Page 107 of Hayden's Stalker

It’s the question I need to know the answer to more than anything else because I don’t want to pretend, so I want to know why she does.

“I thought I’d made it clear. I can’t get involved with a client. I need to focus on your safety, and if I can’t do that, I can’t work for you anymore.”

It’s nothing new, but it is the first time she’s laid it out in no uncertain terms. If she feels she can’t focus on my safety, she can’t work for me. She can’t get involved with a client.

The answer seems obvious, and I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before. “What if I broke the contract and got someone else for security?”

“No!” Tatiana exclaims loudly, to my surprise. She shakes her head quickly and says in a much quieter voice, “No. You can’t do that.”

I don‘t understand why not. It’s such a perfect solution. I can get someone else to protect me from my stalker, and we can be together, or at least see if what we have can be something more when we’re not employer and employee.

“If you break the contract, I will leave, and you’ll never see me again.”

Her words slash through, sharper and more painful than any knife. It hurts because, despite my certainty that she wants me, she’s telling me that if I do this, she’ll leave me anyway.

“I thought you said I wasn’t just a job for you,” I manage to say through the pain in my chest.

“You’re not,” she tells me in a soft voice.

“And yet you would leave as soon as I broke the contract?”

None of what she’s saying makes sense, and all of it adds to the pain I feel in my chest.

“Yes, I think I would,” she says in a sure tone.

“I see.”

I can’t manage anything else because it’s all too painful. Any ideas I had about some kind of life with Tati are shattered in an instant. She’snotthe one after all. She would leave if she didn’t have the contract to keep her here with me and that knowledge is the most fucking painful thing I’ve ever experienced.

I want to leave, but I also don’t know how to go, so I sit in silence next to Tati, hating that I came here and had this conversation. I wish I’d stayed in my room instead.

Tati eventually breaks the silence by saying, “Cooper didn’t want me to tell you, but you’ve had more emails from the stalker.”

I stare at her as I take in her words. I didn’t think there had been anything other than the gift the first night, and I frown at her.

“Why didn’t he want me to know?”

“He wanted you to focus on the tour. The emails scare me, Hayden,” she admits in a quiet voice. “I don’t want you to get hurt, and they talk as though there’s some plan for you to be together.”

“Show them to me,” I demand as fear floods through me because if Tati is scared about something, then I’m fucking terrified.

She nods and pulls up the emails from my stalker on her phone. She shows them to me one at a time, and it feels as though each one is more horrifying than the last.

The love I feel for you is all-consuming. I think about you day and night, and I have done so many things to be with you.

By the time I’ve reached the third letter, my fear has multiplied. The thought of someone out there thinking about me day and night while planning some way to be with me is creepy as hell, and I hand Tati’s phone back so she can open the next email for me.

I listen to your songs so often, and I resent Gabriel for singing so many of them. I know that he’s your friend, but surely you see how he takes the attention away from you, who rightfully deserves it.

This one gets to me with the way they seem so obsessed with me to the point of hating Gabriel for being our singer. It makesme worry for him as well. Will this person attack him for what they see as some kind of slight against me?

I hand Tati’s phone back to her almost mechanically before she pulls up another email for me to read.

My heart and soul are forever in service to our love.

I almost gag when I read the final line of this one. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of this, and I feel sick reading them, but I keep going, also wanting to know exactly what’s been sent to me that people have kept secret.

I could not ask for a better partner in life, my love. I am grateful that our hearts have chosen one another.

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