Scandalized

Tucking the long foam cylinders under our arms, we float facing each other, catching our breath. I want to bottle this feeling so I can sip from it in the days and weeks and years to come. I keep pushing it down, but the awareness that Alec is genuinely perfect rises up in unexpected moments, shooting a spear of pain through my chest.

And then he meets my eyes, and my lungs do a tender wilt at the piercing realization that he brought me out here specifically to talk. I liked our Laguna Beach bubble.

“I have permission to tell you everything now,” he says quietly.

“Wait—why? What changed?”

“I told my source that I was talking to you specifically, and they told me it was okay to share.”

“Me specifically?”

He nods.

I don’t understand. But— “As much as it kills me to say this, you’ll have to tell me only as your two-week stand.” I try to smile. “Conflict of interest, you know?”

“Well, it would be off the record anyway.” He dips his fingertips in the water and lifts his hand, letting the drops catch sunlight as they fall. “But I think it would feel good to tell someone who understands. And maybe the information can help you find something else, even if you can’t write up this specific account.”

Gray area. The life of a journalist. “Tell me anything you’re comfortable sharing.”

“I’m not sure of the best place to start.” He stares up at the sky for a beat before taking a deep breath. “Okay.” Alec blows his cheeks out as he exhales. “An old uni friend of mine from the UK is a man named Josef Anders.”

He glances at me, logging the reaction I know I can’t hide. My stomach positively bottoms out and I feel shocked blankness take over my expression.

He smiles sadly. “I take from your reaction that you’ve heard the name.”

“I have. A lot. He’s one of the owners. His name is all over this.”

Alec places a hand over his brow, squinting over at me. “I suspect it is.”

Thunder. My heartbeat feels like thunder beneath my breastbone.

“During college I had a group of friends with whom I was very close,” he says. “And then when I returned to London after my time in South Korea, a few of us reconnected. I mean, we were all busy, so we weren’t as close as we had been, but we would see each other once a month or so.”

“I swear I’ve looked at every photo of Anders online, and haven’t seen any of the two of you together,” I say, confused. “I never came across this connection.”

“Because our friendship is older than either of our careers,” he says. “We didn’t go out together for photo ops. The group spent time together at each other’s homes.” He swallows, blinking past me. “In the way that my family isn’t photographed at home, we all protected our old friends.”

A ball of black tar settles in my stomach. I am dying to know everything Alec knows but am also preemptively devastated over whatever it is that he might share about a once-close friend.

“Also around the time I moved back to England, Sunny began modeling. She was making a small name for herself in the industry. My friends would spend time at my family’s home.” He swallows. “And at some point, Josef and Sunny began dating.”

“Oh wow.” I mentally scroll through my file on Anders. “I had no idea.”

“You wouldn’t. Sunny’s private life is even more locked down than mine.” He nods, dipping his chin beneath the water’s surface. “But this would be maybe two years ago? Of course they’d known each other since Josef and I were at uni together, but he met her when she was thirteen, so that was a little weird.” Alec looks briefly at me, and then away again. “At first they kept it from everyone. Not even the other guys knew. We would all get together for dinner or to watch a match, and he never said anything about it. She was the one who told me, after they’d been together several months.”

“Were you mad?” I ask.

He thinks on this for a few quiet moments, and the water laps up over his chin, touching his lips. He slips beneath the surface of the water, emerging after a moment and swiping the glimmering droplets out of his eyes. “Honestly, I think I was more worried than mad. I’d known him to be a mostly decent person, but he’d had a lot of girlfriends over the years, and he knew that I wouldn’t want for my sister to get wrapped up in someone who might not be careful with his lovers’ feelings.”

“I get that.”

“But whatever, she was an adult,” he says. “Wasn’t really up to me, yeah?” Alec squints behind me, to the waves crashing on the beach. “You probably know that Josef was in a band, the Tilts, that had a hit song before they dissolved.” He trails his fingers in the water and we float in tight silence for a minute, bobbing gently in the ocean. Alec continues to draw shapes in the water, and I wonder if he’s spelling something out. Somehow, even being an actor, he seems like the kind of person who first writes longhand what he wants to say in difficult moments like this.

“But he was the primary songwriter, and ‘Turn It Up’ is still played at nearly every major sporting event in the UK. It’s made him a good deal of money, and Josef invested very well. He channeled some of this income into Jupiter.”

It’s information I already have, but it still feels like a gut punch. “Right.”

He looks at me and reaches forward to absently stroke a hand along the goose bumps erupting on my arm. “When it really grew in popularity, he was there all the time.”