Page 96 of Flipping the Script

I waited until he’d driven away, memorizing his license plate now that I was close enough to see it under the mud, then got into my car and put my guitar case on the seat next to me. Pulling out my phone, I typed Carl’s plate into my notes app in case Jesse wanted to report him.

I had so many unanswered questions about Jesse and how he and Carl had crossed paths, but at least I knew my secret was safe.

And Jesse was safe.

That was all that mattered.

14

SEBASTIAN

I steeredmy car along the familiar road, weaving around potholes and taking care when driving over the unavoidable ones.

The week had been weird as hell, and I needed to escape to my cabin for a bit.

I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around what had gone down after my show last weekend or what I’d learned about Jesse.

How was I supposed to talk to him about this? And when? Should I text him and be like,Hey, so my stalker was actually your stalker, and I think he used to be one of your escorting clients?

I could wait until the next time we happened to be in the same place again, but it’d been almost six weeks since that night in his bedroom, and I hadn’t seen him once in all that time.

Finding out that Jesse may or may not have been an escort wasn’t the earth-shattering revelation it would have been with anyone else. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

I had no clue why he’d started, but knowing him, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he wanted a challenge or he was bored or something equally innocuous.

This felt like another one of those weird glimpses into each other’s lives that we were never meant to see. I wasn’t supposed to know this about him, but now that I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I’d always had pretty liberal views of sex work and hadn’t really thought much of it when Jesse’s older brother Quinn started filming porn in his early twenties. I’d never watched any of his stuff, but that was because I’d known Quinn since I was eight and it would be weird to see him having sex. Not because I didn’t agree with his choice or thought there was something wrong with it.

And maybe I was obsessing over nothing. Maybe I’d misunderstood Carl or he hadn’t been completely honest with me.

The only way to clear things up would be to talk to Jesse.

But that brought me right back to how the hell was I supposed to do that and not make things even weirder between us.

Crunch.

The world tilted as my front tire fell into a giant pothole, the underside of my car scraping loudly against the cracked and broken pavement.

“Fuck!” I hit the brakes as my car fishtailed, the left front end lower than the rest of the car when I came to a skidding stop, my front end pointed toward a deep ravine.

“Holy shit.” I turned off the car and sat there for a few beats, giving my brain a chance to catch up to what had just happened.

Once my heart slowed back to its normal pace, I threw open my door and climbed out to assess the damage.

The tire was flat, and there were fresh scrapes on the underside of the wheel well.

“Of fucking course,” I said to the woods.

Kneeling, I checked to see how bad the scrapes were and if it looked like I’d busted up my undercarriage at all.

It seemed okay, but I wouldn’t know until I got the spare on and could try driving.

Heaving a sigh, I popped the trunk and went to get the spare.

It took a few minutes to get to the compartment under the trunk, but once I had access, I twisted the little handle and tugged it open.

“Motherfucker!”

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