With three felines weaving gently around his legs, Jacob stumbled to the kitchen and turned on NPR, willing the replay of Marketplace to erase the evening from his memory.
ONE SECOND Rasul’s blood coursed through him, lighting him up and insisting he’d just found north again, his libido firing on all cylinders and whooping because he knew he was going to get laid—and then Jacob ran away into the night.
He was so startled it took him a second to get organized enough to follow, and by then not only was Jacob halfway to the door but the vultures who had been waiting to pounce on him realized they finally had their chance. People who wanted Rasul to look at them the way he’d been eye-fucking Jacob, who wanted their turn at the dance, who liked the idea of a celebrity in their midst and wanted to punch their ticket. Also in the foyer to the event there was, somehow, a group of overexcited twenty-year-olds who kept trying to take selfies with him.
Rasul dodged them all, but they slowed him enough that by the time he made it outside, Jacob was blocks away. Rasul made one halfhearted call to him, then stopped.
He’d already pushed the man more than he should. It would be borderline cruel to pursue him now.
God, but why did that thought make his chest pinch?
As he headed back into the venue, he dredged out a winsome smile for the cluster of people at the door, but he noticed that mixed in with the bright, interested gazes, the usual sort of glances were already appearing. Suspicious, annoyed, dismissive. Well, that was always going to happen, because it was what always happened. He was a biracial, pansexual man with a huge personality and wild reputation. Some people were intrigued, some wanted in on the game, and some resented him for perceived slights. Hogging the spotlight was a favorite callout. Being narcissistic was right behind it. Plenty of people were simply jealous, usually of something Rasul didn’t even have.
The gazes, though, especially right after whatever that had been with Jacob, made him crave a drink. Several drinks. Also, something about that gaggle of women in the foyer had a foreboding feel to it. He aimed himself for the bar.
The dean of faculty intercepted him with a polite, professional smile. “Everything all right, Mr. Youssef?”
Nope, not on a bet. He beamed and winked. “Absolutely. Having a great time. Do you guys do this every year for new faculty?”
“Yes, but the crowd is decidedly bigger this year.” Clare’s tone indicated this was entirely due to Rasul.
Yeah, he needed that drink right now.
Rasul had never been at an event quite like this. He’d been to exclusive gatherings full of people who bought and sold the equivalents of nation states every day, and celebrity gatherings populated almost entirely by the A-list of entertainment. He’d been to house parties thrown by the known and the unknown, by the movers and shakers and the hipster chic. Never this, though, never some sad backwater trying to echo what some movie in 1990 had told them was high society. Never somewhere he was the A-list celebrity. He didn’t know the moves to this dance. He couldn’t find the cache of edgy and slightly disinterested people he liked to adopt at an event where he didn’t arrive with his own squad. Well, he kind of knew where they were, but they didn’t feel right. He floated from group to group, sipping a seriously terrible martini, trying to make polite conversation but mostly wondering how far away the bookstore was from here. It had to be close. Jacob had walked.
He should have followed him.
He couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Eventually he excused himself from the group of doctors and hospital administrators he’d been pretending to chat with and sought out Clare to tell him he was heading back to his apartment.
“Everything all right?” Clare asked.
“Just a little tired from traveling. I’ll be at the orientation for new professors tomorrow, don’t worry.”
“Would you like me to get someone to drive you?”
Drive him? His apartment was three blocks away, and even he with his terrible sense of direction and no GPS could find it. He could very nearly see it. “I’m fine, thanks.”
He regretted this dismissal, though, as soon as he was back in the foyer. The selfie crew was still there, and this time they surrounded him so he couldn’t get away.
“Rasul, Rasul!”
“We’re going to take selfies with you for Adina! She misses you soooo much.”
Rasul blinked and shook his head. “What?”
The delay cost him. Three of the girls surrounded him, and as the camera on one of the phones clicked, two girls kissed him, one on each cheek.
“Hey.” It took him several second to fight them off, after which many more pictures and probably some video had been taken.
“Ladies. That’s enough.”
Rasul turned as a tall, imposing Black man in a very nice suit loomed over them. Beside him, a white man with a menacing snarl took point. “You ladies don’t look like you’re from around here, and I don’t see tickets in your hands.”
An Asian man appeared on the other side of Rasul. He said nothing, only folded his arms and glared. The girls looked like they wanted to protest, but when two more men appeared with equally inhospitable expressions, the ladies took off.
Rasul rubbed at the back of his head and tried to quell the queasy feeling making him want to go hide under a blanket. “Thanks, I—” He stopped as he got a better look at the men surrounding him and something clicked. “Oh, hey, you’re the doctors I was talking to earlier.”
“Three of us are doctors, the other two just sign our checks.” The surly white guy who had appeared initially reached out to take Rasul’s hand. “Owen Gagnon. Anesthesiologist at St. Ann’s Medical Center.” He gestured to the blond man. “This is Jared Kumpel, pediatrician, Jack Wu, super-surgeon. This guy”—he gently elbowed the shorter, slighter white man with curly hair—“is my husband, Erin Andreas, VP of the hospital. And of course we can’t forget our CEO, Nick Beckert.”
The man who’d initially come to Rasul’s rescue shook his hand. “Pleasure. Sorry they swarmed you like that.”
Kumpel frowning in the direction the girls had left. “Honestly, I think they were from out of town. It’s not like I know everyone in town and all the students on the campus, but someone said they saw a group of girls with Minnesota license plates casing out the college earlier and carrying on at the McDonald’s on the edge of town. My instinct tells me this was them.”
“What in the world are twentysomethings from Minnesota doing here?” Andreas asked.
Rasul didn’t know, but he had a bad, bad feeling.
This time when he was offered a ride, he accepted. He’d wanted to meander past the bookstore, but clearly that wasn’t a good idea right now.
Thankfully Wu let him lapse into silence for the most part on the short drive, and after thanking the man for the ride, Rasul let himself into his depressing accommodations. He paced around for a few seconds, then got out his phone. At least he could call Elizabeth first this time.
She answered immediately, which he knew was a bad sign even before she spoke. “You can’t go five hours without a scandal? Is that it?”
He sat down on the couch, sending up another cloud of dust. “I swear on my next advance I had nothing to do with that. Or any of this. I went to the gala like you told me, met the escort.”