“You’ve had a rough time of it.” He spoke the words gently. Too gently. Perversely, she wanted more sniping. More testing.
“Oh, but there’s more,” she said.
“Do tell.”
“I was supposed to be staying in the apartment and not attracting any undue attention until Dan came back from a meeting. We’d planned to fly to Wisconsin tomorrow and then drive up to Michigan to stay at my family’s cabin for Labor Day, only Dan and his agent put that on hold until after they talked to the PR people for the Jets. But instead I waited for them to leave for a meeting and then snuck out.”
“Nice.”
“I left a note on the fridge breaking up with him.”
“Ouch. After he proposed?”
“I know.”
“How long were you two a thing?”
“Four years.”
He winced.
“But this whole last year was long-distance. And even before that, we never lived together because he was in Green Bay and I was in Manitowoc.”
“Isn’t Manitowoc, like, thirty minutes from Green Bay?”
“Yeah. We saw each other a lot.”
“But you couldn’t rent a place together or something?”
May shrugged. They could have. They hadn’t. And it wasn’t this man’s business, but she kept blurting anyway, needing him to know she wasn’t as heartless as she might seem. “I tried breaking up with him a bunch of times yesterday, but he didn’t want to have the conversation. He would just be, like, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’ But today his agent was around all morning, and we didn’t talk about it. So I thought, ‘Forget it, I’m going home.’ I was on my way to Newark airport.”
“Why Newark?”
“We live in Jersey usually. That’s where Dan’s house is, in Florham Park.”
“So what’s in the Meatpacking District?”
“His apartment.”
Ben cast his eyes at the ceiling, making it clear what he thought of turncoat quarterbacks who used their ill-gotten loot to purchase both a house and an apartment.
“So anyway, I was going to fly out of Newark.”
“Never fly out of Newark.”
“I didn’t even get that far. I only got to the lobby of the apartment building, and there were all these paparazzi around the elevator. One of them grabbed me by the arm and led me outside. I thought he was a security guard who was trying to help me avoid the mob, but, in fact, he was just taking me into an alley away from all the other ones so he could steal my purse.”
Both eyebrows lifted. “You got yourself robbed?”
“Well, it’s not like I asked him to rob me.”
“You went with some strange guy.”
“I thought he was security.”
“What made you think that?”
“He had a black polyester jacket on.”
Ben let out a judgmental huff of air. She found herself smiling again.
Her situation had not improved, and now he thought she was a moron. But for some reason, being subjected to Ben’s scorn made her feel more cheerful than she’d been all day.
He put some terrible drug in your drink from a secret vial in his jacket. It makes you confess all this personal stuff and pass out, and then he’s going to carry you back to his apartment and have his wicked way with you.
Of course, he couldn’t outweigh her by more than a few pounds. In order to carry her off and ravish her, he’d have to get a helper. Or a dolly.
“He steal your suitcase, too?”
“What? Oh. No. I don’t have one. We went straight from the site of the forking to Dan’s apartment. I’ve only been there a couple times. I didn’t have anything to pack.” Or many options for what to wear. Which was why she was wearing her old jersey and these terrible shoes. “I figured I’d get whatever I needed back home before I drove up to Michigan,” she said with a shrug.
“Did you report it?”
“Report what?”
“The theft.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t see the point.”
It seemed so unlikely that the police would be able to do anything, and if she’d gone back into the building to call 9-1-1, the cameramen would have followed her. They’d have yelled questions at her, taken her picture as she waited for the police to arrive.
THOR’S GIRLFRIEND FLEES LOVE NEST!!!
FORKING FIANCÉE IS VICTIM OF HATE CRIME!!!
“You don’t have faith in the NYPD?”
“I figured there wasn’t much hope of getting my purse back. A few days ago, I sat by a policeman on the PATH train, and he was telling me about budget cuts and how their resources are stretched really thin.”