Stalker Problems - Chapter 38 - Flint Ironside
What the hell? I stared at the picture of Flint Ironside. Had I seen him last night at the Met?
“Where were you last night?” asked Dr. Lyons. He stared at me and then squinted and looked down at his phone.
“I was uh… at home,” I lied. “Watching Gossip Girl . Duh.”
“But I thought you said you hooked up with someone?” He was still looking back and forth from me to his phone.
I took a big sip of water to avoid answering.
“Is this you?” he asked, flipping his phone around.
I spit my water all over him when I saw what was on it. It was my Society picture right below the words RATE YOUR SEXUAL ENCOUNTER.
“Are you Raven Black?” he asked.
Oh God no. “Who is that?” I tried to sound clueless, but it came out weird and robotic.
“The girl I was with last night. At the Met. It’s definitely you!”
“Don’t think so, buddy. Last time I checked I have red hair. That girl’s a brunette.”
“Right, because that wig is your Society disguise. All I had lying around was a fake mustache from a Halloween costume, but the disguise wasn’t really necessary anyway once they hid my upper half behind that painting.”
My jaw dropped as I put the pieces together.
Oh. Fuck. Ryder really had left for an emergency.
And then the security guards directed me to the painting with his name on it.
Hazing the Noob. Only I wasn’t the noob being hazed.
Dr. Lyons was. And I’d taken it to the next level by mouth raping him while he was trapped in the wall. I was a horrible sexual deviant!
I took a deep breath to calm my nerves, but it didn’t work. I was hyperventilating. It kind of felt like I was having a heart attack. Or maybe I was just going to spontaneously combust. I raped Dr. Lyons. Again.
“I’m so so sorry,” I whispered. God, this was Incident #5.
Raping someone for the second time? What the actual fuck was wrong with me?
! And no one should be able to have this many incidents in such a short amount of time.
I wanted to go back in time before I joined the Society when I only had to dwell on the original incident .
The OG Incident. Just the one! Now I had five to keep me up at night!
Dr. Lyons said something, but all I could hear was my heart beating out of my chest. The walls were closing in on me. I grabbed my purse and my deviled eggs and ran out of the restaurant.
***
I’d shot Chastity an SOS text as soon as I got back to my apartment. And then I climbed onto my couch and hid under my fluffiest blanket. I was never leaving the house again. I was about to call the FBI on myself. Just for the protection of others.
Chastity didn’t bother to knock, she just let herself in. “Hey,” she said and sat down next to me.
I assumed. Because the blanket was over my head.
“That bad?” she asked and pulled the blanket down.
“It wasn’t Tanner’s penis,” I said as I somehow slumped farther down onto my couch. I wanted to sink into it and disappear from the world.
Chastity tossed her purse on the floor. “What?”
“The painting. The man I blew. It wasn’t Tanner. It was Dr. Lyons.” I showed her the picture of him in the Society app and told her all about my dinner date from hell.
“Well that’s amazing,” she said. “Now you don’t have to break up with him.”
“Are you crazy? I can never see him again! I cheated on him with himself and raped him all at the same time. How is that even a thing that’s possible?”
“I have to admit, that is a pretty impressive feat. But if you think about it, this is kind of perfect.”
“Hold that thought.” My whole body was yelling at me.
My head hurt. My chest felt tight. And don’t get me started about my horribly uncomfortable slacks.
Whoever invented pants should be shot. I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t get a glass of wine and change into some spandex shorts within the next five seconds.
So I did exactly that. Well, kind of. Technically it was an entire bottle of wine.
But after the day I’d had, it felt like the right choice.
And I wasn’t a total monster - I grabbed one for Chastity too.
“What was I saying?” she asked as we clinked bottles.
I took a huge gulp straight from my bottle. “Something about my disaster of a life actually being perfect?”
“Oh, right. I mean, how isn’t it perfect? Dr. Lyons still wants to be with you. And he has a huge penis. So you can keep dating him and make Tanner super jealous. Win, win, win.”
“Blowing Dr. Lyons isn’t going to make Tanner jealous. It’s going to make him think I’m a disgusting slut.” Because I am. I’m a dirty, rapey, slutbag. I took another huge swig of wine.
“Tanner can’t really be mad. You two aren’t dating, it was only a blowjob, and you were trying to blow him for God’s sake. It was just a classic masquerade ball mix-up.”
“A what?”
