A few seconds went by.
Did you fuck him?
Leave it to Mare to be so blunt.
No.
Are you going to?
I took a deep breath.
I don’t know. I’m not really even sure if he wants to.
What guy doesn’t want to???
Well, that was a good question. However, I’d been pretty much alone with Aiden for the past four days, and he hadn’t even kissed me again. He’d been inches away and hadn’t closed the gap.
What if he’d changed his mind? What if he wasn’t just being polite when he said he’d take the couch the first night but just didn’t want to be that close to me? He could have decided that I was just too boring to bother with at all.
“Hey, are you okay in there?” Aiden called through the door.
I hadn’t realized how long I’d been gone.
“I’m fine!” I replied. “Be out in a sec.”
My phone beeped.
Call me!
I shook my head again.
I have to go. I’ll try to call you tomorrow.
You better! You have me worried!
I will.
I shoved the phone back into the pocket of my shorts along with the business card Lo had given me the previous night. After splashing water on my face, I checked myself in the mirror to make sure I looked more composed than I felt.
I didn’t.
Something about texting with Mare had me even more on edge. What guy didn’t want sex, indeed? If stereotypes were to be believed, men weren’t all that picky as long as they were getting laid. If Aiden wasn’t interested, what did that mean? Why did he bring me here?
Alarm!
My mind whirled. Could he have brought me here for some other reason? If he really was a drug dealer, what would he want with me?
Or was that too simple—too obvious? Maybe he wasn’t a drug dealer but some other sort of criminal. Perhaps he really was in some kind of organized crime ring and planned on using me for…for…for what? He’d had days alone with me. He could have done anything he wanted—raped me, killed me, or sold me off to some arms dealer in trade for weapons of mass destruction.
Aiden was right about me—I had led a sheltered life. I had no notion of the activities of criminals. Aside from a tour of Alcatraz when I visited my mother, I had no knowledge of what sort of illicit dealings people in the underworld might be involved in. He could be planning anything. He could be biding his time, placating me into trusting him so he could lure me into some insane life of crime.
Wouldn’t that count as a thrill? Was he testing me with the skydiving to see if I might be enticed into that kind of life? Could he be planning to use me as some kind of patsy for a crime he intended to commit?
Too many questions.
No answers.
Words spoken by both my mother and my father started to fill my head.