Page 54 of Durango

I shrug. “Programmer humor.”

Samantha sighs. “Back to the video, you’re right. We can’t leak it.”

Thank God.

She stares at me with her devilish smile. “But we can make Tyler think we will.”

“No,” I say. I grab the kettle before it’s ready and pour water into my mug. I prefer it cooler anyway.

“Hear me out,” she says as she jumps down from the counter. “We find a way to get a message to Tyler. We tell him we have a copy of all of his videos.”

“I think he already knows someone has a copy. Otherwise, how would one have been leaked to the press?”

Samantha’s eyes grow large. “Oh no, he might think his girlfriend did it. Okay, we need to act fast.”

The girlfriend. No, he can’t suspect her because if she saw any of those videos, she’d have left him.

“We get a message to Tyler stating we will release this video with Benson unless he turns himself in for illegally videotaping himself having sex with all those women,” Samantha says.

I take a sip of tea. Too soon. It needs to steep longer, so I set it down. “It won’t work.”

Her smile drops. “What do you mean? Why not?”

“If he turns himself in, who is going to keep the illegal drug activity going at his family business? Plus, if someone really wanted to hurt him, they wouldn’t blackmail him. They’d just turn over the videos. No, he’ll make it his mission to find whoever sent the note instead.”

Samantha frowns. “You really think he’d do that?”

“I do. I was with him for six years. Remember?”

She sighs. “Okay, fine. I’ll go back to watching the sex videos to see if I recognize anyone else.”

I glance at my phone. “You were in there for two hours. How many videos are there?”

She grabs a can of sparkling water from our refrigerator. “I’m only watching the first few minutes of each, and I’ve taken a few breaks for my sanity. But there are a little over one hundred videos.”

Over one hundred? He was with over one hundred women while we were together? The nausea returns.

“When did he get that scar on his chest?”

“It was a few years before I met him. He said it was from a surfing accident. Why?”

She walks back to the living room, and I follow her, carrying my tea. “The last sex videos I watched were from before the scar.”

So, he wasn’t with a hundred women while with me. I should feel relieved, but I don’t. I sit down on the couch again. “He’s been taking videos for that many years?”

She nods. “And since I think I’m only halfway, it looks like it might go back pretty far.” She grabs her laptop and heads back into her bedroom but turns back before entering. “From the littlebit I have seen, he’s not that good at sex. You might consider dating around so you can experience someone good.”

“Okay.” That was not what I was expecting her to say.

She goes into her room and thankfully closes the door so I don’t have to hear anything. I sink down as my thoughts race. Tyler was making sex tapes before he knew me and, likely during what I call our honeymoon stage, when I thought everything was great.

But I need to stop thinking of it that way. This wasn’t an ordinary relationship with a great time and a not-so-great time. As my therapist explained, this was always about control for him, not love.

How could I have been so blind not to suspect anything was off about him? Would I see red flags with Durango?

I take a deep breath and shake that thought away. I’ve known Durango since I was in high school. He comes from a good family and isn’t a narcissist like Tyler. He’s a good man. A good man who has been patiently waiting for me to come around and be ready for something real with him.

And now I am. When he returns from his assignment, we’ll reschedule our first date.

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