Emery watched him and the rest of the students filter through the double doors like sand passing through the bottleneck of an hourglass.
“You finished eating?” Dallas asked, bringing her mind back to the people around her.
She nodded, and even though she’d taken only a few bites, he didn’t press her. He grabbed her tray along with his own, emptied both into the garbage and stacked them one on top of the other.
Emery sat still, waiting for the room to empty completely. She wanted to be certain everyone was in class before she attempted the walk across campus to Aiyana’s house. She’d heard Eli recruit Dallas to help with some PE classes—a teacher wasn’t feeling well—so she figured he’d be staying at the school. She’d have to decide what to say to Ethan on her own or wait until later, when Dallas was available to offer his opinion.
But he surprised her by telling Eli he’d be a few minutes late and insisted on walking her back to the house.
“You did it,” he said, once they were on their way. “You braved being in public on your own. Way to go.”
Emery had her head bowed, her eyes focused on the ground in front of her, but she couldn’t help looking around every few seconds to make sure she wasn’t going to run into someone who might stop her and sound the alarm. “It was a mistake.”
“Why?” he asked in surprise.
“Because I’m afraid that boy who approached me will tell his cousin I’m in town, and Avery will mention the video. If that happens, if just one student hears the news, it’ll spread through the school in no time.”
“Some people will invariably find out, Emery,” he allowed. “You have to expect that.”
And weather it. That was the part he didn’t say. “But kids?” she responded. “Young boys? You know how salacious that will be to them. I came here to escape what was happening, to feel safe—not to expose an entire boys’ school to that video. If New Horizons starts buzzing with the news, I won’t be able to stay. At that point, it’d be better to hole up inside my apartment in LA and order DoorDash until I run out of money.”
He smiled as though he was tempted to laugh at the pathetic picture she painted, but he didn’t. “Hopefully, Avery will surprise you and not share that information with her young cousin.”
She cast him a sideways glance. “You really think it might go that way—with my luck?”
“Why not give her the benefit of the doubt until she proves me wrong?”
“Because I don’t know her all that well—I never did. She wasn’t part of my close circle of friends. She was just someone I knew from the equestrian club and a couple of projects we did together in history class. That was the only reason I was at her house when that boy saw me. Avery and I were working on a group project.”
“I haven’t heard anything about your sex video that leads me to believe it was anything other than two consenting adults who were in a monogamous relationship. It’s not as if you were moonlighting as an expensive escort, or swinging with another couple, or you were discovered having sex in public. From what my mother has told me, you didn’t even know you were being filmed.”
“I didn’t! That Ethan would do something like that is...it’s disgusting.”
“You just happened to be a well-known news anchor,” he said. “And a beautiful one, at that, which caused the video to go viral. What you were doing on that video—it’s nobody’s business but your own, and there’s got to be other people who see it the way I do.”
She would’ve been pleased by the compliment he’d embedded in that response. Dallas wasn’t the type to say things he didn’t mean. And beautiful seemed a strong adjective for him, so it was a flattering one. But she was too buried in her own misery to take any pleasure in what he’d said. “Most of the world isn’t that broad-minded,” she grumbled. “You should read the scathing messages I got on social media until I closed all my accounts.”
“People can be cruel, especially when they’re hiding behind a computer. Forget those bastards.”
Shrugging it off sounded good in theory. But she couldn’t do it. She was too sensitive to the criticism, too embarrassed to be caught in such an indelicate situation and too hurt that Heidi and the rest of the management team at KQLA chose to keep Ethan and not her, even though she felt she was the better anchor.
Maybe it was that they could pay the woman they hired to replace her a little less than they’d been paying her, since her replacement would be starting at the bottom of the pay scale.
Emery’s blood boiled when she thought that the station itself would benefit from what Ethan had done to her. “He wrote me.”
“Who?”
“Ethan.”
“What?”
“He did,” she said as they were coming up to the house. “He texted me last night.”
Dallas stopped walking. “What’d he say?”
She got her phone out to show him. “Can you believe it?”
He shook his head as he read Ethan’s text. “No, I don’t believe it. What a prick! What’re you going to say to him?”
“I’m dying to let him have it, but maybe there’s a smarter way to handle this.”
“I don’t know how you’ve held back,” he admitted as he started walking again.
She hurried to keep up with him. “It hasn’t been easy, but if I can set my emotions aside and...I don’t know...draw him in somehow, maybe I can turn the tables.”
“How?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. If he’ll admit that he posted that video and that he did it because he was angry with me, I can prove it was all about revenge. And if I can prove it was all about revenge, I might not be able to
