Page 11 of Total Exposure

The line cuts and I just stare at the dead screen for a few seconds.

Asshole.

I decide tomorrow is a long way off and I’m not gonna ride my damn bike to Denver anyway, so hardly matters. I suck down the rest of my smoke in darkness, put it out, then rip the towel off my waist and get in bed naked.

Sleep is probably the only part of my day that makes sense anymore.

It eludes me.

Sleep, I mean.

Because I’m thinking about Jordan all goddamned night. I haven’t seen him in a very long time. Don’t even know how many years. Maybe seven? Eight? Somewhere around there. And that last night we were together runs through my head like a fucking movie on repeat.

If I never talked to the guy again I’d be fine. Shit, I haven’t even thought about him. Like at all. Just… moving on, right? Doing my thing. Being me.

But him showing up like that? The cryptic nature of his motives, and the fact that we’ve got that history together, well, it fucks with my head more than I’d like to admit.

And that’s why, at five AM, I push the bike out into the blowing cold wearing almost every article of clothing I own, and get on the highway heading south.

It takes me seven fucking hours to get to Denver. There’s no snow or ice, and the sun is out for most of the ride, so that’s a lucky break. But sun hardly matters when it’s twenty-three degrees and you’re on a bike going eighty on the fucking freeway.

I go because I can’t not go.

The memories, the questions, the way it all ended.

You know how there’s some people who drift in and out of your life and you like them and all, but you don’t have a reason to look them up and talk? Or go see them?

And then there are some people you had a really hard time letting go. But eventually you do let go, and then one day there they are again, and it’s like… it’s like no moments passed at all since the last time you spoke. Like they’ve always just been there, even though they weren’t. They were.

That’s what kept me awake all night.

I could’ve just stayed up in Wyoming doing my thing and being me. But it didn’t take much self-reflection to come to the conclusion that I’m doing a whole lot of nothing. Not to mention being me isn’t as much fun as it once was.

If it ever was.

Maybe I should be somebody else?

By the time I walk into Jordan’s swank office in downtown, I’m pissed off that I talked myself into doing this, tired as fuck, and so cold I might never get warm again.

“What the fuck are you wearing?” Jordan says, eyeing my leathers.

“What every goddamned biker wears,” I snap. He’s wearing a goddamned suit that looks like it costs as much as that car I left back at Rachel’s sister’s house.

“You rode your bike down here?”

“Long. Story.” I close my eyes to signal that I’m not in the mood to tell said story, and he takes the hint. Because he knows me just as well as I know him. “Why the hell am I here?”

He stares at me. Looks me up and down. A whole scenario flashes in my mind in the time it takes him to reach down to pick something up off his desk, where he says, I found her. Or, She found me. Or, You wanna go to dinner with us? Because we’ve got reservations at the Grant. And he means her and him, as in the whole thing about us that made us an us in the first place.

But of course, he doesn’t say anything like that. He says, “Here’s the job,” waving a large yellow envelope, handing it to me. “Everything’s in there. Just…” He sighs and pinches the space between his eyes—stupid fucking Jordan gesture—like I’m the one on his last nerve, and not the other way around. “Just do it, OK? And be super fucking discreet. This is all anonymous. You do not show your face. You do not make any sort of contact. It’s strictly surveillance. Got it?”

I rip the envelope open and take a peek. Two keys, two bound stacks of hundred-dollar bills, which should be twenty thousand dollars, and some paperwork. “Is it legal?” I ask, taking out the stack of papers.

It’s a dossier—female. Mid-twenties. Dark hair and gray eyes—for one Evangeline Rolaine.

“Of course it’s legal. Why does everybody always ask me that? I’m a goddamned lawyer, everything I do is legal.”

“Yeah.” I laugh, reading the woman’s short bio on the top page. “You’re a goddamned lawyer, all right. Why does this name sound familiar?”