10. Mika #3
“Anyway,” Xander said, shooting his other half a dirty look that was clearly meant to make him behave.
I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought that was a wasted gesture.
“Is there anything else? If not, then start the preparations, except you, Mika. I need you with a finger on the pulse of what’s coming our way, so sit your ass in the lab.
Aidan, you follow him and do whatever you’re handed, and when you’re out there, you listen to Mika. You got it?”
“Got it,” Aidan said, and although I was a little annoyed at Xander’s insistence when Aidan was clearly listening and behaving, Aidan didn’t seem bothered.
“Good, then get going,” he said with a wave of his hand, and the scraping of several chair legs against the tiled floor filled the room as we got to our feet.
“One second,” Aidan said as he followed me out the back. “Hey.”
I snorted when he took advantage of our alone time to slip an arm around me and pull me in. “I literally just saw you a couple of hours ago.”
“Did you?” he wondered lightly. “I would swear it was longer than that.”
“You left your laptop on my lap,” I pointed out to him. “Because you were there all morning.”
“You’re mad about me ‘cluttering’ up your space,” he said with a snort, kissing me. “I’ll come by and get it later, but if I go with you now, I might get distracted.”
“Sorry Xander was singling you out,” I said. “I don’t want to make excuses for him, but—”
“This is serious. I’m new and not nearly as experienced as you guys, I get it,” he said easily. “Don’t worry, my feelings aren’t hurt. I just hope it doesn’t come down to me not fucking something up because holy shit, I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be,” I assured him quietly, kissing him. “You’ll be with me and we can get through it.”
“It will be nice knowing it’s you that has my back,” he smirked. “And ordering me around…out of the bedroom.”
“Shut up,” I said with a laugh, pushing him away. “Don’t get any ideas. Until we’re no longer under alert, we’re all sleeping in the bunks, so don’t get too wound up.”
“Well, that’s fucking disappointing,” he said with a sigh and turned when he heard his name called. “Gotta go. Behave.”
“Always,” I told him, and watched him walk off, wistful at the loss of any alone time over the next few days.
I had a job to do, though, and I made my way back to the science building.
I walked to my laptop and discovered nothing new had come in.
Frustration filled me. Ordinarily, I would take a lack of conclusive results as just another part of the process when you were dealing with something as mercurial as the weather, but when you had Xander breathing down your neck, it added a sense of urgency.
Well, forewarned was forearmed, and considering the storm could be better or worse than we thought, it was important to know if we were about to face it head-on.
Sitting around while all I could do was nothing was a brutal combination for me.
I looked around; my eyes fell on Aidan’s laptop, open and charging nearby.
I remembered hearing that everyone in the group had read Aidan’s writing and how I’d felt like shit that I hadn’t.
I still hadn’t got around to it, though it was on my to-do list. I grabbed his computer and slid my finger over the touchpad to bring the screen to life.
Aidan had given me the password when he needed me to pull up a video for him, and I punched it in.
It wasn’t his desktop but his email that popped up, and apparently he had been in the middle of one before we’d been called to the house a couple of hours before.
I wasn’t even thinking when I skimmed the unfinished email, but it was enough to catch my attention, mainly because it was three partially started sentences.
I really can’t continue doing this for much longer; this isn’t fair to…
I cannot, in all good conscience, continue to maintain the facade I have been entrusted with, and from this point forward I feel it would be better…
Listen, you pompous fuck, this was bullshit from the start and I’m sick of doing this shit, so how about I just come clean and see what kind of mess I can…
And then, right at the bottom, as if needing to type his thoughts out to understand, was:
Fuck me sideways. I got myself into this mess, and now I don’t know how to get out of it.
Not without causing shit to fly. I’m so tired of finding my foot stuck in it no matter what I do.
I should have never agreed to this shit, but then what?
Then I wouldn’t be here in the first place, and I wouldn’t have Mika, and the rest of the guys.
So, do I keep my mouth shut, keep going and feeling like the dirtbag that I probably am?
Or do I come clean and accept the hate I’m going to get?
Yeah, yeah, I know the answer. I’ve known it for a while, but after the other day, what can I do? Maybe it’ll be easier if I’m hated by other people and not just myself.
Yeah, right.
But when?
Fuck.
“What?” I asked softly, heart hammering in my chest as I tried to make sense of the words I couldn’t stop reading repeatedly. My first wild thought was that he had been dating someone before he’d come here, or that he’d been seeing someone else the whole time.
Except…except that didn’t track. For all the crimes I could have imagined about him, cheating had never entered my head, even at my most cynical and suspicious moments.
That, and even if it tried to enter my thoughts now, the draft wasn’t addressing a lover.
I searched the words to make sense of them until my attention latched onto the email address attached to it.
It was a last name that sounded vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite make sense of it, along with a letter that was probably the initial.
The draft was clearly addressing someone who was familiar to Aidan, though, so he had probably emailed them before.
I knew it was wrong to search, but it sounded like Aidan wasn’t doing something he thought he should do either, something that might affect everyone here, if not at least me.
Two wrongs didn’t make a right, but forewarned was forearmed after all, and I didn’t want to be blindsided by whatever he was doing.
Tapping the email address into the search bar generated several emails, and heart hammering, I scrolled past all the individual emails and settled on the last of a chain of emails between Aidan and this AndersonB@gmail. I read quickly and felt my heart sink.