Page 64 of Priest (Priest 1)
Poppy didn’t answer at first, checking her mirrors and craning her neck as she water-bugged through the dense Saturday night traffic. I decided not to push her, even though the curiosity was killing me, as well as the faint, nervous worry that someone would see us out together.
Finally she said, “Someplace I’ve wanted to take you for a while. But first: yesterday. We need to talk about yesterday.”
Yes, we did, but now that I knew she hadn’t slept with Sterling, I half wanted to avoid the painful dialogue altogether. This last day and a half had shoved us roughly past the pretending phase, past the place where we could just imagine the world outside as an irrelevant storm beating ineffectively at our window, and I hated it. Because beyond that place were all the decisions and discussions that would slowly break my life apart, one piece at a time.
“So, Sterling came to my house yesterday,” she said. “After he saw you.”
She knew about that?
As if reading my mind, she followed up with, “Sterling loves to brag about his conquests. Business, romantic, vengeful, any kind of victory. I think he thought I’d be impressed that he’s so thoroughly boxed us in with the photographic evidence of our relationship.”
God. He’s such a tool.
“You have to understand, I knew he’d come here eventually, and I knew that I would tell him I didn’t want to be with him. But I also knew that he wouldn’t accept anything less than a full, face-to-face rejection, and also I felt like I at least owed him dinner, a chance to talk everything over. I mean, we dated for years….”
“Years that he cheated on you,” I muttered.
She looked over at me. The look wasn’t entirely pleasant. “Anyway,” she continued, her voice edged with agitation, “I agreed to drive down to the city and get dinner with him. We ended up talking so late that I fell asleep in his hotel room.”
I didn’t like that detail.
I didn’t like that detail at all.
“But like I said,” she said, “nothing happened. I dozed on his couch until morning and then his driver brought me back home. To you.”
“So he knows now that you’re done with him? He’s leaving?”
She hesitated. “Yes?”
“Is that a question? Are you saying you don’t know for sure?”
Her eyes stayed on the road. “When I left this morning, he said he understood my decision completely. He said he didn’t want me to be with him unwillingly—that it mattered to him how I felt. And so he’d be stepping back.”
I thought of the man I’d met yesterday, of those icy blue eyes and that calculating voice. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who’d step back. He did, however, seem like the kind of man who would lie about stepping back.
“So the pictures he’s taken of us…he went to all that effort to set up a potential blackmailing scheme and he’s just going to give that up?”
She bit her lip, checking over her shoulder and changing lanes again. I liked the way she drove—fast, capable, with a flavor of aggression that never actually translated into anything unsafe. “I don’t know,” she said a bit helplessly. “He seemed so determined and so yeah—it’s hard to imagine him going to all that effort just to leave, but I also don’t think he’d lie about it either.”
“I do,” I said under my breath.
She heard. “Look, Sterling is not a saint, but it’s not fair to demonize him just because he is my ex. Yes, he did bad things, but it’s not like he’s a psychopath. He’s just a spoiled boy who’s never had anyone say no to him. And I honestly don’t think he’ll do anything with those pictures.”
Is she defending him? It felt like she was defending him, and that pissed me off a little.
“Did he offer to return the files to you? Or even to delete them?”
“What? No. But—”
“Then I don’t think he’s planning on going anywhere,” I said, keeping my gaze on the window, where the dusk-covered fields were slowly turning into the sprawl of the city. “He said what he knew you wanted to hear, but this isn’t over, Poppy. It won’t be over for him until he gets what he wants. Which is you.”
Her hand slid over mine, and for a minute, I petulantly thought about ignoring it, about not lacing my fingers through hers, whether to hurt her or to show my disagreement, I wasn’t sure.
God, I was being such a tool.
When I grabbed her hand, I grabbed it tight. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just—it’s like this trident pointed right at my heart. That I might lose you or lose my job—or both.”
“You’re not losing me,” she insisted, glancing over. “And you won’t lose your job. Unless you want to.”
