If she could have come up with another person who had access to the kind of information she needed, she never would have called Jay—at least she hoped she wouldn’t have. She’d come to terms with suffering through his class for a few weeks, but this was different. It put her in closer contact to him.

Maybe that’s what you were angling for.

“Oh, shut up,” she said to that persistent and irritating voice in her head. She did not want to be close to Jay. Not now. Not ever. This was just a necessity, a means to an end.

“Date my ass,” she muttered, leaving the restroom and yanking her jacket from a peg.

With a wave to Ezma, she was out the back door of the restaurant, where two of the line cooks were smoking in the blue illumination from the security lights. The night was cool, a mist sliding through the parked cars in the lot and clinging to the drooping branches of the single tree.

Kristi took off at a jog for the Watering Hole. The student hangout would be crowded enough so that it wouldn’t feel intimate, yet there were spots in the connecting rooms that were quieter than the open space around the sports bar. There was a chance Jay might be seen with her, but she figured it didn’t matter. Who would care?

Barely breaking a sweat, she made it to the hangout only eight minutes late. Shouldering open the door, she slid inside. With a quick perusal of the semidark, crowded interior, she zeroed in on Jay seated at the bar, nursing a drink, staring up at a television screen where some football game was being played. He was facing away from her, but she recognized his shaggy brown hair, wide shoulders stretching the back of a gray sweatshirt, and jeans she’d seen him wear in class, the battered, sun-bleached ones with a tear at the top of a back pocket. The stool beside him was empty, but he’d claimed it by resting the sole of his beat-up Adidas running shoe upon one of the cross-rails, as if he were saving her a seat.

Fat chance. She knew he hadn’t wanted to come. She’d heard the hesitation in his voice.

But then, Kristi couldn’t blame him. It had taken her half a week to work up to calling him, and the only reason she had was that she was desperate and needed help. His help.

She took in a deep breath as she wended her way between the tables and knots of patrons talking, laughing, flirting, and drinking. Glasses clinked, beer sloshed, ice cubes rattled, and the smell of smoke hung in the air despite all the efforts of a wheezing air-filtering system. The televisions were muted but music wafting from speakers mounted high on the walls competed with the noise of the crowd.