Page 26 of Her Bad Boy

"Miss Barstow, would you like me to drive you home?" Joey called after her.

But she didn't answer him. She got in her car—not even peeling out or anything—calmly and sedately driving away, never having seen the man who was gazing out at her longingly from behind the curtains in his library.

When she arrived home, she got into her most comfortable clothes and walked methodically through the house with a box in her hand, dropping anything into it that he had given her. The blue dress went in there, a copy of his grandmother's recipe for sauce, the handbag and the perfume and the phone case, the DVDs of Star Trek: TOS he'd gifted her with, as well as a shopping bag, full of various sex toys that she knew she would never use again.

Allie stood and stared down at it for a long moment, the detritus of a failed relationship. There were a few things she'd left at his place that she wanted back, so she included a hand-written letter addressed to Joey—her point of contact with him, apparently—which she put in there, too. Then she taped it all together, addressed it to Lucas, care of Joey, and put it by the door to take to UPS in the morning. And that was that.

But she didn't cry. A kind of veil of numbness descended over her during the next couple of months, instead. She went to work. She ate, although not very much. She even went out on Friday nights with the gang and had a drink, although she very carefully limited it to one, and she always ordered an appetizer and got herself an Uber. She went shopping with Laura and even continued to push herself out of her comfort zone a bit at a time, actually taking a few days of vacation to go up to Oregon to see a college friend who had just had a baby.

The tears didn't hit her until much later, and at the worst possible moment—when he was sitting across from her in the court room.

They had done it—they had gotten him dead to rights on credit card fraud using skimmers—little devices that could be attached—almost undetectably—to a card reader at a retail establishment or ATM that recorded the information on the card, tracing the trail the long way back all the way to him.

Although Perry was there, at the table with them, she was the lead on this case, and therefore, was expected to deliver the opening argument. She'd never had such an attack of nerves about speaking in front of a crowd in her life. She was, of course, ultra-prepared, and all of her ducks were in very neat rows.

But then she'd never had to deliver a speech in front of her ex-lover before, nor one that was likely to be the start of something that was going to put him away for a very long time. Still, she forced herself to rise from the table, walk out to stand before the judge and the jury and begin.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she said. "My name is Allyria Barstow." She could hear him saying her name in that passionately demanding way of his in the back of her head, but did her best to ignore it. "And I am here to prove to you that this man…" she came to stand in front of Lucas, barely able to force herself to look at him as her eyes flooded with tears, but hoping that no one would notice "…is…"

Her entire body flushed hot all of a sudden as the tears flowed down her face, and she couldn't seem to get the next word out.

"Is…" She tried again, smiling weakly now as she began to feel worse and worse, while crying harder and harder. Allie opened her mouth to start over, and as soon as she did, she knew it was not at all a good idea, clamping her hand over it instead and literally running out of the courtroom to the nearest ladies' room, where she forcibly divested herself of the meager contents of her breakfast—some weak tea and a stale doughnut, all while crying her heart out.

Laura happened to be there that morning—she was the only one on her side of things that knew that they had been involved, and although Allie was as staunch as ever in her faith in herself and her ability to go through with this, Laura had her own, serious doubts about that, so she decided to watch, hoping she was wrong.

And everyone around her was glad she did because they were all men, and she was the only one—as far as they were concerned—who could go in there and see to Allie.

Laura scoffed at them and headed in, while Lucas took a seat as close to where her friends and coworkers had gathered, in order to eavesdrop as best he could about what was happening.

When she entered, Laura didn't have to ask where her friend was. She could tell by the sounds of the retching and crying.

"You okay in there?"

After one particularly violent bout, Allie raised her head and sniffle-groaned, "Just ducky, thanks."

"Anything I can do?"

"Yeah, help me put my stomach back into my body when I'm done here?"

"You got it, kid."

"Actually, would you run and get my purse? I have a portable toothbrush and toothpaste in there and I have a feeling I'm going to nee—"

"You have no idea how glad I am to go do that for you. Back in a jiff."

Lucas watched the woman fly by him, then fly back with what he recognized as Allie's purse, which he had learned was just as Boy Scoutish, in its own way as his car's trunk was. In other words, there was no telling what was in there that she wanted or needed, because she had pretty much a little of everything.

"Got it! I'm just going to sit out here and wait for you and hope that I don't join in next to you at the sounds of what you're doing. My stomach is very easily suggestible. If it was a vag, it would be a total slut."

How someone could make her want to laugh when she felt so horrible, she didn't know, but Laura had achieved it.

Eventually, after more rounds staring at the stains in the bowl with tears flowing down her cheeks than she wanted to count, she straightened experimentally, and nothing in her rebelled violently at the idea. Allie gave it a minute or two, then decided to call it good, but hang around the bathroom for a few minutes, just to make sure.

But she'd had a bit of an epiphany while emptying her guts into a public toilet, and what it meant, she wasn't exactly sure, but she knew—beyond a doubt—that she couldn't go back into that courtroom today.

And perhaps not ever again.

When she'd brushed her teeth, used up her small travel bottle of mouthwash, and combed her hair, she turned to Laura while blowing her nose.

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