I blinked. “Shut up, Jordan,” I said, downing the rest of my beer. “You never could hold your liquor. You need something to eat.” I waved the waiter over and ordered three different appetizers while Jordan watched me with a completely baffled look on his face.

After a stretch of silence while we each checked our phones, he finally looked up. “Hey man, I’m sorry. Actually I think she’s a nice girl. She’s just young, you know? What’s she, like, nineteen?”

“Twenty-two.”

“That’s pretty damn young.”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “It’s only four years younger than me.”

“You’ve got the brain and experience of a thirty-five-year-old on the inside, though, man.”

I shrugged. The waiter came with our appetizers and asked if I wanted another drink. I ordered a mineral water. Jordan rolled his eyes, but said nothing. He knew better than to get me to drink anything hard.

In spite of declaring he wasn’t hungry, Jordan began to devour a plate of hot barbecue wings. I sampled the sashimi.

“So what do you make of all this?” he asked after a long silence.

“The insurance bullshit?”

“Yeah. All the talk of possibly settling.”

“I’m going to fight that. I don’t want to settle.”

Jordan raised his eyebrows. “People do it all the time, bro. And the public realizes why that is. It’s not an admission of guilt.”

“That’s how it appears, though. Appearances are very important. I have a feeling the fallout from this is going to get pretty unpleasant.”

“The news has moved on to all that stuff going on in the Middle East.”

“Hmm,” I said as I finished up a bit of Brie cheese spread on crusty bread. “Tell that to the news magazine van that stalks me in the campus parking lot, trying to squeeze a statement out of me.”

Jordan’s brow furrowed. “Maybe we need to hire you a bodyguard or something—just for the next little while,” he added when he detected my protest. “Don’t take chances, Adam. We don’t know what the repercussions from this are going to be. That outside PR firm I hired—”

“Has been pretty useless so far. They want me to do interviews. I don’t have time for that shit. I have the Con to get ready for. That has the potential to help PR more than just about anything they can do.”

I sat back, not having eaten much. I was no longer hungry. I checked my phone again.

“Everything okay? You’re checking your phone more often than my little sister who’s still in high school.”

“I’m fine. I think a workout and then an early night might be a good idea.”

“The night’s still young and that blonde is still undressing you with her eyes.”

“Enough already with the blonde. Jesus Christ, you are the horniest geek in Manhattan.”

“Better the horniest than the most boring,” he said and I flipped him the bird while I

signed off on the bill.

I was halfway through my workout and had the treadmill going at near full speed. With my headphones on, I was running to the backbeat of eighties alternative band Erasure when my phone chimed with a text message.

I picked it up and looked at it, expecting some smartass remark from Jordan or maybe even a snapshot of the mythical blonde he’d been going on about. I almost stumbled when I saw it was from Emilia.

Fucking finally. I clicked on my chat app to read it, powering down the treadmill to a slow walk.

Just wanted to let you know I moved my stuff out today. We’ll talk when you get home from NYC.

I did stumble then and almost fell off the fucking contraption, reading it over and over again. Soon as I caught my breath, I called her.

It went straight to voicemail. Fucking bullshit.

My fingers were stiff with anger as I tapped out the reply.

Answer the goddamn phone.

She responded two minutes later as I was wiping off my face and the equipment.

I’m not going to talk about this on the phone. Text me when you get back & we can talk then.

My hand closed around the damn thing. I took a deep breath, downed an entire bottle of water and walked back to my room before I called her again.

No answer.

“Texting me that you moved out is a really fucking shitty thing to do, Emilia. Now put on your big girl panties and talk to me,” I snarled to her voicemail. She never called back.

I was panicking now, big time. This was no longer a game of chicken. This shit was getting real. And I couldn’t find one scrap of ancient Chinese war wisdom to support me in how I’d behaved. In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.