Uneasy, Silas made a soft noise as she passed them, and she flicked her fingers, acknowledging him even as she continued on as if oblivious.
“Let’s go.” Allen touched his arm, and they backed up before turning and walking away.
Oblivious to the strength of Peri’s commitment, Allen almost danced across the dark campus. “That was so sweet!” he exclaimed, hardly above a whisper. “Damn, I love my life.”
Laughing, Summer pointed out Peri, and they angled toward her.
“You did it, yes?” Peri asked as they closed the gap and halted under a lone streetlight.
Summer nodded, looking beautiful as the two women exchanged phones. “I sent the drone into the ocean, and trashed the controlling app already.”
“Thanks.” Peri checked her messages, head jerking up when Silas grabbed Summer, spinning her around in a shrieking circle and pulling her into him as they came to a happy halt. She was soft against him, and laughing, and, not letting go, Silas took a wipe from his pocket and cleaned the black smut from Summer’s face. A new closeness made his motions more tender, loving, as he traced her lines, and, sensing it, she smiled at him, the happiness and relief in her warming him.
Unable to resist, he pulled her closer and gave her a kiss, his passion kindling deeper as she responded as if they were alone, pressing into him with a fervent tension. He would never let her go.
But she reluctantly pulled back a little, remaining in his arms even as she used the same wipe to take the smut from his face in turn. “I hope this works,” she said, eyes flicking behind him to where Allen stood, quiet as he cleaned the incriminating black lines from himself.
“It has to,” Silas said, letting Summer go as he realized Peri was carefully not watching them as well. “No one has ever done it before. That has to count for something.”
“So who wants to go for a beer?” Allen said, the glow from his phone lighting his face as he checked the time. “We’ve got almost an hour before last call.”
As if nothing bad could ever happen, they turned to cross campus, arm in arm and laughing like the drunken students scattered about. “ ‘This is bad for my asthma’?” Silas said, poking fun at Peri, and the woman flushed, her embarrassment overshadowed by the obvious pleasure of having found her place among new friends.
But her reply never came, and her expression fell.
Allen halted, swearing, and Silas and Summer scuffed to a halt, following their companions’ attention across campus to the upperclassman apartments.
There were cars parked askew in the lot before the building’s main door, and people were standing in the glow of headlamps.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Silas’s thick hands clenched as he stood in the small kitchen, refusing to sit in the living room like a chastised little boy. Summer called it a fanny-bumper kitchen, and he took up the space nearly in its entirety, hunched and angry as the accusations mounted and the night went from bad to worse.
The small apartment had hosted larger parties, but the venom pouring from Professor Milo combined with Professor Woo’s frustration made it claustrophobic. Peri’s advocate, an old man in his seventies named Dr. Cavana, had been a silent, closed pillar standing behind the small woman, but the deference the other two were showing him was enough to give Silas pause.
The wrinkle-lined man had arrived earlier that evening, called in by the two professors to discuss Peri’s probable involvement in the previous day’s drone incident. Failing to find her, he and Professor Milo had tracked her down to the empty apartment and the thwarted, chipped wristbands. Milo’s anger over the wristbands was nothing compared to the outpouring when the tech call came in about the mainframe’s failure. That had been about twenty minutes ago.
Silas’s eyes went to the ceiling vent when the air conditioner clicked on. Mood bad, he reached out and turned it off so he could see Professor Milo sweat in the coat and tie he’d put on for the dignitary. A lump showed on his right arm where he’d been bandaged, and Silas didn’t feel any remorse at all that he had it in a sling.
Coming into the small kitchen, Summer swayed around him in a familiar dance, eyebrows high as she flicked the air conditioner back on again.
Silas ignored the heated argument between the two retired Opti agents, bending close over Summer to breathe in the scent of her hair. It still held the hint of that hideous perfume from the manager’s office. “You always were the smarter of us,” he said as she poured coffee into two mugs. His eyes flicked to the silent, tall man behind Peri, wondering why the mismatched mugs bothered him. They never had before.