“Good night, Elle. Sweet dreams.”
As she revisited every word and feeling from the night before, she longed to bask in her euphoria, but someone was banging on her door.
Throwing back the covers, she walked to the door and slung it open.
“This is getting pretty old,” Byte told the three women standing outside her apartment.
“We want deets,” Voodoo said as she entered the room.
“Nothing hardcore. I cloned the phone and we left. Oh, and we had a dance.”
“Um, Byte, we’re talking about after the dance,” Aria explained.
“Oh, I mean, he asked me out for another date.”
“And you said?” Voodoo asked.
“I told him I was busy today. Actually, I don’t know if I ever said yes.”
“That was because you were too busy kissing the daylights out of him,” Ivy added.
“Why would you say that?”
“A little something called surveillance cameras,” Voodoo chimed in.
Byte’s face drained of color. How could she have forgotten to disable or even erase last night? God, now everyone had seen them, including the men.
“It’s okay,” Ivy said, pulling Byte down onto the sofa. “We’re happy for you. Hunter seemed like a nice guy.”
Byte buried her head in her hands and the ladies felt horrible when they saw Byte’s shoulders shaking.
Aria sat beside her, rubbing her back, apologizing for embarrassing her.
Byte lifted her head, tears running down while she laughed.
“You’re not mad?” Voodoo asked.
“Oh my God. I can’t believe my first kiss will forever be immortalized on the ALIAS database.”
The girls joined in on her happiness and listened intently as Byte recounted her last two evenings with Hunter and the news that he was now her boyfriend.
“That must have been some kind of kiss,” Voodoo joked.
“Yes, it was.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-NINE
“Now the real reason we’re here. We know you are meeting your mother and thought you might like a little moral support. Any of us, or all of us, are here to go with you if you want. It’s completely up to you. We’re just here to remind you that you’re not alone,” Ivy told Byte.
Byte looked at Ivy and realized she hadn’t felt alone since she joined ALIAS. She and Ivy had known each other but she’d had a closer relationship with Ghost. He was the one who introduced her to Steve Ellison when he was hunting down his daughter. It seemed like only yesterday they were kicking some Russian’s tail and she was driving the getaway car. Byte had a sense of right and wrong, which was why she created Karma, but seeing what Ivy was doing on a larger scale, well, she knew where she belonged.
But meeting with her mother was something she needed to do by herself. She didn’t want her friends to see how she would react when seeing her mother after all those years away. She had so many questions, and she wasn’t sure she could ask them in a respectful way, so instead, she thanked them for their offer, but declined.
“This is a demon I have to face alone. However, I wouldn’t mind a Chunky Monkey ice cream party tonight.”
“You got it! I’ll get everything we will need to do an ice cream party right!” Aria said.
“And we will all wear our pj’s. Who knows, we might go into an ice cream coma and have to stay the night,” Voodoo added.