Mira couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a passenger in her car… let alone one as handsome as Conrad. She kept fighting the urge to sneak sidelong glances at him, sitting there like some kind of marble statue, his hair tousled by the wind through the open window. It was a gorgeous day, blue skies and a few puffs of cloud, and she was surprised by what a good mood she was in, all things considered. Maybe that was a bad sign. Maybe she was entering some kind of manic state. That wouldn’t be a surprise. Nothing would, at this point.
She parked outside her therapist’s office, but when Conrad made to follow her inside, she hesitated. She hadn’t really thought this part through, had she? What was he going to do, sit in the waiting room for an hour? But Conrad seemed to sense her hesitation, and with an easy smile, agreed to wait by the car. Mira squeezed his hand in gratitude and promised she’d only be an hour. Why was she so concerned about leaving him, she wondered? Nobody was going to mess with a guy built the way he was.
It felt good to be back on her therapist’s familiar couch, and it wasn’t long before she was spilling every detail of the past few weeks—the disastrous date with Eddie, the way his creepy texts had activated some of her past trauma. She didn’t mention the man who’d broken into her house the night before, though. And when it came to talking about Conrad, she covered the truth of his bizarre arrival with an explanation that he was an old friend who was visiting from out of town. It was a story she’d come up with that morning in the shower, when she’d been privately debating whether or not she should keep her appointment.
Her therapist, unflappable as always, listened in attentive silence until Mira had finished her diatribe. Then, she sat back in her chair, raising an eyebrow. “Is Conrad a friend we’ve talked about before?”
“I don’t think so,” Mira said, hesitating for a moment. She’d told her therapist about the blue-eyed suitor from her dreams… but she hadn’t had a name for him then, had she? “Although… he does remind me a lot of the guy I dream about, now that we’re spending time together in person.”
Her therapist leaned forward. “That’s interesting.”
A flush rose to her cheeks. “Is it?”
“Well, isn’t it?” The woman smiled faintly. “This fantasy man has been your model for relationships for a long time, hasn’t he?”
“I guess.”
“Is the friendship strictly platonic?”
A flash of how it had felt to fall asleep in Conrad’s arms the night before… the memory of his arms tightening around her, the heat of his lips against hers, somehow so much more intense than it ever had been even in the dreams that left her breathless when she woke… “No,” she admitted, her cheeks burning. “No, I don’t think so.”
“And what does that bring up for you?”
Mira had intended for this session to be about her anxiety, but she found herself talking a lot more about her feelings around Conrad than she’d intended to. The end of their session came more quickly than she’d expected, and for a moment she wondered whether it had been a mistake not to spend more time talking about her stalker, her irrational fear that she was being followed, the resurgence of memories around what had happened with her mother. But what could she have said about it, at the end of the day? The truth was that she hadn’t been imagining it—shewasbeing followed, thereweremen out to get her. Knowing that her fears were grounded in reality had oddly done a lot to reduce them.
She headed back out into the afternoon sunshine, already looking forward to seeing Conrad’s handsome face again. But she stopped dead on the sidewalk when she saw a familiar figure standing next to her car… and it certainly wasn’t Conrad. Her heart sank and she felt a cold chill run down her spine, debating for a split second whether she should turn on her heel and walk straight back into the reception area to ask them to call the police. That would have been the sensible course of action. She knew that, even as she felt her legs carrying her straight across the sidewalk, a fierce anger burning in her. She didn’t need the cops to deal with this creep.
“Eddie,” she greeted him coolly. “Get the hell away from my car.”
“I’m sorry I had to do this, Mira, but you left me no choice.” Eddie folded his arms across his chest, straightening up to his full height. Did he think that she was going to be intimidated by the fact that he had a few inches on her? Everyone on the planet had a few inches on her. And after her brush with real danger last night, Eddie was suddenly feeling like much less of a threat. “If you’d just been sensible and answered my messages, I wouldn’t have had to track you down.”
“How did you find me? Have you been watching my house?”
“Never you mind how I found you. Let’s just say that you should probably learn a little bit more about the technology you rely on every day,” he added, nodding to the phone in her hand. She fought the urge to roll her eyes. He’d ranted about cybersecurity for a considerable part of her date… when he wasn’t leering down her dress and making disgusting comments about full-bodied women, that is. “Now, I’m still willing to take you on a second date—provided you apologize for jerking me around like this.”
“I’m not jerking you around, Eddie. I’m not interested.”
A flash of anger on his face. “Listen here, you ungrateful bitch. You’d be lucky to land a guy like me, so stop playing hard to get. It’s not cute.”
Frustration seethed in her. Didn’t she have enough on her plate at the moment without dealing with this asshole? “What’s it going to take for you to get the message, Eddie? I don’t want to see you again. We’re done.”
“I say when we’re done,” he snapped. “I only agreed to go out with you out of pity, but I can see that was a mistake. It’s given you an inflated sense of your own market value—”
“You can take that incel shit elsewhere,” Mira snapped. “Get away from my car, now.”
“Or what?”
She narrowed her eyes. Threatening to call the police would have been the right move, most likely… but what she actually wanted to do was punch him square in the nose. But before she could do either, a shadow fell across Eddie. His eyes shifted upwards—and suddenly, a lot of the anger drained from his expression.
Conrad was standing at her side, looking somehow even taller than she remembered him. His face was as calm and serene as an iceberg, those cool blue eyes boring through Eddie like he was nothing more than an ant. Mira felt him take her hand in his, a small gesture that made Eddie’s eyes widen for a moment, then narrow sharply.
“Oh, I get it,” he scoffed. “I thought that prude act was all for show. You’re a slut like the rest of them—”
She realized suddenly that Conrad wouldn’t be able to understand a word Eddie was saying. But it seemed he didn’t need to. He took a single step forward, and though he didn’t so much as raise his hand, Eddie stumbled backwards as though he’d been hit. The movement seemed to break his conviction. With one last poisonous look at Mira, Eddie turned and strode away across the street, earning an angry blast of a car horn from the traffic he hadn’t bothered to check for.
Conrad looked down at her, and she saw his cool expression vanish, revealing real worry in its place. Strange, to actually watch him take off that mask… “I’m so sorry, Mira. I was walking around the block, checking for more men like the one from last night—”
She shook her head, fighting back an odd urge to laugh. “It’s okay, Conrad. That guy’s a whole different story to the guys from last night. Way less of a threat,” she added, shaking her head. “I’ll tell you the whole story in the car.”