Her Knight In Rusty Armor

Chapter XXVII

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Mario Miller
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Nora and I sat on the couch, my face scrunching up upon watching her slip a phone out of her jeans' back pocket. The device dangled before of my face, and I could only wonder what way she was trying to convey with that action.

"Well?" she asked, one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows arched. It seemed as though I was completely missing the point. However, the point was clearly nowhere to be seen.

"Well?" I echoed. "Am I supposed to be impressed? Wow, that's a really nice phone; a bit outdated – nothing a label of vintage can't fix."

She shook her head at me. Pressing its home button, she chucked it over to me.

The lock screen had a picture of Drake and I on it.

Only then did I realise whose phone it was.

"What the hell is Drake's phone doing in my house, Nora?"

She sighed, resting her head against the headrest of the couch.

"Drake's been kind of on edge, you know?" she spoke, the fret evident in her voice. "I'd get insanely annoyed whenever he'd constantly rap his fingers against tables, and the fact that he became rather fidgety didn't help either. He was practically glued to his phone, jumping at every notification as if expecting a text from someone... I knew something was up.

"Sadly, I couldn't figure out his password combo, but I felt like you could crack the code or something. So... I brought his phone with me. Now here we are..." She ended her little monologue on a sheepish note.

"And you couldn't ask him for the password?" I asked, matter-of-factly.

"A small piece of advice for you is to never go into a brooding pelican's vicinity. Trust me."

All I could do was give her a sarcastic bark of a laugh.

Usually, the things Nora said were right. Her conclusions had evidence backing them up, and her sixth sense always ended up saving our asses. If she had witnessed Drake's odd demeanour firsthand and realised that something was definitely off, then she was right. That would explain his newly hostile behaviour towards me, too.

Before nodding at her, I stared at the phone's lock screen; the wallpaper was a subtle reminder of better times. My lower lip protruded into a pout.

And then came another conundrum: he had a password, let alone a pin. There might be 218340105584896 possible pin code combinations, but words were way harder to decode than numbers. Who knows what riddles Drake must've encased in his password.

My thumbs hovered over the phone's digital keyboard, the latter mocking me of my obliviousness to the right key.

"How about something Drake likes?" Nora suggested, trying to assist me through the process.

Immediate thought: Slushies.

Poking my tongue out of the corner of my mouth, I tried my luck a few times, praying under my breath that one of the phrases would work.

ILoveSlushies123

Password is incorrect.