“And hey, it’s on sale. Ninety-nine bucks. That’s not too pricey.”
“I guess not.” The first woman lifted a carton into her friend’s cart.
“Hey!”
“You try it. If you like it, then I’ll get one too.”
“Well, maybe I will.” The second woman took three avocados out of the display. “These should give it a test drive.” With a grin at her friend, she pushed her cart on toward the tomatoes.
Fynn glanced at Nolan. “Micah said his marketing department was trying a new strategy.”
“Seems to be working.”
“It’s a big price drop. Do you think people who paid full price will be mad? You paid thirty bucks more for the basic model at Christmas.” Fynn looked anxious rather than pleased.
Nolan couldn’t resist a quick rub on Fynn’s tight shoulders. “People expect technology prices to come down, and new fancier models to come out. This is no different.”
“I suppose.” Fynn watched a teenager stop to eye the infomercial, then shrugged. “At least it’s not the video I’m in.”
“You did a commercial?” Nolan would have to go looking for that. Fynn was easy on the eyes, for sure, but he’d have said the man had zero acting ability.
“Yeah.” Fynn peered up at him. “It was Micah’s idea— the man behind the invention. They used this clip of me pouring something into a test tube with smooshed avocado in the bottom. It was totally stupid. Plus, the pouring liquid was bright red like cough syrup. There’s almost nothing in bioscience that color.”
“I don’t suppose people will know.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. The art guy said they picked the color because it made my eyes pop. I told him I didn’t want my eyes topop. That has to be the stupidest expression known to man.”
Nolan chuckled. “Tell me how you really feel.”
“I really feel like I belong in a lab, not a commercial.”
The teen wandered off, but an elderly woman stopped at the ’CadoBox shelf. Nolan spotted Amelia coming in the door. She gave him a wave. He set a hand under Fynn’s elbow and turned him away from the avocados. “Come on, let’s pick out some blueberries. And maybe some Pringles.” Fynn deserved anything that would make him feel better right now.
Chapter 9
Fynn woke from another nightmare, muffling his sounds with a fist pressed against his lips. His eyes stung with tears. In the dimness of his room, lit only by the yellow-green avocado nightlight Micah had given him for Christmas, he lay rigid on his bed, his chest heaving.Not again, damn it. It’s been almost two weeks.
He was pretty much okay in the daytime. Sure, knowing someone had tried to kidnap him twice—duct tape— kept his stomach in knots and he’d lost a little weight, but he could handle it. Especially when Nolan was there.
Nolan had started working a split shift, covering both Fynn’s morning commute and his drive home, however late that turned out to be. Joe still drove, having refused Fynn’s offer to give him a vacation till things settled down, but Nolan rode with Fynn in the back seat. His calming presence was the only thing that’d kept Fynn’s freak-out from becoming a full-blown panic attack the first time they got back on a freeway.
In the mornings, Nolan would sit in a corner of the lab working on his phone until Fynn submerged into the day’s work and didn’t care about being handed over to the midday shift. In the evenings, he rode next to Fynn in the car home, never impatient as Fynn expounded on his successes and frustrations. Nolan told stories, too— he seemed to find Fynn a good audience, even with his tendency to interrupt. Fynn didn’t feel like he had to perform being ordinary around Nolan.
Life was good when Nolan grinned at him from across his own kitchen table or shared the couch as they unwound by watching sci-fi movies and reruns. Fynn had even hauled out his current LEGO project and Nolan had a knack and never seemed bored.
At night, though, Nolan had a right to his time off. He’d leave at eleven, handing off to one of his team members, and Fynn would go to bed. Only to wake like this. Apparently, knowing Charlie or Sheridan was out there on the couch watching the security screens didn’t settle Fynn’s sleeping subconscious worth a damn.
When Micah had found out the bodyguards were hanging out in Fynn’s living room, he’d offered to have Fynn move to his house or suggested a hotel with good security. Fynn wasn’t doing either of those. He didn’t want to fall back into his teen pattern of Micah finding him too much, too loud, too wrong, while pretending not to be frustrated with him. He definitely didn’t want to give up his familiar spaces for a hotel that wouldn’t feel and smell like home.
I’d probably have worse nightmares in a strange room.
Not that these were fun. He bit back a whimper as a flash of car headlights cut through his field of view behind the curtains.Not headlights, a helicopter, silly.He could make out a subtle vibration and the sound of the rotors fading away, and anyway he was on the fourth floor. No headlights would shine in on him until they invented flying cars.
What a traffic control nightmare that’d be.Not to mention a security nightmare, if threats could come at you from three dimensions instead of two. With the way people drove, knowing who basically sucked behind the flying-wheel and who was approaching with nefarious intentions would be challenging.
Maybe I could design an analysis program to evaluate common human driving patterns versus deliberate threats.Except programming wasn’t Fynn’s strength. Nor was extensive data collection. He loved his current lab where he could come up with an idea, stress-test the details, then hand everything over to more methodical types to generate actual statistics—
Something thumped loudly beyond his door. Fynnscreamed.
