Page 95 of Radar

Xander laughed, and Elyssa read that laugh as nervous, maybe a bit bewildered, but he was definitely uncomfortable. She raised a questioning brow.

“I gave you a much narrower choice of topics,” Xander said.

“Fair.” Elyssa reached for her bottle and took a swig. “Got one. Tell me about your most excruciating dating fail.”

He looked at her in silence, then rubbed his thumb over his chin. “I go out for dinners more than I date. When you say date, do you mean in a deep relationship?”

“Whatever you want to tell me about,” Elyssa said.

“I have a group of friends, and the women in the group set me up for a dinner. They thought they had found this really great match for me.”

“Checked all the boxes?” Elyssa asked. “Intelligent, attractive, interesting hobbies, successful career.”

“Seemed so. But there weren’t enough boxes on that survey.”

“Uh oh. Not just a bad fit.”

“Good fit actually.” Xander was brushing a soothing thumb along the side of her hand. “I enjoyed myself on our one date. She suggested Chinese food, and then we went to the Capital because they were having a free concert, featuring buskers, and it was a lovely evening weather-wise. Yeah, all good. But by the end of the date, she was telling me that we were meant to be and started asking what I thought about where we should live when we moved in together. She thought we should consider the school districts. She wanted her parents to meet me.”

“That’s a lot for me to take in as someone hearing the story. I can’t imagine what that felt like from your point of view.”

“It felt like a win at first, to be honest,” Xander said. “From the start, I was grateful to my friends for introducing us. Things were going well, and I could see that we had the potential for future dates. Then the red flags popped out in quick succession. It would have been so much worse had I been months in when I discovered that she wasn’t—” He held his hand up, then let it drop. “‘Sane’ was what I was going to say, but since I don’t wantto misuse psychological words, I can’t say that. But in my world, she’s delusional.”

“Present tense?” Elyssa asked.

“That I can’t say. I haven’t seen her in about six months.”

“Go back. You haven’t seen her, does that mean you decided to date her?”

“No. I told her I had a nice time, but I didn’t feel like this was heading anywhere romantic. Best wishes. She smiled at me and said I’d change my mind, because she could feel it in her heart. It was just a matter of timing on my part, and she was patient. This was years ago. I was interviewing with the DIA.”

“Okay. I’m stuck on the words ‘I haven’t seen her,’ and I’m stuck on how your muscles contract when you talk about her. The way I’m reading that is that you’re conflicted because you feel like you have to defend yourself against this woman, and at the same time, you were raised to never hit a girl.”

“You’re good at this.”

She lowered her chin and raised a questioning brow.

“She never put me in a position where I felt defensive.” He shuffled around in his seat. “She had a way to get under my skin because you’re right,” he turned to catch Elyssa’s gaze, “if this were a guy, I’d have known how to handle things.”

“Mano a mano.”

“We’d both understand the boundaries,” Xander said.

“Yeah, well, picking out a house with a good zip code for schools on a first date says she’s not great at understanding boundaries, even if you did know how to navigate them. What happened after that? She started calling you every fifteen minutes for days on end?”

“I told you we went out for Chinese on our date. Every time I was in that area, I’d see her out and about, which wasn’t frequent, maybe every few months or so.”

“A random ‘we’re at the same diner’ kind of thing or ‘she’s hunting you down and stalking you’ kind of thing?”

“Random.” He looked over the tops of the seats, then scowled, paused, and shook his head. “Had to be random. Yeah, random. But the next night, say around ten o’clock, the doorbell would ring, and there would be a Chinese deliveryman delivering egg rolls. My address. Her name paying the tab.”

Elyssa sucked in a long gasp. “What? From the date night restaurant?”

“Always a different place. I guess it was so I couldn’t call and put my name on a do-not-disturb Chinese take-out list.”

“Yeah, if some guy did that to me … And you’re right, that doesn’t seem to break a law. That would be hard to use in court to get a restraining order because you’re not endangered. It is creepy. But this stopped months ago? Do you think she’ll pop back on the scene?”

“I moved to my condo since then. So it might be the person at my old address who is receiving random egg rolls.” He grinned at the thought, then let it fall off as his face grew serious. “Up until that point, I’d had zero interactions with someone like her. I didn’t know the ins and outs of it. But I was hired by the DIA.”

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