***
That idiot had, indeed, signed up using his own email address. It had been simple enough to call my contact in the company—the amount of people who try to blackmail others by using their real name would astound you—and get them to shut down the account and report him to the authorities. Blackmail, even when done over email by some moron who wasn’t ballsy enough to ask for more than five large, is still illegal.
Just to make sure the issue wouldn’t get brought up again after the idiot did his time, I’d made a call to another contact of mine, this one on the Fairy side of things rather than the human. Jax was a broker of sorts, someone who could get you things from places most people couldn’t, but never for nefarious purposes. He’d never say how he got what you needed, but as long as you could prove it was for good rather for evil, he’d have it for you within the hour.
Roxanne hadn’t believed I’d solved all her problems in less than a day, but had agreed to meet me for lunch anyway. When she walked up, I could see how age and motherhood had settled into her skin, plumping her up, wrinkling the corners of her eyes ever so slightly, and making her even more beautiful than she’d been twenty years ago.
“Mel?” she asked, her jaw dropping open, her brown eyes wide. “You look … nothing like Mel.”
“My hair’s a little shorter but that’s about it,” I said, getting to my feet to pull out her chair and gesture for her to have a seat. She stared for a moment, looking me over once more before shaking her head. Usually getting the thrice over from a lovely woman, even a happily married one, made me feel pretty good. In the wake of everything that had happened in the weeks before, I felt my insides squirm.
Finally Roxanne sat, turning her head to stare at me as I circled from behind her to the empty seat across the small table.
“Your husband wouldn’t like you staring,” I said, trying to make it sound confident rather than nervous. Damn, it was like being in high school all over again.
“Staring isn’t cheating. Especially when you’re staring because someone looks as good as you do. I mean, you were always cute, but damn.”
“I—“ I laughed, shaking my head, unable to articulate for a moment. Jesus, the succubus had scrambled my brain harder than I’d realized. I still wasn’t back to my old, confident self. Thank god I hadn’t gone home and run into Gwen. She’d have smelled the insecurity on me and pounced.
Sure, I’d tried many a time to get her on top of me but not with her claws at my throat. Then again, maybe I deserved a few swipes here and there. I did have a tendency to ruin her day.
“Sorry,” Roxanne said after a few moments. “I remember you were always insecure in high school. I just figured maybe that had changed since you became a beefcake.”
“Beefcake?”
Instead of explaining, Roxanne just reached out and pinched my biceps, nodding appreciatively. I snorted.
“Fair enough. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
Roxanne laughed and looked down to flip to the back of the menu real quick, as the waiter had almost made it to the table. We each ordered a drink, and she waited until we were alone outside the small café before leaning in close.
“Did you take care of it?”
“I did. Do you remember Steve Cameron?”
“I think so. Didn’t know him well but he hung around in the group I ran with sometimes. Um, was it him?”
“You don’t remember him being there the night you ruined the roses?”
Roxanne bit her lip, her eyes drifting, before she shook her head. “I don’t know. By the time I got behind the wheel, we’d been out getting into trouble for awhile. A lot of people had come and gone.”
“Well, he’d come, taken some pictures, and gone, it seems.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the old photo, handing it over. “Not much more to see with the real thing, but he won’t be showing up in a year trying the same thing twice.”
“I don’t understand why he tried it in the first place!”
“He’s a bad guy,” I said with a shrug. “He needed money quick and I guess figured it would be easier to get it from you than to play the lottery or, I don’t know, get a fucking job.”
Roxanne squinted at the grainy proof of her stupid mistake for a few seconds before tearing it up into tiny pieces and dropping it in her water glass. “What a jerk.”
“You got any other stones you need to keep unturned?”
“I didn’t even know I had that one,” she said. “I mean, I knew I’d messed up, but it’s been two decades, I figured if it hadn’t come out yet, it wasn’t going to. The roses have grown back, who knew Steve-o was gonna show up out of the blue?”
“Next time, just tell your husband. Or go to the police.”
“Yeah, okay,” Roxanne said, looking a little sheepish. “It was nice to see you, though. We should catch up for real some time. You can come to dinner. You and the girlfriend, if you’ve got one.”
“Nope, single.”
“Well, then just come to dinner and bring your muscles. My kid hasn’t quite sprouted, yet, and he’s worried he never will. You can tell him all about how high school sucks, but that it gets better.”
“Oh joy,” I said. “My favorite subject.”
Roxanne laughed, leaning back as the waiter set down her soda.