The Brat
JON, IN THE PAST
I was at Jack’s, like I usually was. The Taylor house wasn’t the biggest or the cleanest, but it was warm, and there was always food in the fridge. Jack’s mom was nice enough—absent-minded, chronically tired, but she loved her boys and never seemed to mind having me over.
I lived in a trailer. That’s how it had been since I turned eighteen and got out of the group home. It was fine for sleeping and showering, but for gaming or coding, I came here—both for the Wi-Fi and the human contact.
Chatting with Jack, I took a sip of coffee. Then, slowly, I lowered the mug.
“I wonder why my coffee tastes like the Dead Sea.”
Jack just shrugged, too focused on his laptop to care.
I tasted it again, more carefully this time. Then I looked toward the doorway where Cooper was leaning. He didn’t even try to hide his excitement.
He raised his brows innocently. “Is it a bit . . . robust?”
I kept my face a mask of stone, and took a long, slow sip. His smirk faltered. His nose crinkled in genuine disgust.
“Okay, that’s just wrong,” Cooper said, stepping into the room. “Who drinks that?”
“You wanted me to,” I replied calmly. I set the mug down, pinning him in place with the way I inspected him. “I’d hate to disappoint you.”
At seventeen, Cooper was really testing the limits of how much he got away with when it came to me.
Too damn much, probably.
Jack glanced at him. “What the fuck, Coop. You have a death wish or something?”
Cooper stalked off, returning minutes later with a fresh mug.
He didn’t just give it to me, no, he made a whole production of dropping two sugar cubes in before slowly stirring it.
Then, staring me straight in the eye, he licked the back of the spoon, his pink tongue mocking me before he wrapped his mouth around the utensil.
I should’ve laughed him off. Instead, I was too fucking aware that the brat was blatantly flirting with me—and I was letting it happen.
During another visit, my shoes disappeared.
I checked the hallway, Jack’s room, even the kitchen.
I didn’t like walking around someone else’s house in socks.
It was the feeling of not being able to leave the second I needed to that bothered me.
But his mom preferred a shoes-off house, so that’s what I did, and now—
“Have you lost something?” Cooper asked from the couch, not even pretending to be subtle. If anyone else had hidden my shit, I would’ve been a lot less patient. With Cooper, I counted to ten.
I was starting to suspect I’d always count to ten with him.
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied with an annoying little smirk.
I stared at him. He stared back until he couldn’t, until the attention he chased from me got to be too much. His eyes flickered to the corner of the living room—where my shoes were.
“You’re predictable,” I said.
His mouth dropped open. “What do you mean?”
“You always look at the hiding spot.”
“I do not.” He seemed indignant.
“You just did.”
“That was a coincidence! I didn’t last time—”
“Oh,” I cut in. “So it was you who hid my keys?”
He flushed. “I never said that.”
I stepped closer, bracing a hand on the back of the couch, close enough that he had to tilt his head back to look at me.
His breathing faltered.
“Next time,” I said quietly. “Don’t hide things I actually need.”
Some of his attitude drained away, but he was still more intrigued than intimidated.
“You keep chasing my attention,” I continued, watching him carefully. “And the second you get some, you panic.”
He flushed deeper. I winked, amused by the gasp that escaped him.
“Keep trying, Coop,” I added, just to tease him a little more. A reckless part of me enjoyed seeing him like this, all flustered and squirming. “And maybe one day I’ll give you all my attention.”
For once, he didn’t have a clever comeback.
And I had no excuses for my behavior.
The third time, I should’ve known better. Cooper had been too quiet. He’d spent an hour on the floor near my chair, scribbling in a notebook and occasionally bumping his shoulder against my knee. It was distracting as hell and exactly what he wanted.
I was at Jack’s desk, laptop open, working through the final adjustments on my game build. Launch was in three days.
Cooper stood up, but he didn’t leave.
“Do you always look like you’re trying to move pixels with your mind?” he whispered, leaning so close I could feel the puff of his breath against my ear.
“Probably.”
“That’s why you have that permanent crinkle,” he murmured. Before I could react, he pressed a cool finger to the spot between my brows. I froze. The contact was brief, but his touch lingered. My heart gave one slow and heavy thud.
“Coop.”
“I’m just smoothing you out.”
“Leave.”
