Page 16 of The Lonely Road

How is it that a woman I talked to in my life for no more than fifteen minutes is taking up so much real estate inside my head?

I have no answer that makes sense. It’s all irrational shit, like chemistry and past-life connection.

I pass a minivan doing forty in a sixty-five. A family—three kids in the back, somewhere between two and ten. The father looks hassled. The mother, who is behind the wheel, looks worse.

What’s between Taya and me is subtle—a tension that manifested loudly at Wild Coffee, where I was waiting for her. She usually gets a cup of coffee between noon and one in the afternoon, so I knew she’d come by.

My intention was to talk, flirt, and ask her out to dinner.

I did talk to her. We did flirt. But I didn’t ask her out because when you meet someone who is on the exact same wavelength as you, so much so that they can see you and you can see them, it screws with your head.

It definitely screwed with mine.

Snap out of it, Brooks!

She’s a job. She doesn’t know that, but you do. So, the fact that she’s attracted to you is a positive.

But my being just as attracted to her is not.

I slow down as 82 becomes Main Street, turning over how I’m going to handle the Taya situation. I brought up the fact that she was a lawyer—that’s something. A setup to get to the Whitman case, which I’d have done over dinner. The dinner I didn’t ask her to.

She doesn’t seem the type to blurt out case strategy just because she likes a man. Which means I need the dinner.

I’ve slept with marks before. I don’t have a problem with it as long as it’s consensual and everyone’s having fun. I make no claims about emotional involvement—that’s a line I don’t cross. The question is whether I can keep it that clean with her.

I turn on my right blinker and get on South Galena Street.

Of course, I can keep it clean.

If we fuck, we fuck. No harm, no foul. She has some fun. I have some fun. I get what Jessup needs. And then I’m gone—just some guy who passed through, took her to dinner, and moved on.

I turn left onto East Dean Street.

The thought sits wrong before I’ve finished having it. A blip in her life. I’ll just be a blip.

I don’t like that.

I hand the keys of the rental truck to the valet outside the St. Regis.

Senator Otis Jessup is staying here for the week, in a suite that runs four thousand a night and looks exactly like every other four-thousand-a-night suite in every luxury hotel in every mountain town in the American West—pale stone, reclaimed wood, a view of the Rockies that costs extra. The whole place is designed to make you believe money is the natural state of things, and everything else is a failure of imagination.

Jessup’s man is waiting in the lobby and takes me up without a word. I haven’t seen anyone from Wildflower Canyon, but the valley is small, and the precaution is real—my connection to Jessup stays quiet.

The senator is standing by the window when I walk in, in a silk robe, a drink in hand. It’s very Hugh Hefner—his way of making it clear I’m the help.

Like I give a fuck.

I work for men like Otis Jessup—men who think they have power. But when something actually needs to get done, they come to people like me who are morally flexible, efficient, and willing to get our hands dirty, so they don’t have to.

They think they own me.

It’s the other way around.

I decide how much help they get and what kind. I let them win when it suits me—when they pay me enough.

“Mason.” He says my name with a warmth of ownership. “Appreciate you making the drive.”

“Senator.” I take the chair he gestures toward.