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I go into my tiny kitchen, open the fridge, and then close it with a loud groan. I have to go shopping. Instead, I grab the bottle of pinot noir I bought earlier, twist off the cap, and pour it into a glass. It goes down nice and smooth. I let out a deep sigh. I’m still not twenty-one, but the kid at the store didn’t blink when I pulled out my credit card.
I lean against the counter and survey all that’s mine.
When college started again in the fall, I didn’t want to go back because nobody could stop talking about the Collectors. I couldn’t escape it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to relive it. So I took a break. I still don’t really know what I want to do. The fact that I had someone championing and selling my art means squat when he turned out to be nothing more than a sex deviant and murderous mega rich man who wanted me to be his personal prize and pet.
Thinking about it still creeps me out.
I guess I could have stayed in New York. People always say big cities are the best to lose yourself in, but I don’t think it’s true.
Big cities are nothing more than tiny villages, and that particular big city of Manhattan is too close to the beautiful coward of a man who doesn’t want me.
“Idiot,” I mumble before taking another sip, and I’m not sure if I mean him or me for still mooning over him.
The fallout from the Collectors scandal has been phenomenal. My video is still making waves. Though I can’t really call it mine. It was just my idea. The camera work was Harley’s, and sure, it was my platform, but the words and bravery were all Clay Barrow’s. The senator’s sixteen-year-old son.
Everything else happened like it was planned.
Whoever and whatever these people are that both Smith and Orion are part of aren’t even ghosts in the story.
It’s all about the people involved. The far-right famed businessman who was always spouting ideals of anti-LBTQIA, marriage for one man and one woman, went down as the one who took Clay. Raped him, tortured him.
I shudder.
Because it could have been me.
The rest of the assholes involved turned on others, and half came out looking like either heroes or poor innocent lambs unknowingly caught up in something deplorable and depraved.
And not one single word from Orion.
There are times during my job as a barista when I whip around, expecting to see him. I don’t, though. When my awareness is riled and pressure changes in a room, on the handful of dates I’ve been on—dates I cut short—it’s never been Orion. Why would it be?
He’s the kind of coward who couldn’t say it was fun but it’s done.
Instead, he had to hand me a useless sliver of hope, talking about how we were drawn to each other and I deserved better.
“Asshole.”
I take the bottle and glass to the living room and set them on the coffee table. I’m tempted to pick up my phone again, but this time, I resist. That urge to look him up is always there. Same with the one to call.
But he doesn’t exist, and Jaxson Gardner is dead.
Also, I don’t have his number.
The times I’ve almost called Smith to get it are beyond embarrassing. “Screw it.”
“Alexa,” I say out loud, “Play Aristotle Lives.”
Music from a new band fills my place.
“Jaxson Gardner,” I whisper, “chose to die. And Orion chose not to come for me.”
Of course I’ve looked him up, read all there is about Jaxson. It’s not much. A rich, connected family. He looks, in the last few photos available, like a young man restless and unhappy with his life. But it’s the photo of him when he joined the military, the one that announced his so-called death, where I can see Orion in him.
I can see the man I know in the other photos, too, but in the last one he’d lost the spoiled aspect. Something changed.
And then I looked up his dead girlfriend. That took me a while, but I worked back from what he told me about the circumstances of her death. Rich girls. Kidnappings.
And… it was a punch in the gut.
