“I notice le boyfriend is not in attendance,” he said.
“He . . . he had to go do something with his parents,” Ariana replied.
“Ah, what a good boy he is,” Jasper said, moving even closer to her. So close their knees brushed. “I’m just curious as to why a girl like you would bother wasting her time with a guy like him.”
Ariana’s heart pounded in every inch of her body. Any second someone could walk in here and see them. See Jasper leaning toward her. See her looking up at him. Note the clandestine setting. Palmer would know in an instant. But still, she couldn’t seem to pull herself away. “What do you mean, a guy like him?” she asked.
Jasper shook his head, as if the answer was so blatantly obvious. “Boring as white bread. Virtuous as a priest.”
Ariana balked. “I’ll have you know that he and I—”
Jasper held up a hand. “Spare me the unsavory details,” he said. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about everything else. Do you think Palmer Liriano has ever done anything even remotely wrong? Remotely questionable. Remotely . . . naughty?” He looked her up and down in a way that made her blush all over. Then he grinned into her face. “Yeah. Didn’t think so.” He took a step closer, nudging her so far back her entire body was flat against the wall. “Let me tell you something, Ana Covington. Something I know about you that you may not know about yourself. You, my friend, need some excitement in your life. Some complexity. That guy? He’s never going to be enough for you.”
Ariana was so flustered she could hardly think straight, not a familiar sensation for her. She hated that she was letting him get to her.
“Not enough?” she asked finally. “Who could be better for me than the president of the student body? The second in command at S and G?” she said, lowering her voice. “Who could possibly have more to offer than the son of a professional athlete and one of the most respected congresswomen in the House?”
Jasper smiled slowly, looking directly into Ariana’s eyes. His nose was mere millimeters from hers. The flap of his jacket lightly grazed the front of her brown dress. His eyes flicked to her lips, and Ariana felt her heart catch and her toes curl.“You need,” he said quietly, “a guy like me.”
Then he leaned in, closing the minute gap between their lips. For a wisp of a moment Ariana let go. She moved into him. But at the last second she lifted her hand, and all Jasper got to kiss were her fingers.
His eyes darted open, and he looked at her, stunned. Ariana felt proud, suddenly, for her self-control.
“Actually, there is something I need from you,” she said. “I need you to get me a Valium prescription.”
At that moment, a bell rang out in the parlor, the double doors behind Jasper opened, and out rushed the wait staff with bowls and plates full of steaming food.
“Brunch is served!” someone announced in the next room.
Saved by the bell, Ariana though
t. And then, with a satisfied smirk and a quick smoothing of her skirt, she turned and walked away from him.
At the third bail bonds storefront, in the bowels of Washington DC, Ariana finally struck pay dirt. There was a man there—if the troll she was faced with constituted a man—with the means of forging a very authentic-looking birth certificate. All he needed, he said, was ten thousand dollars. Cash. When he’d told her this, he’d done so with an evil, knowing, gap-toothed smile, as if he’d expected her to faint dead away. Instead, she had walked out, taken a bus to the nearest branch of her bank (she had decided not to bring her car into this particular part of town, since she would rather it not get stolen), and returned twenty minutes later with the money.
When the disgusting little man’s watery eyes had widened, she’d felt a distinct hum of satisfaction in her bones. Now Ariana stood in the center of the grimiest room she’d ever had the distinct horror of entering, making sure not to touch a single surface as she waited for him to complete his work. She was certain that if she laid so much as a fingertip on the oil-smeared metal bookcases, the table littered with fast-food containers, or the walls with their pockmarks and unidentifiable stains, she would die of hepatitis on the spot.
“Here you go.”
The man turned around from his cluttered desk, stubbing out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. He exhaled two plumes of smoke as he handed over the green and white document that stated that Emma Jane Walsh had been born sixteen years prior on January 9 in Denver, Colorado. Ariana breathed a sigh of relief, ignoring the protestation in her lungs over having inhaled so many carcinogens while she waited. With this and the Emma Walsh driver’s license she’d had made in Texas, she could get herself a real passport. And with a real passport, she would be able to flee the country if Lexa spilled about what had happed on Halloween.
“Thank you, Mr. Blaze,” Ariana said curtly, folding the birth certificate into her bag.
“Pleasure doing business with you, sweetheart,” he drawled, lighting another cigarette. He tore open the paper band around the stack of bills she’d brought him and started to count them. “Please come again.”
That’ll be the day, Ariana thought.
She used her elbow to shove open the swinging door of his office and speed-walked past the counter, where two middle-aged men turned away from the hockey game on TV long enough to leer at her. The second she stepped out into the frigid November air, she took a long, deep, cleansing breath. Everything was going to be fine. Her backup plan was in place. Then she looked up and down the seedy, semideserted street. A garbage can had been overturned near the wall, and a scraggly cat was picking through the debris, while two men all in black argued loudly near the corner.
Now all she had to do was live long enough for the bus to arrive. She sidestepped a swaying drunk and stood near the broken and graffitied bench at the bus stop. Her phone rang.
“Dammit,” Ariana cursed under her breath, the life all but scared out of her. She dug her phone out and rolled her eyes when she saw Jasper’s face on the screen. She hit the talk button and brought the phone to her ear.
“What?”
“Wow. Tense, are we?” Jasper replied.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Ariana said impatiently, eyeing a scary dude with a scar across his lip as he strolled by. He eyed her right back and puckered his lips at her. It was all Ariana could do to keep her lunch down. “What do you want?”