligns my silences, my deflections, my tendency to avoid any talk of staying anywhere but her apartment. “Your parents are in town and they’re staying with you, and you didn’t tell me.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, but it is indistinguishable from what she’s just described. “The estate is undergoing renovations. They come and go.”
She absorbs that, but her face only hardens. “But they’re there now?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you never invited me over?”
I swallow, hating the taste in my mouth. “It’s… not a big place. Well, it is, but not when they’re both here. And you wouldn’t like it.”
“Why wouldn’t I like it, Logan?”
Because my whole life is a closet I kept shoving parts of myself into, hoping no one would ever come open the door and see what’s inside.
Because my parents are the kind of people who can fill any sized home with tension by the sheer force of their expectations.
And I know—have always known—that introducing them to anything I love, anyone I love, is like drawing a bullseye on it.
This is a secret so old and basic I’ve stopped even naming it, like I stopped naming the constellation of scars my father left in my sense of self-worth.
But Audrey is looking at me now, and she’s not going to look away until I answer.
Why wouldn’t she like it?
Because she’s brilliant and awkward and unpolished, and my parents eat girls like her alive.
Because if I ever brought her home, if I ever let her all the way in, it would mean surrendering the only thing I’ve managed to protect from them my entire life.
“Are you…are you ashamed of me, Logan?”
The question nearly plants me on my ass.
This is it, the old voice whispers. This is where she leaves.
You kept her out to protect her, and now she thinks she’s the problem.
Just like you made her think before Sweden.
You’re doing it again. You’re always fucking things up by shutting down—even when you speak up. Why can’t you just be normal?
There is a life, a whole alternate universe, where I let that voice win.
I blink stupidly, say nothing, let myself shrink so far into shame that I never come back out again.
Maybe that’s what I would have done a year ago—hell, maybe even a few weeks ago—before Audrey came back and rewrote the source code of my existence.
But I look at her, the way her jaw is set, the way her hands are white-knuckled with the effort of not breaking, and I see it—the same expression she wore when I blocked her kiss. The same confusion, the same hurt, the same desperate question: What’s wrong with me?