he'd scratched out the corporate email and replaced it with his personal one.
"Okay, mom," she replied, laughing, as she went down the stairs, and then she heard a train approaching and ran for it. She made it, just, and spent the ride home torn between annoyance at his intrusive tactics, and amusement at his efforts to bend the world to his will.
The minute she stepped through her front door, she sent him a text.
"Home. Survived subway in one piece. Good night."
Five minutes later, she heard the reply ping on the kitchen table as she was hanging her clothes in the bedroom closet.
"Thank you for indulging me. Sleep well."
Emmy went to bed with a hundred questions swirling around her slightly intoxicated mind; worries about her store's future, about the Faustian pact she might be about to enter into, about Eric's real intentions. She might be about to take a leap into the unknown, with the potential for disaster; she had no idea whether he was acting in good faith, and yet, she was drawn to him, and willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
She slept fitfully — she blamed the wine — and dreamed of him, incoherent piecemeal dreams where she was in turn running away from some unnamed danger through the streets of the city, Eric by her side, hiding in a shadowy decrepit building, and, towards the morning, caught in a passionate clinch with him that woke her up with a hot flush of arousal. Her legs were squeezed together and she was out of breath, heart thudding in her chest, the phantom memory of his lips on hers still vivid.
Chapter Three
It was 10 am and Emmy was on her second cup of coffee when a bike messenger turned up on her doorstep, the thick cream envelope in his hand the twin of the one she'd received at the store a week earlier. In it, there was a copy of the current lease agreement — with amended dates all the way, and a few spaces for her and Eric to sign; and the same polite notice to quit, with July replacing April. On a separate sheet, Eric had added a handwritten note in black ink:
Just to show you I was being serious. And there could be even more time for you to attempt to change my mind, should you so wish. I will be in touch after the weekend when you have had a chance to think it over. I hope you enjoyed last night as much as I did, and you are willing to consider more of the same.
Yours in hope
Eric
The nerve of it was breathtaking, and Emmy wondered whether he annoyed her too much even to consider his weird dating/blackmail proposal, then she remembered her dream and her resolve faltered. It would've been so much easier if he were less attractive, and perhaps less infuriating. Something about their interaction reminded her of high school and that asshole Jason Doherty from the football team who used to pull stupid pranks and tease her to distraction. She'd hated him, until that night at the junior prom where, drunk on spiked punch, he'd told her he'd had a crush on her since freshman year. They'd ended up making out in the back of his mom's Oldsmobile all night, dated half the summer and he'd come that close to taking her virginity before she ditched him, two weeks shy of senior year.
Jason fucking Doherty. If that was the template for Eric Oswell, she might as well give up right now.
By the time she made it into work for a few hours on the busiest day of the week, Emmy had already been going over the past evening in detail in her head, and especially Eric’s proposal. She was certain of two things — one, that she couldn't mention it to Natalie, who would kill her; the other, that she was undeniably attracted to him, and should not even be considering his offer.
Unsurprisingly, she failed on both counts.
Customers were milling around the store when she came in, and Josh was racking up sales at the cash register where a group of students were collecting orders — Open Book's student ordering service was one of their successes. New stock had arrived, and Emmy spent some time sorting it, as well as replying to emails, and occasionally stepping onto the store floor, when more customers turned up.
Sometime mid-afternoon, during an unexpected lull, Natalie cornered her in the back basement storeroom, where Emmy