“No.”
I turned back to the screen, trying to ignore him. A rookie mistake—silence was an invitation for him to escalate.
“You know,” he went on, leaning over my shoulder so his hair tickled my neck. “If you made your characters less ugly, more people might actually play this.”
I prayed for strength. “They’re not ugly.”
“They look like monkeys with jungle anxiety.”
A pause. Then—a click. Slowly, I turned. Cooper stood there, hand still near my keyboard.
“What did you just press?”
He blinked. “Nothing.”
I watched the screen. Everything seemed normal at first, but then the interface glitched. Something deep in the system broke loose. The code was unraveling in ways that shouldn’t even be possible.
“No, no, no—”
I lunged forward, trying to undo it, to stabilize—
Error.
Error.
ERROR.
“What did you do?” I snapped.
“I didn’t—I just—” He stepped back. “I pressed one thing—”
“You don’t press things, for fuck’s sake!”
He flinched, his whole body recoiling as if I’d struck him. The damage spread. Days of work, hundreds of lines of logic—gone.
“Get out,” I said, my voice low and vibrating with rage. Cooper froze. I’d snapped at him before, but never like this. Never with so much anger that the room shrank around us.
“I’m sorry, Jon, I—”
“Out. Now.”
He turned and bolted.
I didn’t sleep. I rebuilt. Recovered what I could. By morning, my eyes were burning and my hands were shaking, but the build was stable. The launch could still happen on time.
When Jack woke up, he found me slumped over the desk. “Jesus. You look like a corpse.”
“I feel like one.”
He leaned against the doorframe. “You know he stayed up too, right? I found him at three in the morning, crying over his own laptop, googling how to fix code.”
My grip tightened on my cold coffee. “He doesn’t know shit about coding.”
“No,” Jack said quietly. “But he stayed up anyway. He thought he’d ruined your life.”
I found Cooper in the kitchen later, staring into a bowl of cereal. His eyes were puffy, and those ridiculous curls were sticking up everywhere.
“I fixed it,” I said.
“Good,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to break it,” he added. “You let me.”
He finally looked at me. I felt an alarming surge of relief, like I was the one in the wrong.
“Was I supposed to know you were going to press random buttons?”
“If you didn’t know that about me, you haven’t done your homework.” He had clearly been crying. “I’m a disaster. It’s the way I’m built.”
Silence stretched. My anger had burned out hours ago, replaced by something far more disturbing.
“You tried to fix it,” I said softly.
“No I didn’t,” he said quickly. “Whatever Jack said—he’s lying.”
Cooper avoided looking at me when he said it, and that told me more than any confession would have. He hated being caught caring, and I understood that better than he realized.
That evening, as I was leaving, he cornered me in the hallway. He shoved a crumpled twenty-dollar bill into my hand.
I frowned. “What’s this?”
“For . . . the thing,” he muttered.
“What thing?”
He glared at me. “Don’t be annoying.”
Realization hit. He was trying to pay for the damage.
“I don’t want your money,” I said.
“You should take it.”
“I’m not taking it.”
“It’s fair.”
“It’s not.”
He huffed. “Well, it’s all that I have.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I closed my fingers around the bill and pushed it back into his chest.
“Keep it.”
He bristled. “I’m not a charity case.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Then take it,” he said, stepping closer until there was barely enough space left for breathing. His voice turned into that soft, needy pitch that always made my knees weak. “I don’t want to owe you.”
Jesus. There were a lot of things I’d survived—foster homes, fists, sleeping in crappy trailers—but Jack’s little brother looking at me like that might actually kill me.
We stood there, tension snapping between us.
“You’re so annoying,” he said after a while.
“I’m pretty sure you started it by demolishing my code.”
“You really fixed it?” he asked, quieter now.
“Yeah.”
His shoulders dropped, just slightly.
I watched him carefully. “Next time,” I said. “Don’t touch my code.”
He rolled his eyes. “Next time, don’t let me.”
There he was again, the Cooper I knew. But now I knew something else too. He’d stayed up all night trying to fix what he broke, even though he had no clue what he was doing.
I turned away before he could see my reaction. Because the damage hadn’t just been the code. The real damage was this—the way I felt.
Fuck.
I was falling for the brat. And that was a bug I couldn’t fix.