23. Reconnaissance
23
W hatever was going on between Chance and me was evolving into something else entirely. There were some moments where it felt natural and I was eager to explore the way he constantly sent my heart soaring. But other times, it gave me so much anxiety, fearing opening up to someone after having been betrayed and rejected over and over again by those that I trusted.
If he broke the trust we had built—if he broke my heart…I would not recover.
Thankfully, after the heavy discussion of the crosses we had born as teenagers, splitting both of us right open for the other to examine and dissect, we turned our attention to our next mission: obtaining Daniel's laptop password.
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving break, the perfect opportunity presented itself.
Jolene had left school early for the day, for a dentist appointment. It was imperative that she wasn't in the office, as she would easily spot Chance, and it could not only expose our tenuous alliance, but then we'd have to reveal everything to her, which could put her at great risk.
In the days preceding our second heist, Chance and I strategized on how best to distract Milton to give Chance enough time to poke around on his computer to find the student laptop passwords.
"Can you wear the leggings you wore when we broke into the headmaster's office?" Chance asked seriously. "Those will easily distract him—they did a number on me."
"Be serious." I shoved him playfully.
"I am!" He threw his hands up, feigning innocence.
"They're not work appropriate," I argued. "There's a no leggings rule in the Montgomery dress code."
"There are a lot of ridiculous rules in the dress code. Interestingly, most of them apply only to women," Chance observed.
I snorted a laugh. "I wouldn't expect any less from Montgomery Prep."
"What about a low-cut shirt?"
I rolled my eyes.
"Can you unbutton like one or two more buttons than usual?"
"Why don't I just show up in nothing but a bra?" I suggested sarcastically.
"That would definitely work." Chance grinned.
I huffed, hating that we had to resort to overt sexuality to get what we needed…but we really did need that password. "Fine."
Chance's eyebrows raised in shock. "Just a bra then?"
"No! The button thing," I snarled.
He nodded his head in understanding. "You know you'll have to bend over so he can see down your shirt, right?"
The thought made me queasy. "I'll do what I need to do to give you as much time as possible."
"I'm only sorry I'll be missing your acting debut."
I pursed my lips into a flat line, unamused by his flirting that evening.
Taking a deep breath, I set my laptop on Jolene's empty desk, unfastened two buttons—Chance insisted it had to be two—and set off down the hall to enact the plan that he and I had devised.
"Milton?" I asked sweetly, leaning against the doorframe.
Milton started at my appearance, closing a window on his computer before I could take a step in to see what he had been looking at.
"Uhh—hi, Violet." He straightened his mustard-colored shirt, then righted his thin-framed glasses on his nose. "Did you need help with something?"
"Urgently." I sounded breathless; the effect was unintentional, but worked like a charm.
Milton scrambled out of his chair, not bothering to lock his computer, just as we had hoped, and strode toward me. "Tell me what happened."
"I just finished writing my final exam—it took me weeks—and my computer got unplugged and shut down before I could save. When I started it back up, the file disappeared, and I can't find it anywhere," I lamented, leading him down the hall toward the front office and my waiting computer. "Can you help me?" I pleaded.
I positioned myself and the computer at just the right angle so Milton's back was to the hallway to his office. Chance slunk out of the shadows, flashing me a devious grin as he silently padded through the room.
Catching my line of sight, Milton almost turned to see what I was looking at, but I bent over, giving him a great view of my cleavage, pulling his attention right where I wanted him. "I had it saved in this folder." I pointed to the screen.
Chance was gone the next time I glanced up. The clock was ticking.
"But you had it partially saved when your computer shut down?" Milton asked, clicking away on the keyboard and searching through folders.
"I don't know. Doesn't it autosave?" I asked coquettishly, knowing damn well I wasn't that technologically illiterate.
"Do you have the autosave feature turned on?" He glanced up at me.
"I don't know." I shook my head.
He grimaced, but kept clicking. "Do you remember the file name?"
"ClassicsFinal-rev4," I told him.
"So you did have it saved?"
"That's what I wrote at the top of the document. Usually it saves the document as the first thing I write." I should have felt ashamed at how easy it was to sound like an idiot. Maybe I just had too much experience with all the neo-Luddites at the school who still wrote their papers by hand and had Jolene type them up.
To be fair, most of the teachers just reused the same tests for decades at a time, so Jolene didn't have to help them too frequently. More often they just took advantage of her to print and collate their massive stacks of paper tests, a task which she seemed to enjoy, but one that would have been hell on earth for me.
"But the paper comes out all warm, and it smells good," she had gushed to me one day when I had eyed her strangely as she had smiled brightly while sorting the stacks into an assembly line, grabbing one paper from each pile and then stapling each packet together, completing the process by creating a new stack of its own.
"I think I need to start it in safe mode to try to recover an older version." Milton stood back from the laptop. "I wrote down the instructions in a notebook because I kept forgetting. I'll just go grab it."
"Wait." I instinctively reached out, placing my hand on his arm.
He stood frozen, bewitched by my touch. "Can you tell me how you were looking through the files?"
He stared at me blankly for a moment, his mouth open like a dead fish. "Sure." He grinned suddenly, returning to the computer.
I had to stifle a giggle when I remembered the mission title Chance had settled on—without my agreement, I might add—which was "Project Seduce Milton." And if he could see me in action, he would have been pleased…and probably a little turned on.
Despite my hesitation, his tricks were working. I hated that he had been right about Milton's baser instincts.
"I'm looking at the root file directory here." Milton pointed to the screen. I tuned him out as he rambled and clicked through the windows. It was obvious he was working to throw in as many tech terms as he could muster, many of which I was pretty sure he was using incorrectly.
But after another minute or so of his explanation, I saw Chance hold up a piece of paper, a giant victorious grin plastered across his face as he snuck back up the stairs, with Milton none the wiser.
"Oh my gosh!" I exclaimed. "There's the file!" I pointed at the screen, at nothing in particular.
"What?" Milton blinked.
"You did it! Thank you!" I closed the laptop and pulled it to my chest, covering the spot where the buttons weren't fastened. "I owe you one, Milton." And with our mission complete, I turned on my heel and scampered up the stairs, leaving a bewildered Milton in my wake.