Page 107 of A Scandal in Homeroom
She spun away from me, and I could do nothing but silently follow her.
My big gesture? #epicfail.
25
The Next Day
Locke
“The sprinklers went off on your signal, correct?” Croft asked me, clearly stumped by my early morning foul mood.
“Yes.”
“And his hands. Red like we planned.”
“Yes. Exactly like we planned.”
“And you said…”
“Caught red-handed!” I shouted in frustration. “Yes Croft, it all happened just as we’d discussed.”
“Then I don’t understand. How could it have been a disaster? You caught the bad guy.”
“That’s what I said,” I told him. “Only it was. A disaster. Fitz was furious with me. Irene’s not speaking to me.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, the FBI got the warrant to search Bennet’s home and all his electronic devices. They’ll find the IP that sent the email to Senator Darcy traced back to him. I’m sure of it. According to my sources, Bennet has lawyered up, but that’s to be expected.”
“Hmm, no, it doesn’t make me feel better. At all.”
I got up from my seat at the kitchen table to pour myself another cup of coffee. I hadn’t slept all night, staying awake in the hopes Irene would return at least one of my texts.
She hadn’t.
I’d apologized. I’d groveled. I’d offered to reimburse her for the dress. I imagine all that water would have stained the satin pretty badly.
So maybe it hadn’t been thebestplan.
But beyond that, I, too, was hurt. That thing she said about maybe getting something more than a hand job. That wasn’t fair. I didn’t expect anything from her sexually and she knew that. Besides, I didn’t want any kind of sexual experience that felt like some kind of payoff.
What we’d shared was important. It was intimate. It was a first for me, and now, it felt a little cheap.
Is that what she thought of me? I didn’t think so. I had to believe she’d just been hurt in that moment and had lashed out. I had to believe that, because if I didn’t, I didn’t see a way forward for us. Not if she thought everything that happened between us was always transactional.
There was something else that had stuck with me. Something I couldn’t shake loose. Bennet’s reaction. Telling me I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand. He hadn’t been pleading his innocence. Or disbelief. It was more like he’d come to understand something in that moment I did not.
“Croft, does it occur to you that this all came together a little too neatly?”
“What do you mean?”
I tried to walk through all the events in my head as I knew them. The puzzle I’d put together.
Over the summer, Bennet appeared to leave town, taking all his money with him. In that time, he established the alias Moriarty and began blackmailing people in the town, people he knew had secrets. Then he took over Irene’s underground poker game, to both collect the dirty money as well as make a tidy profit for himself on the game.
All of that indicating he must have been having financial troubles with his business. Which was why he’d needed to dissolve it. And the blackmail money was being used to cover that up.
A mayor with a sexual scandal.
A doctor with a dog problem.
