Chased him away. His shoulders rounded slightly.
Elizabeth sighed. “I know. I know the look on your face in those selfies. Plus, I’ve been haunting your ex’s Instagram and YouTube. She got dropped by her agent. She’s desperate, and she’s sending her fans to you. Everybody who tags her with pictures of her precious Rasul who she misses so much gets a shout-out.”
“What?” Rasul remembered the doctor’s remarks about Minnesota license plates, and the pit in his stomach grew. “She sent people here? Why?”
“We’ve had this meeting. While you were dating her, she saw a four-thousand-percent rise in social media hits. You broke up with her and she went way down and couldn’t get it back. Then you answered her booty call and got her on the lips of everyone again. You’re the meal ticket. She’s not letting go.”
“I’m in Wisconsin.”
“Who cares? She operates online. She’s billing this as a sad separation and she’s the dutiful wife at home holding up the fort. Her agent, damn him, spilled the beans about you not having social media access, and so she’s filling the void. Apparently you called her before the gala. You miss her so much.”
Now Rasul felt sick. “I didn’t call her. I swear. I swear. Call the mobile carrier and ask for my phone log.”
“You act as if I don’t have access to that already. I did set up the account. But no, I was pretty sure you didn’t do that. All the same, this is a problem that needs to be nipped in the bud.”
“You want me to call her and tell her to back off?”
“Absolutely not. You’ll just give her clear voice samples.”
He wanted to object that this was too much, Adina wouldn’t do that, but he did know how desperate she was to get a toehold on real fame. He hated to think she’d fallen this far, but Elizabeth was right, he couldn’t get involved. “So what do I do?”
“Avoid selfies. Exercise restraint. Honestly, I wish you had a legitimate, stable relationship with someone else to end this before it gets started, but I also don’t want you distracted from your work.”
Jacob’s fussy face appeared in his mind’s eye. “You want me to document a different relationship online?”
“No, she’ll just see that as a war. But hmm, I wonder if her fans assumed someone was a significant other, that might help. Maybe, but maybe not. Look, like I said, I don’t want you to be distracted. I certainly don’t want you to upset people there. At some point this should die off on its own, but I want you focused on your work, not your unstable ex.”
Rasul couldn’t get Jacob out of his head. “But if I did legitimately have someone, that would be good?”
“If you had a stable relationship with someone who truly appreciated you, didn’t use you, and actually supported you? Yes. That would be amazing. But I’m not holding my breath. You certainly don’t know how to pick a winner.”
“Hey.”
“Show me the evidence to the contrary.”
Jacob. He could show her Jacob. He didn’t say anything, though.
Elizabeth sighed. “I’ll keep monitoring your social media and keep you apprised if there’s anything you need to know. They just started posting things.” There was a pause. When she came back, her voice was sharp. “Who is this guy you’re dancing with?”
They had pictures of him and Jacob? Damn, Rasul wanted to see. He cursed his lack of internet. Need to fix that. “That’s my escort for the evening. The guy who owns the bookstore from earlier, actually.”
“You look like you’re about to eat him for dinner. And he looks like he wants to be on the menu.”
Rasul went warm. Jacob looked like he was into him too? Really?
There was another pause on Elizabeth’s end, and then she grumbled. “These comments are going to send Adina into orbit.”
The bad idea formed in Rasul’s mind. He tried to push it down. But all he could think about was the way Jacob had felt in his arms, the way he’d smelled like the bookstore. “I… might have asked Jacob out.”
“Wait—you asked who out?”
“The escort. The bookstore owner. Guy in the photos. His name is Jacob Moore.”
“If you get distracted by dates instead of work—”
“Hey, I thought you just said a significant other would be good to deflect Adina.”
“Yes, potentially. But I want you working.”
“I understand.”
Her tone was softer now, though. “It is true that this would be fortuitous. I don’t know that you dating someone would truly put her off, but I worry about what this chick is going to pull. I’ll take what I can get. And if this is the guy the president of the college insisted was a quiet, dependable, upstanding citizen, that could be good for you in general, not simply deflection.” She sighed. “All right. Date your bookstore guy. Just remember. The book is your priority.”
When Rasul hung up, he stared at the ceiling a moment, digesting the gravity of what he’d done. Then he opened the contacts and read the new contact name nestled between the others.
Mr. Rogers.
Smiling sadly, he shut the phone.
Probably he should call Elizabeth back and tell her he’d lied, that he only wanted to date Jacob.
A real hero would leave him alone and go work on his manuscript, not force him into a relationship.
With a sigh, Rasul put his phone in his pocket and shuffled through his boring apartment to his boring bedroom.
When he couldn’t sleep, he turned on the bedside light and started to read I Capture the Castle. Except just as he thought, it depressed him. When he was young, he’d seen himself as Cassandra. Now? Now he couldn’t deny that he was anything but the self-absorbed, fragile patriarch who couldn’t get organized to publish another book or work in any fashion. He could only hide in his gatehouse refuge, reading.
This isn’t a gatehouse, and it’s no refuge.
Jacob’s bookstore was, especially his apartment.
Rasul forced himself to keep reading, not allowing himself to plot how he could maneuver his way back there.
Chapter Four
JACOB DIDN’T sleep at all after the dance, only lay there tossing and turning until four in the morning, when he finally gave up and started his day. The cats glared at him because he’d dislodged them from the bed all night and then didn’t feed them immediately upon rising as they were accustomed to.
“You’ll get fed at six as always,” he told Susan as she glared at him from the end table beside the chair where he was trying to read his usual round of digital news and failing.
Susan, unimpressed by this answer, tucked her striped tail around her body and continued to stare daggers at him. Occasionally Mr. Nancy would yowl in an attempt to get his attention, and the whole time this went on, Moriarty batted a felt mouse across the kitchen floor with a carefully calculated degree of aggression.
Doing his best to ignore them, Jacob switched to another news site and continued his attempt to ground himself in normalcy, but nothing could pull his focus from the continuously echoing truth that he had spent the evening talking, dancing, and flirting with Rasul Youssef, and then had bolted into the night. Even when he surrendered the tablet, gave the cats their morning kibble, and descended into the bookstore to distract himself with inventory, the events of the previous evening continued to play through his mind. The things Rasul had said, the way he kept studying Jacob with an intensity that made him want to purr.