"Annie? This is a surprise."
Though she didn't sound like she thought it was a horrible one. That surprised me enough I almost spent some time chatting before asking her my questions but then I had less than two hours and my nerves were thrumming and so I – messed up.
"Em, hey, I know it's been a while and I promise if you want we can have a long conversation soon but right now I need advice."
She didn't quite sigh. Emily is somewhat proper, like she was born into the wrong time. By maybe a hundred years. But she gave the impression of it. "What's up, Anne?"
"I have a date," I said, no longer hoping for much. Outside the sun was going down in a beautiful array of pinks and golds.
To my surprise, Emily was instantly excited for me. "That's great! Hey, Dad said you enrolled in college. And you've moved! What's up? Are you still getting married?"
I bit my lip and checked the time on the microwave. I could talk to Em for thirty minutes and still have enough time to get ready. This was unusual enough – her being excited about anything in my life – that I kind of wanted to.
Which is why I had been dressed in nice jeans, boots, a white scoop neck t-shirt and red beads and earrings for about ten seconds when James arrived.
"Hey, you look great."
So did he. Long dark hair, big dark eyes, the kind of guy who five o'clock shadows by three p.m. He was wearing a white heavy cotton button-down and clean dark jeans. I drew in a breath, half wishing I could suggest we stay in. We could have a good time without ever taking in the Fremont Street Experience. Who needs ziplines?
But that wasn't fair. It also wasn't normal. This was a date, not a hookup. He deserved a chance to run like hell, I told myself, before he finds out what a freak you are.
And then strangely Cole St. Martin was in my head, telling me I didn't get to talk that way about me. It was unexpected. It was also really nice.
"So there's this place in Portland, tell me if you know it, because I was only there once and I wasn't – ahem! – in a strictly legal state of mind, at least at the time, and I've never been able to find it again."
I narrowed my eyes at him across the table. We'd ended up, after ziplining and going through a bunch of small shops and taking in all the new tech, in a taproom, looking at sandwiches and salads and local brews. "You realize I was in Seattle and that Seattle is not Portland?"
He made a face of shocked incomprehension which made me laugh. "Mercy! And you never were ever allowed out of Seattle?"
"Shut up. Yes, I went to Portland. The really big bookstore that takes up a full block, it's called – "
"Now you shut up," he said. "Not Powell's. I'm talking about the other necessity in life. Not books – food. There was this place in Portland, a tiny tea room, only open like during blue moons or something funky, had the best – "
"Brownies," I said dreamily. "Or crème brulée. Or anything. If you ordered it, it was the best you ever had. It's open on fairy schedules, I think, and it's in an old house that should have been condemned but probably the city condemner is a fan."
He raised both dark brows. "Condemner?"
"I'm sure it's a thing. When were you there? It helps to be stoned, by the way. Makes it easier to see the fairies and find the restaurant."
Then we were both talking volubly about food and books and Portland and Seattle and then we were talking about a girl he knew who was a friend, not a girlfriend, he emphasized, as if I might care despite it being in the past. The girlfriend – girl, who was a friend – asked him to go with her to Lucky Devil Body Piercing and didn't tell him she was getting her hood pierced. He described all the fuss and undressing and no sheets – Well, they have to be able to see where they're piercing, I said, hoping he'd see reason.
He didn't. He was blushing as he told me how she squeezed his hand so hard he thought he'd have to go to emergency afterwards only he couldn't think what to tell them.
"It's Portland," I said. "The truth."
He choked on his beer, laughed, blushed again, and said, "She kept asking me to go around and tell her hot it looked. How it looked! Like metal in a very bad place for metal and blood somewhere I didn't want to see blood and oh, yeah, right, something I didn't want to see in someone I wasn't dating!"
And I laughed with him and thought how cute he was, how easily embarrassed and how we obviously weren't going to be ending up in bed together if that was his attitude.
But we did. We ended up there before midnight with James kissing his way down my body because apparently when he was dating a girl he didn't mind looking at all. Looking. Licking. Either one. He was very good at it.
He was very good at all of it. It was weird and delightful and I went to sleep happy that night, both at the date and the way it ended, and the fact that it had ended and I was sleeping alone.
The next morning I called Emily and thanked her.
9
Annie
Everything was new. Everything was unrelated to my life in Seattle or my life with St. Martin. I could be a totally new Annie if I wanted.
I didn't want to. I wanted to be Annie who was excited about having an everyday life that was nothing more than an everyday life.
Until the day James came in too excited to not talk about his latest assignment. He was already working in the field, a job with the DA's office in criminal matters. He was mostly a gopher, which had the advantage of teaching him everything, but because it wasn't an internship, he was actually getting paid. That made him feel more in the loop than a student and the day he came in he was bursting with information.
"There's a sex ring in Vegas," he said, looking like a ten year old saying My dad has these magazines under his bed!
"What else is new?" Brooke asked. She was blond and beautiful and cool as her name. She looked like a model, not a potential paralegal. "Have you walked through the streets right off The Strip?"
James wasn't interested in being silenced. "Not that," he said. "And not legal prostitution only on The Strip."
Because prostitution was legal in Nevada outside the two main metro area counties and the Carson City area, because it was the state capital. Drive over the line of those counties on any of the few major highways that crisscrossed the state and the instant you went rural there was a bunny ranch.
It was a weird place.
"Are you talking about trafficking?" one of the guys asked.
I was grateful for the question. Obviously it wasn't a topic that would be easily dropped but my heart was in my throat and hammering too hard for me to act cool if I asked. Not just because James and I had dated however briefly. But because I thought my interest would shine like a spotlight. I hated the idea of sex trafficking though I had no doubt some of it went right through the middle of Vegas. It's too big and glittery a city to not have runaways who can fall into the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. Hell, St. Martin and his billionaire sex kitten dinner parties raised money to fight it.
I'd gotten auctioned off to Vincent in one such auction and that's how all that started. I wrenched my mind back online.