Page 19 of The Pleasure of Panic

For a second I think he’s referring to my conversation with Jordan. There are several silent seconds of me irrationally picturing these guys listening in on that.

“Were you guys spying on me while I was at Chella’s?”

“Who’s Chella?”

“The tea shop, you idiot! Did you have bugs over there? Did you hear—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says. “Calm down, ninja. We didn’t have bugs over there.” He glances at me in the rear-view again, cocks his head slightly as he squints his eyes. “Why, you hiding something? What was really going on over there?”

I take a few moments to consider if he’s lying. I can’t imagine Jordan bugging the tea room. Like… this whole thing is about discretion, right?

“Issy?” Finn prompts. “You got something you need to share with me?”

I huff out a laugh. As if. I laugh again. As if I’m going to be the one to initiate the game play. Nope. If I wanted to ask a man to fuck me in front of strangers, I wouldn’t bother playing Jordan’s Game and letting all these people in on it, now would I?

“You know there’s a confidentiality agreement, right?”

“What?” he asks.

“Between me and Jordan. I signed it, he signed it, and that means he can’t talk to you about shit.”

“Yeah,” Finn says, getting off the freeway and easing onto Colfax. “That’s typically what lawyers do.”

“So did he talk to you? Did he tell you anything?”

“Who?”

“For fuck’s sake,” I yell. “Jordan!”

“He’s out of town, remember?”

I cross my arms and lean back into the seat. “Right.”

We’re quiet after that, but I catch him stealing glances at me in the mirror. I don’t tell him where I live, but he finds it anyway—must’ve been in my file—and parks right out front of the fixer-upper I bought when I first came to town. It’s an old house that needed a lot of work, so I got it for the amazingly cheap price of just over a million dollars.

It’s also the only single-family home within three blocks of the Capitol building and there were several developers interested in the property, if only to knock it down and sandwich another apartment building between all the other apartment buildings that have sprung up in this neighborhood over the past decade. There’s two tall, brick buildings flanking the long front yard on either side, and neither of them have windows facing me, so it’s unusually private for the city.

Lucky me. I am the proud owner of one total piece of shit house. Because it needs everything. New roof, new windows, new floors, new plumbing, new electrical… you name it. It needs it. I have plenty of money to do all that, but time is something else altogether. You can’t buy time and that’s something I never have enough of these days.

So I just live with it. And I don’t even mind all the noises the boiler makes, or the way the water takes forever to get hot, or how none of the electrical sockets work on the second floor and I have to run extension cords up the stairs to get light.

After living there for almost a year, I find I actually love the place. Even though it’s practically falling down, it felt like home immediately. I love walking inside after a long day and just falling into the couch cushions and looking around at the mess.

And I love the front yard. There’s no back yard to speak of. Just a cement slab in between the house and the detached garage. But the front yard… those tall buildings on either side… they make me feel walled in and safe.

I am a control freak about everything but this house. It’s like… it’s like the imperfections are perfect, ya know? So many people have lived here before me and each one of them is ingrained into what makes this place a home. It’s chaos, but not. Because it’s history.

I check my watch. Almost nine thirty. This guy better have a sex club in mind if we want to get this show on the road. I refuse to show up for a seminar on no sleep, no matter how good the promise of sex sounds, but I’m willing to play along for a few hours if it’ll get this whole fantasy game over with.

“So…” Finn starts. Like he wants to ask me something but he’s not sure how. Like he’s not sure what to do next. Jesus Christ. Fucking amateurs.

“So you wanna come in?” I finish for him. “I mean, you do want to come in, right?”

He chuckles a little. I can still see him in the rear-view mirror. “Are you propositioning me?”

“Yes,” I say. “So open the damn door and let me out already. I can’t open it from the inside, remember.”

Our eyes meet in the mirror. Hold each other’s gaze for the count of three. Then he laughs, and I laugh, and he gets out and opens my door. I get out, taking his offered hand to help me, and it’s… normal.