The Perfect Date by Iris Baxter

Author:Iris Baxter [Baxter, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Part 2

Chapter 13

I don’t know where the time flies. After the police arrive, everything sort of melds together. I vaguely remember talking with the police officers and going with Sean to the hospital so they could take a look at his head.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” he tells me before they rush him inside the doctor’s office.

I don’t see him after that. It may sound selfish, but I don’t have enough room in my head after that for him. All I keep thinking about is Joshua breaking in and ruining my date with Sean. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at Sean the same way anyway.

Not after that night.

Any chances we had of a successful relationship were snuffed out by Joshua. In a way, he’s won. He’s in custody, awaiting trial, but no matter what happens, no matter how many years he gets, he will have left his mark on me.

Sometimes, I think that’s exactly what he wanted all along. If he can’t have me, then he might as well traumatize me so much that I never look at another man the same way.

I know I’m exaggerating. I’ll get better someday. Right now, I just need time for that. And when I do get better, I’m going to start dating so hard that I’ll meet the man of my dreams and marry him and have a happy life…while Joshua rots in prison.

It will be my ultimate screw you to him.

But that day seems like an eternity away.

I’ve become too sensitive to the stimuli around me. Something as simple as the smell of wine or peanut butter, or the sound of the door slamming shut, can transport me back to that cellar. It only lasts for brief moments, but it’s enough to disorient me.

I’m a lot more careful in the streets. If I feel like someone might be following me—and I get that feeling a lot these days just from seeing someone glancing in my direction—I move to a more crowded area. I also carry Rachel’s pepper spray with me, and I’m thinking of getting a gun.

I know this all seems like too much for such a mild experience, but I can’t express how vulnerable the entire event has left me feeling. Joshua had gone out of his way to locate me at the house of my date, knocked Sean out, locked me in the cellar, and then let me out, pretending to be the hero while blaming Sean as the perpetrator.

He won’t admit to that, though. I’m told he’s sticking with his story that he got an anonymous text about me being in danger and that, when he arrived, he got into a fight with Sean. According to his story, I was already in the cellar when he arrived.

Although the police weren’t able to pinpoint which phone the anonymous text had come from, they speculate Joshua sent that text from a burner phone to himself to get the suspicion off of him.

The dealbreaker, however, is the fact that he’d been tracking me with the spy app.

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