As soon as I had everything lined up, I called Emily.
“Hey, how are you?” she said, sounding far calmer than I felt.
“You heard back from the guy?”
“Geez, eager to jump right into it, huh?”
She gave a short laugh. I did nothing of the sort. Emily got the picture quickly enough.
“OK, here’s what I need you to do. Write down everything you can remember about the guy and the situation around him. His clothes, his name, where you met him, when you met him—no detail is unimportant.”
“I can’t tell you?” I asked. “Or I can’t speak directly to the guy?”
“It’s best right now just to do it this way,” she said. “I promise he’s good, but he has a very particular way of doing things, and trying to go against the grain won’t work here.”
That was annoying, but I trusted Emily’s word above just about anyone else’s, sometimes even my own. If she told me to write “S.O.S.” in big letters in my backyard to get the attention of this investigator, I probably would have.
“When you’re done with that, email it to me, and I’ll pass it on,” she said. “No real rush. I’m going to have to mail this information, along with your phone number, to him. Once he has it, he’ll call you to follow up on any details he may need.”
“Um, OK,” I said.
She may not have been in a rush, but I sure was.
“OK, just text me or call me if you need anything more.”
And with that, the conversation was done. I’d hurried home so I could send her an email?
I put the phone to the side and stared at the blank document on my screen, that annoying little flat line just blinking right back at me. Everything you can remember. No detail is unimportant.
At first, I took Emily at her word on that. I started by describing how I’d been a miserable mess that morning. I was still in my funk—I guess you could say even now, that was the case—and needed to hit one of the ski lodges. I wrote that the ski lodge was still around, but I didn’t know if the bartender was still there.
But then I realized how stupid this was. I was being asked to describe everything I could about Trent, not about the circumstances leading up to him. That was like being asked to describe a crime scene and giving statistics on the city at large.
I recalled what I could. Sleek jaw. Narrow face. Eyes that looked haunted but determined. Dark brown hair. No obvious wrinkles, but a man as skinny and fit as him would have some lines. Veins in his arms and neck, but not to the point that one would wonder if the guy took steroids.
Shit, just thinking about the guy was making me a little excited. I hadn’t even had sex since that night. But what was I going to do, masturbate to his memory? With Charlotte playing with her toys? No, this was important.
I tried to recall anything else I could. His calloused hands. His deep voice. His…his authority.
Now, suddenly, it was like because I had remembered that one aspect of him, a whole lot more came flooding back.
When he’d said he wanted to make love to me, it was like he’d started the music to the dance and had brought me on stage. And when we got on stage…my God. There was sex, and then there was sex. Trent had introduced me to the latter and probably ruined the former for me forever. Damn him and his ridiculous power.
Holy fuck, what power he had. And while he was nicely equipped, it was more than his physical attributes that made him so strong. It was the assertiveness, the confidence that he just fucking dominated me with that made it impossible to do anything but submit to him.
The combination of having never done anything like that before and the degree to which he took it made it impossible to forget that moment. And as a result…my body was starting to, right now, feel things I didn’t anticipate it would while taking notes.
“Oh, crap,” I muttered under my breath, quietly enough that Charlotte wouldn’t hear me.
I had to. I just had to. It had been two years since I’d last had sex, and it was unfair that the last memory was that man driving me mad in some random motel room. It was unfair that the mere thought of the night was enough to get me so horny, I had to move my daughter away.
“Sweetie,” I said, trying to sound motherly but really just desperate for a moment alone. “We’ve had a long walk. Why don’t we go take a nap?”
Charlotte just looked up at me with that look of awe. In a normal moment, I would have found it profoundly sweet and beautiful that she would still look at the world like that.
In this moment, I was grateful that she wouldn’t fight back. If her father was the one that gave her her stoic and even-keeled temperament, it was all the more reason to masturbate in his honor.
I scooped up Charlotte, took her to her room, and called Bucky. Though he preferred to guard the front door at night, he was also fiercely obedient and knew when I wanted him to guard my room or Charlotte’s room.
“Go inside, Bucky, go inside.”
He did
