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Sylvester: Is that why we’ve not heard from you in days? Are you in hospital getting your eyes rounded back out?
Forest: I don’t know, I think square eyes would rather suit me
Winston: Forest Four-eyes. Hahaha
Forest: Highschool flashbacks, thanks @Winston
Winston: As if. You were never bullied. Weren’t you a popular jock at high school?
Forest: [Screenshot of Winston’s message: ‘Forest Four-eyes. Hahaha’]
Sylvester: Touché
Sylvester: I love the jock-Forest photos. What happened to your illustrious football career, @Forest?
Forest: Oh, I don’t know
Forest: A little-known man named Emory
Winston: Ugh
Jude: Leave off him @Winston @Sylvester
Jude: We do miss you though, Forest
Jude: I think that’s what these meatheads are trying to say
Forest: Appreciated
It was true I’d been more absent than usual. Any time that wasn’t spent at work was spent thinking about what I needed to do about Apollo, or mentally revisiting my recent encounter with Ria. It was a much nicer preoccupation than Apollo, but it made my wish to be rid of Apollo stress be even stronger.
I wanted to focus all of my attention on Ria. By now, she had entirely captivated me.
But there were other things to be done.
The time came for Ria’s next appointment. I was still daunted, but more excited. I’d wanted to cancel my plans last Monday to see her again, but I knew it was a slippery slope, canceling my plans for an attractive woman. I needed to keep my head in the game – the game being success, and warding off Apollo.
But she didn’t show. I was angrier than it was fair to be. I’d ghosted her, I suppose that made ghosting fair game. Except it didn’t, really. I’d explained to her why I’d been feeling reluctant to undergo the sessions, despite my keenness. And then we’d slept together. I felt like that warranted a text message, at least.
I wasn’t used to being angry about anything but Apollo. Amongst my brothers I was considered the measured, least hot-headed one of the four of us. But I was just more restrained. Inside, I had the same burning core of anger as we all did. And now it flared.
When I was angry, I got paranoid.
Wasn’t it an odd happenstance that a young, attractive tarot card reader had showed up unexpectedly at my networking event, lured me into a tarot card reading that had hinted at Apollo –The Sun –then slept with me at our first subsequent session? This was so out of the ordinary that I became convinced that some evil force had to be at work here.
Blood boiling, unjustifiably for now since my suspicions were just that, suspicions, I did some digging. Firstly I checked to see how Ria paid her table fee. I knew that she wasn’t rich, and that the fee hadn’t been cheap, especially not for the prime position her booth had been in. She’d done well out of it, sure, but that was due to my interest in her business, not because she had a particularly solid business plan from what I could tell.
Interestingly, the fee wasn’t paid by her company, or by a bank account in her name or the name of any of her relatives. It came from a shell corporation. I made some calls. My people traced the flow of the money through a number of shell corporations.
Surprise, surprise. They led back to Apollo.
Fuck. Fuck! I’d let myself be ambushed by Apollo in the weirdest possible way. He was just... sending tarot card readers in to try and have sex with me, now? What was his tactic there? Maybe it was a numbers game – he’d just keep throwing weird curveballs at me to see what really got under my skin, and take it from there. Unfortunately he was quite good at getting under my skin.
Maybe Ria – and Apollo – had gotten all they needed from me now. Maybe Ria had been lying about birth control, and maybe she was now pregnant with my child, through which Apollo would use to extort me of everything I owned, to use my company for his own gain.
My brain was swirling with crazy theories. I was possessed of a chaotic energy that I rarely let myself become possessed by. But if the tarot readings had affected me so deeply as to open up my emotional self, or whatever garbage Ria would have said to sell me on the idea of being so vulnerable around a stranger, then the floodgates were open. My wrath was spilling out.
It didn’t take long to find Ria’s address. I called a car immediately to take me there, no idea what I would say.
