After a breathtaking kiss and some fondling under her shirt, Mikael whispered in her ear, “Hey, could you write my final term paper after this?”
And that was the end of her twenty-minute relationship with hunky Mikael.
Kerim chuckled quietly to himself, jolting Cristal back to the present.
She raised an eyebrow and shot him a glare.
“What’s so funny?”
He looked down at his boots, obviously struggling to keep from breaking into uncontrollable laughter.
“Nothing. I was just thinking of a girl I once knew,” he managed to choke out between laughs.
The elevator lurched to a stop, the doors sliding open. Cristal took the opportunity to exit first and keep her distance from him. Okay so maybe he wasn’t laughing at her. But it reminded her of how awful she felt when kids taunted and laughed at her in grade school. Even after all these years, she still felt awkward and different. No matter how sophisticated she had become, she knew she was still a geek through and through. She preferred a good book to a night out clubbing. She liked hacking into secure networks just for the fun of it. She never understood why girls her age enjoyed shopping and hanging out at the mall. All these things meant that she didn't have many girl friends to hang out with. This was who she was and no amount of de-nerdifying her was going to change anything.
Kerim followed Cristal a few steps behind as they walked down the dark hallway. She could hear his soft chuckles and the crackle of old incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the only other sound accompanying their footsteps. Even though he irritated her, she felt a sense of calm knowing he was there. He felt like someone familiar to her. And it didn’t hurt to have someone around because this place definitely gave her the creeps.
Finally, they reached Gabriel’s apartment door. She glanced up at Kerim briefly before knocking. He winked back at her.
The door squeaked and she turned towards it. It opened a crack, before swinging wide open. An unshaven Gabriel, his dreadlocks tied up in a short ponytail, greeted her. He had his usual goofy grin on his face, but she could see that his dark brown eyes were reddened, probably from hours spent on the computer. Dressed in a worn grey bathrobe, T-shirt, and jogging pants, he looked like he must have been playing another “all-nighter.”
Cristal opened her mouth to speak at the exact moment when Kerim, standing behind her, coughed loudly. Gabriel’s eyes widened, his smile quickly disintegrating into a grim line. He looked past her shoulder towards Kerim.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. He was always protective of her. He too had lost his father a few years back.
“Kerim Ilgaz,” Kerim replied calmly. “Harry recruited me to the Truth Seekers last week.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He didn’t seem so easily convinced. “Harry never told me about you. And he never said you’d be coming.”
Cristal was stumped. Why didn’t Harry tell Gabriel about Kerim? He was always careful about who he recruited. Gabriel was Harry’s closest friend and most trusted Truth Seeker. He never kept Gabriel in the dark. Until now.
For the past year, ever since he got her the job at Global Nation, Harry had been acting strange. Okay, stranger than usual. Come on, who could blame him for being different? The guy had the IQ of Einstein for crying out loud. In her books, Harry’s intense and introverted behavior was what made him intriguing. And sure, his idea of taking the Truth Seeker game offline seemed crazy at the time. When he said that the mission was to help her find her missing father, she was all in. After that, there was no looking back.
Their first mission together was to track other gamers who also lost a loved one. Remarkably they found a dozen of them, more than what she had anticipated. Harry was able to tie GN with the disappearances of a few of them including her father. She and the other recruits were working together to gather intel from the GN databases to uncover their missing loved ones’ locations.
“Gabriel, we all are here to help each other. Let us in.”
He gave her a glazed look. Great, looks like he’s going to be a pain about it. She stepped closer, letting her eyes meet his stare.
With an authoritative tone, she said, “You know I am the only one who can decode all that encrypted data. Harry told me specifically to bring Kerim. Do you want to find your dad or not?”
Gabriel’s pressed his lips together for a second before shrugging his shoulders.
“Okay, whatever, come in,” he said, stepping back.
Kerim walked past both of them, headed straight to the living room, and plopped down on the black leather couch, placing his helmet beside him. Cristal gave Gabriel a weak smile. She found a spot at the opposite end of the couch, physically distancing herself from Kerim.