Hooked, then. I was hooked. It made no sense because she was so utterly different to me. She was small, shy and smart; I was a big cocky idiot who only really knew how to sink beers, drive fast and shoot straight. But I loved spending time with Erin.

Maybe it was because we were so different. Everything in my life has always been physical, real. Fights in the dirt-poor neighborhood where I grew up, fists smacking faces, blood running down knuckles. Then my time in the army, the clump of my boots hitting the ground in endless marches, the rush of cold night air against my face as I jumped out of a plane. Then the SAS and later Delta, with JD: the feel of mud soaking through my uniform as I belly-crawled through the dirt, the comfort of a wall against your back when you finally find cover, the feel of JD’s hand in mine as one of us pulled the other to their feet. Even the stuff I did for fun was physical: screeching round a corner in a car, tires smoking, fitting an engine together, drinking, fucking….

But Erin was different. Sure, she worked with her hands, but the wires and solder was just the beginning. All the magic happened in the power that flowed through the wires, the data that shuttled back and forth as radio waves. A whole invisible world that the rest of us didn’t understand but that she worked in as naturally as our world of dirt, blood and bullets.

And for fun, she lost herself in a world that didn’t exist, where dragons flew. I’d never done that, never imagined a place so intensely that I felt like I was there. I wasn’t sure I could. But Erin made me want to find out.

Both of us reached a tricky bit in our work and we stopped talking and lapsed into a comfortable silence. But after a while, as I tinkered with the engine, I started to hear something. A soft mumbling, made even softer by that gentle country accent.

She was talking to herself.

I didn’t turn around because I didn’t want to spook her. I just worked away for a full hour, listening to her tell wires and circuits that you need to go to the RAID controller and we’ll bring you round here and get you hooked up to the CPU. She clearly didn’t realize she was doing it and it was the cutest thing I’d ever heard. I could have listened to it all day.

It hit me that I’d been sitting here with a woman for most of a day and I hadn’t made a single move. Usually by now we’d have fucked, eaten ice cream and be starting round two. What did that mean?