“Are you fucking with me?” I said. “How did you get in here?” Vince had to be behind this. He was the only one who’d seen “cat girls” in my search history, and he hadn’t given me a break about it since.

I’d been joking when I’d looked it up anyway. Half joking. You could get off to something and still consider it a joke.

“The others wanted to surprise you,” she said, walking into the room and casually dumping the bag on the floor. “They thought this costume was hilarious.”

Thank God I’d cleaned in here. I wasn’t a messy person; I was disorganized. I’d gotten the smallest bedroom in the house, but I only spent time here to work and nap, or if it was too hot to tolerate sleeping next to Vincent. Mostly, this room was just a place to keep my computer setup since it took up so much space.

I’d put off washing my sheets since she’d slept in my bed, finally throwing them in the laundry only yesterday. Usually I was pretty good about that, but when I smelled her scent on the blankets, the last thing I’d wanted to do was make it go away.

Her pale blonde hair was glowing in the light from my blue LEDs as she sat on the edge of my bed. It made her look psychedelic, like something out of a perverted fever dream. The tiny dress hitched up on her thighs and I was salivating already.

“So, you’re the one responsible for breaking the security system?” she said.

“I didn’t break it. I found and utilized an exploit that allowed me to control it.”

She nodded slowly. “Meaning…?”

“I hacked it. It wasn’t even that hard. Your parents seriously have to replace that shit. I’ll install it myself if I have to.”

Jess hummed as she nodded again. If I didn’t know better, I would have said she looked impressed. “The rumors in high school were true, weren’t they? People would complain about you getting their passwords and messing with their accounts, but I honestly didn’t believe it. You were always so quiet.”

“That’s how I got away with it,” I said. “People don’t suspect the quiet ones.”

Being underestimated allowed me to slide under the radar. She gave me a long look, regarding me as if she was trying to discover some secret. I worked from home, so I wasn’t dressed to impress. I wasn’t even wearing a shirt, and these sweatpants doubled as pajamas. But her eyes lingered as they got lower, probably because these thin pants didn’t hide shit.

That little dress she was wearing didn’t hide much either.