Maybe he hadn’t helped her with a damn thing, and he was just kidding himself. Maybe she was just letting him think that because she was the nicest person in the entire world.
Picking up his phone, he scrolled through his messages before remembering that he had deleted the whole thread. Every trace of her.
What a dickhead he was. There he was, worrying about an affair, and she was probably still suffering from brutal memories in the middle of the night.
Opening up a new message, he typed in her phone number and then hovered, trying to figure out what to say. If he asked if she was okay, she would just assure him that she was fine.
After debating for a few minutes, he finally came up with, “I could sure use some Chinese right now…”
The message didn’t immediately register as read, so he put it down and waited. A few minutes passed without response, so he opened his computer and decided to check his email one more time, which led to three other things he hadn’t planned on doing.
Suddenly a half hour had passed and still no response. That was unusual for her, so he checked the message again… and saw that she had read the message twenty minutes earlier.
No response.
That surprised him for a minute, but then when he thought about it with his new theories about her sleeping habits, he realized maybe it shouldn’t.
Why had he stopped checking on her when things had turned sexual? What a stupid thing to do.
Well, no, actually, she had been the one to dip out, hadn’t she? The morning after the hotel, he had contacted her, but she ignored him. Then he didn’t see or talk to her again until the grocery store, then Halloween, which he assumed was because she saw him at the grocery store.
He was so confused.
Figuring he would wait a little while longer just in case she changed her mind, he lost close to an hour doing absolutely nothing on the internet, and would have wasted more time if not for Amanda coming to the door with the cordless phone and telling him he had a call.
Everything froze for a split second. Willow wouldn’t actually call his house, would she? How would she have even gotten the phone number? But nobody called the house for him, and Amanda sounded vaguely irritated.
Preparing to open the door to an understandably furious woman, he was surprised when Amanda merely handed him the phone and turned to walk back down the hall.
His shoulders went slack in relief and he put the phone to his ear. “Hello.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you—did you change your fucking number?”
Frowning, Ethan asked, “Who is this?”
“It’s fucking Tito, man, who you think?”
That was so much worse than what he had prepared for.
"What the hell are you doing calling my house phone?" Ethan demanded in a furious whisper. "How did you get this fucking number?"
"I need to talk to you, man. I'm in a real bad scrape."
Amanda had stopped at the end of the hall and turned around, walking back in his direction. Although she didn’t typically attempt to eavesdrop, that was the time she just stood there watching him.
"I can't talk right now. Don't call me at this number again, I will call you back on a different line."
When he hangs up, Amanda frowns. "Who was that?"
"Nobody," he muttered.
“Nobody? Do you usually swear at nobody? Who shouldn’t be calling you at home?”
“Nobody should be calling me at home, that’s why I have three fucking cell phones,” he stated irritably.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her brow furrowing even more in concern. “Who was that man, Ethan?”
“I…” He shook his head, then realized he hadn’t taken Tito’s number. The chances of him having the same phone probably weren’t very good. Cursing again, he tried to see if he called from a listed number, but of course he hadn’t.