The Product Tester

Chapter 8

Mary sat on the couch, busily typing away at her laptop.

Ethan stepped up from behind the couch, carrying two mugs of hot cocoa and setting one in front of her. "You wanted whipped cream, right?"

She looked up at him, deadpan. "Do you even need to ask? Everyone wants whipped cream on hot cocoa."

"Okay, okay," he chuckled, craning his neck to see her computer screen. "What are you working on?"

She turned her computer away, smirking and shaking her head. "Hey, hey! I don't get to peek at your notes, you don't get to peek at mine."

Rolling his eyes, Ethan sat back on the couch, sipping his cocoa and flipping through channels on the TV. "Fine. How are you acclimating, by the way?"

She glanced up from her computer screen, then paused to take a sip of her cocoa. "Are you fishing for information?"

He shook his head, settling on a cooking show that could play in the background. "No, I just want to make sure you're feeling okay. I know this was... kind of a big deal for you, I guess?"

"Well, I'm adjusting fine," Mary replied, tabbing open to a new screen. "Still kind of getting used to the whole... well, yeah. But I'm getting kind of desensitized to it."

"It's been six days," Ethan pointed out, glancing sidelong at her. "And I haven't seen you make any real progress since that first set of experiments. It's alright to admit I was right, you know."

Staring up from her laptop, Mary got a good look at her fiancé's wide smirk. "Asshole!" she said, kicking the side of his leg gently with her foot.

He laughed, cheeks turning a little red. "I'm just saying, I haven't even seen you try anything since that day I had to come home and take care of you. If I didn't know any better, I'd think maybe you'd given up on ever using the toilet again."

Mary feigned outrage and shock, but she couldn't hide her smile as she set her laptop aside and sat up. "Jerk! I'll show you-"

"I mean, I know it's convenient," Ethan said in a loud, patronizing tone, "But-"

"Shut up!" Mary snickered. "You're just happy because you think you're winning!"

Ethan laughed. "Well sure, I think it because it's true. I told you this'd be impossible, baby. Did you think I was joking?"

She rolled her eyes, taking her laptop and returning to her project. "We'll see about that."

In truth... he had a point. She hadn't been slacking the last four days, but she had been turning up nothing with her work.

Even though she knew that the cover had to have some sort of wireless connection, she'd been completely incapable to figure out how to crack it. She had thought she'd be able to figure out an exploit there, but the security on the signal was incredibly tight. So tight, in fact, that she hadn't even been able to definitively detect what kind of signal it was.

So, without brute force or a wireless exploit being on the table, Mary had been at a dead end. She'd even taken a few other jobs that she could do from home, setting up some websites for a client.

Mary wasn't about to admit it to Ethan while he was high on power, though. Instead, she changed the topic. "What's our netflix login again?"

Ethan glanced over at her, but he didn't seem suspicious. "My email address, and "Ethan!sgr8". Why?"

"Wanted to look up and see if a show was on there," Mary explained, punching in the login info.

If she'd lectured him on password security once, she'd done it a thousand times. It didn't matter how strong a password was, if he used the same one for every single account, it wasn't going to do him any good.