Free Blown Away by Stephanie Julian Page A

got sick of being the tough guy when I couldn’t keep my mouth shut for more than a day. So he taught me how to fight my own battles.”
    “My brother had already moved away when I got to high school, and my sister was in college. And then I skipped a few grades between fourth and ninth.”
    “Oh yeah? How many?”
    Her nose wrinkled. “Fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. But I had a great gifted teacher in high school. She got me on an accelerated program so I wouldn’t be bored.”
    “You didn’t have much of a childhood, did you?”
    She shrugged. “It was tough, but it wasn’t awful.”
    “Merri, you don’t lie well.”
    A pretty pink suffused her cheeks even as she frowned. “It wasn’t awful.” She stopped to swallow back a sigh as they carried the food to the table and sat to eat. “All right, some days it was awful. But isn’t everyone’s some of the time? I mean, I didn’t have a lot of friends my own age… Okay, I didn’t really have any friends my own age, but I had a couple of great advisors and they got me through elementary and high school without losing my mind.
    “When I was fourteen, I decided I wanted to be a teacher. My mom loved that. She had no idea what to do with a twelve-year-old who could do AP Calculus and actually enjoyed it. But being a teacher, that was normal, you know what I mean?”
    He nodded, watching her as she poured syrup over the dead center of her pile of pancakes then cut them into precise, equal pieces. “So what happened?”
    “I got flagged. My high school advisor was a Stanford grad and she talked to some of her former professors about me. That’s how the NSA heard about me.”
    “When?”
    “Well, I was flagged at ten, but I didn’t find out until I was fifteen, just before I was ready to head to college. I did my undergrad work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison because it was close to home. Right before I left, I heard my parents arguing about it. My dad wanted to let me make my own decision. My mom didn’t want me to be a freak, a lab rat for the government. She wanted me to be normal. But how normal can you be when you start college before you’re sixteen?”
    Not normal at all. He knew that firsthand because he’d started MIT at seventeen.
    “My mom said she’d come live with me, but she would’ve had to quit her job, and by that time, my sister and brother both had children and she babysat for them a lot. It would’ve been a hassle for everyone.”
    Except she’d only been sixteen. “You told her you didn’t want her to come with you, didn’t you?”
    Merri dropped her gaze and nodded. “Yeah. I could tell she really didn’t want to go. I mean, it would have meant leaving my dad and finding somewhere for her to live near the college. It was just easier to get an aide, someone to help me.”
    Jimmy leaned over and grabbed her hand. “Merri, who wants to be normal when you’re already extraordinary?”
    She smiled, but it was a poor attempt. And she withdrew her hand from his. “My mom never understood why I needed to work for the NSA. But after 9/11, there wasn’t anything I wanted more.”
    He wanted to kiss her again. She’d taste sweet from the syrup and smoky from the bacon, and it’d be so easy to pull her onto his lap and cover her mouth with his.
    But he didn’t want her to run again. And he had the feeling that, even though she’d asked him to help her brush up on her seduction skills, she didn’t realize how much she didn’t know.
    And how much he wanted her.
    “What about you?” she asked. “Did you always know you were going to be a…what exactly do you call yourself? Mad scientist?”
    She accompanied her last words with raised eyebrows, making him laugh out loud.
    “Some days that would fit, I guess. But I prefer research and development mad scientist.”
    “So why aren’t you working for the government? I can’t believe some branch of the alphabet soup didn’t want to snap you up. Or you could be