Page 49 of Look, Don't Touch

“I don’t know.” I shove my unusually heavy and large bag off my belly and onto the floor and stare at the envelope.

“Um, you realize that doesn’t make sense, right?” Her voice goes up in a bit of a panic at the end.

“Fully aware.”

“Good.” She wraps a hand around her pretty neck, flops one leg over the other, and leans heavily on one armrest. “Explain.”

I open the envelope and pull the note from inside it. Once more, the ink is dark and rich and the letters slice across the page in a perfectly straight line, only this one isn’t one row after another in perfect form. It’s just one row. Four simple, yet stunning words.

I whisper the words where Astor can’t hear them, much like I’ve whispered them to myself time and again over the past five days and nights.

“I’m not a clairvoyant, Hailey.”

“This past Friday, I went to Crave again.” I give her time to input, to berate me for going back after what happened last time. She remains dutifully quiet. “I only went because I was able to match with my option one.”

“What prompted you to go?”

I make a bubble with my mouth, then slowly blubber it out. “It was work-related.” Again, she’s quiet, waiting for me to expand. We don’t talk about our clients, per se, but we’ll talk about situations should the need arise. “I overstepped a little.” I shrug at the sky.

“You never overstep.” Astor gasps.

“I know.”

“I overstep all the time. It’s a hard job to keep firm boundaries in place, especially with clients you’ve known for a while and have a ton invested in.”

“It’s a new client. Right before Matt…” I don’t have to elaborate.

“What is it about this client that makes your extremely impenetrable walls come down?”

“Lower. Not come down.” I correct. She doesn’t take the bait. “They’re unique and intriguing.”

“Not to the point of?—”

“No,” I snap. “I would never risk my license.” My head jerks in her direction, and her hands go up. “I just said something I shouldn’t have, and he left.”

Fuck! I said he.

“Does he remind you of Matt?” Of course, she picked up on it.

“Not in the least.”

“Okay. Did his walking away make you feel like you messed up, like you felt with Matt?”

“No.” I shake my head and look back at the ceiling. “I just felt… I felt deeper than I have, maybe ever, and definitely since I was a kid, and it shook me.”

“What did you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.”

I snarl, even curl my lips. It doesn’t faze Astor. “I felt connected. Like I finally met someone as uniquely fucked up as me and that maybe I could help him and that maybe he could help me.”

“These are good feelings, Hail.”

“They don’t feel good. They feel scary as fuck, which is why I ended up at Crave after swearing it off again.”

“And what happened at Crave?”

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