“You know…when you go to a masquerade ball with your boyfriend and think you’re banging him, but really it’s some other dude. Technically it’s not cheating since you had good intentions.”
“Are you sure that’s a thing?”
Chastity nodded. “Haven’t you read Lulu the Love Doctor’s blog? She talks about it all the time.”
“All the time? How often could that situation possibly come up?”
“A lot, apparently. At least in the inner circles of the Manhattan elite. You know how rich people love to throw a good masquerade party. Daddy used to throw them all the time. But it doesn’t even matter. Tanner’s never going to know what you did.”
“I have to tell him, don’t I?”
“No. What you do with other men before he asks you to be his girlfriend is none of his business. You’re a 28-year-old divorcee. I’m sure Tanner doesn’t have any illusions about you still being a virgin. Think of it this way: Do you want to know his sexual history?”
“Not really.” Suddenly all I could picture was him hooking up with every girl in the Society.
The thought of it made my stomach turn over.
Or maybe I just felt sick from downing half a bottle of wine.
Either way, I realized that I needed to be more assertive with Tanner.
I was done playing games. They just weren’t my thing.
I wasn’t smooth enough to play games. There was only one solution.
No more making him jealous. Which meant no more dating Dr. Lyons.
I got the ball rolling by deleting all the texts Dr. Lyons had sent me since I escaped in an Uber. Then I hovered my finger over the BLOCK button. With one click, he’d be gone from my life.
“Are you sure you want to get rid of Dr. Lyons?” asked Chastity. “Maybe you should think about it for a little while. I mean…it is that time of the year when you start to act strange.”
“Are you talking about my period? You know that’s a monthly thing, right?” Or did Chastity get knocked up and not realize it?
“Yes, I know periods are a monthly thing. I’m talking about the anniversary of Rosalie’s disappearance.”
“Oh.” I bit the inside of my lip. That was indeed coming up.
But I’d been trying not to think about it.
Although, by actively forcing myself not to think of it…
I was pretty sure that meant I was thinking about it.
“I don’t think that makes me act differently.
Yes, I’ll be sad on the day of. But other than that… ”
“Ash. Last year around this time you followed an elementary school teacher for five blocks and then watched her with a pair of binoculars through the school windows. You almost got arrested for being a pervert.”
“Well she looked a lot like Rosalie. And why is everyone so freaked out that I own a pair of binoculars? They’re not the creepy kind. They’re…”
“The fancy opera watching ones. Yeah, I know, you told me. But the year before that you ordered 50,000 baking cups that had a picture of Rosalie’s face on the bottom in hopes that someone would recognize her and give you a call.”
“I stand by that tactic. If Joe hadn’t canceled the order, it might have worked.”
Chastity took a big swig of her wine. “Okay. But you have to admit that your plan to move to Somalia last May wasn’t completely rational.”
“I think it was the pinnacle of rationality, actually. They have a very favorable tax rate. With how much the cupcake business was pulling in, it just made sense financially.”
“Somalia has been in the middle of a civil war for like the last 30 years.”
“Well no location is perfect.”
“Last May you also tried to convince me that we should shave our heads.”
I waved her comment off. These examples were all so random. She was acting like I wasn’t weird the other 364 days of the year. Trust me, I was. “That’s also unrelated to Rosalie. I just happened to read an article about the horrors of head lice and wanted to be proactive.”
“Fair point. Lice are disgusting. But still…my point remains. Your judgment around his time of year is typically a little suspect. I’m just trying to make sure that ditching Dr. Lyons is really what you want.
I feel the need to reiterate that he’s a war hero doctor with a giant penis.
I don’t know what more you could want in a man. ”
I nodded. “You’re right. On paper, Dr. Lyons is perfect. But he’s not Tanner. And Tanner is what I want.”
“Is he? Or does Tanner just feel like the safer option because you know he’s unavailable? And since he won’t even start a relationship, then he can’t break your heart like Joe did.”
“That’s crazy talk.”
“Is it?” She stared at me.
“I’m not crazy.”
She just kept staring at me.
“I’m not sabotaging myself. Tanner gives me butterflies.
Honestly, him stalking me every Tuesday and Thursday evening was the only thing that got me through the past few months.
And now seeing him at work is the reason why I can bear to wake up at 6 a.m. and put on real people pants.
I want him. And I’m going to make him want me.
His issues be damned.” I slammed my empty wine bottle down on my coffee table to accentuate my point.