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“Maybe we should go,” Emma suggested, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. She didn’t want the man to find them.
“Fine. I got this round.” Sarah slapped down a few bills in the small shot glass that held their bill, and then they made their way through the thick crowd to the exit.
They were barely out the door when behind them, someone shouted, “Hey, Kitten!”
Emma froze, for a second, wondering if it was Mr. X.
But, when she turned, she found the average-looking blond with two of his friends. “Kitten, you’re even prettier in person. We were going in to Barleycorn.” He nodded at the big Irish pub near them. “Buy you and your friend a drink?”
Sarah gave Emma nudge.
“Okay,” Emma reluctantly agreed.
* * *
Xavier sat at his laptop at home, poring over a bug in the Nost code that some of his engineers couldn’t figure out. He’d spent the week burying himself in work, trying to stave off thoughts of Emma: what she was doing, what she was wearing, who she might be with. He’d resolutely refused to answer her query about dinner, and yet, he worried that she might be giving up on him. After all, he’d never responded, but she hadn’t followed up, either. Her question sat on his phone, almost like a dare, a challenge. So far, he’d resisted caving, but he could feel his fingers itching to respond. Itching to set a time and place.
Only work could keep him from doing that. He had to throw himself into work and hope that eventually he’d forget about Emma.
You don’t forget about the woman you love, his father had told him. He hated that his father’s voice seemed to be in his head constantly. I don’t love her, Papi, he wanted to say, I don’t even know her.
Yet, why did he suddenly understand why his father kept coming back to his erratic mother? Why else would he suffer so much?
Emma doesn’t seem like suffering, though, an inner voice of reason said. Emma is passionate, vulnerable, whole. She’s not Mama. Or Sasha.
Sasha. The moment she betrayed him, Xavier saw his mother all over again: the woman who burned so brightly, she burned everyone around her, too. He might have been young, just eight, but he remembered the nights his father would go out looking for his mother, the worried look on Xavier’s aunt’s face as she tried to reassure him that everything was fine. He knew everything wasn’t fine.
Xavier blinked away the memory of the frightened little boy. He was a man now, a man in charge of his own destiny. And he wasn’t going to be weak like his father.
In fact, he’d prove it. He pulled up the Nost app on his phone. Beautiful women smiled back at him from his inbox. Yet, even as he pored through the pictures, all he could do was compare each and every one of them to Emma. They all came up wanting. Why couldn’t he get her out of his mind? Why couldn’t he put aside thoughts of her? He would find a way to rid himself of this desire, of this weakness. He wouldn’t be his father. He forced himself to message a gorgeous brunette and a beautiful twenty-something. He needed a palate cleanser, that’s all, he reasoned. The second he had another woman, he’d forget all about Emma. Wouldn’t he? He put his phone down and turned his attention back to his screen.
As he typed on his computer, he saw a notice coming into his inbox. He’d signed on to be copied on all complaints registered at Nost. He opened the message, and that’s when he saw Emma’s account flick before his eyes. She was active again? was his first thought. A flame of jealousy rose up in his chest. Was she, right now, in the arms of another man?
The thought of her flirting...or kissing...another man, made him shift uncomfortably in his office chair. He didn’t like that idea. Not one bit.
Then he read her complaint, and as soon as he pulled up the profile picture of the guy, he knew it was the same man who’d hassled her at the bar. He’d put up the exact same fake photo of himself, and the description she’d typed of him—down to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap—all rang a bell. Dammit, the asshole had slipped into the system again.
This time, Xavier dug deeper. He pulled up the man’s fake profile, but, unlike other profiles, he’d actually put in a local phone number. After being booted from the system multiple times, he’d be locked out, unless he used a number that worked, a number he could confirm by text. This could be Xavier’s break. He used reverse look-up online for the number, and found it registered to a Jimmy Keith. Could it be that easy? Was Jimmy Keith the man? Or would it be another dead end?
Xavier ran a few more searches on him, and landed on a social media page, which confirmed it: this was the guy who’d bullied Emma at the bar. He had only a handful of Facebook friends, but was born and raised in St. Louis. Xavier went a step further and ran the man’s name through a criminal background check. Results instantly popped up: trespassing, public intoxication—and then Xavier saw something that made the room spin. He had pleaded guilty to sexual assault ten years ago in St. Louis. Another Google search pulled up local newspaper articles about it. He was sentenced to eight years, but was paroled early.
