“Never mind,” he says. “We don’t have time. Are you packing up?”
In the empty, calm room my head is a storm of chaos. I grab my toiletry bag and return to the bedroom, staring at the landscape of his clothes and my clothes draped innocently together over the back of a chair. I collect mine, shoving them into my bag. “Are you—”
“Gigi, are you packing up?”
I stare at my open suitcase, my things spilling out of it. So many clothes I haven’t worn because I live in my underwear here. I wear his T-shirts. “I am, but I don’t underst—”
“Gigi,” he yells, voice unrecognizable. “Fuck. Just—please. Hurry. Pack up and leave the room.”
Hurry. Pack up and leave the room.
My phone starts shaking. My hand is trembling so hard I can barely maintain a grip. I never could have imagined how it would feel to hear him be angry with me. A physical shove would hurt less. “Okay,” I manage, but the word is garbled by a confused sob. “I don’t know what I did, but I’m so sorry.”
“Shit.” When he speaks again, his voice breaks. “I don’t know—” He cuts away again, answering someone in the background again, before telling me, “I have to go.”
I hear the burst of a door, wind, and a blast of voices all around him.
And in the melee, only one voice comes through clearly, the sharp sound of a woman cutting through the chaos—“Alexander! What’s your connection to the Jupiter scandal?”—before the call disconnects.
Eighteen
Yael is already waiting for me when I lug my suitcase out to the loading dock, and for once, I don’t even try to make nice. With my bag thrown haphazardly in the back, I climb into the passenger seat, click into the seat belt, and wordlessly hunch over my phone to figure out what Eden saw on Twitter, what might have Alec panicking.
Immediately, in Top Trends, I find it and I feel the blood drain from my face.
A shitty British tabloid has posted seven pictures of Alec escorting a woman through the back door of a club, and the post already has thousands of retweets. In each photo, he has his arm around the woman, but it is clear she can barely walk. The angle makes it look like he’s dragging her, unwilling and unconscious, into a car parked in the back alley. A coat has been tossed over her head. She could be anyone.
Fox, CNN, and BBC are all reporting the photos leaked of Alexander Kim escorting an unconscious woman from Jupiter. And because the location is so obvious—because the club name JUPITER is visible in stark black paint on the service entry just behind him, and because my enormously damning story went up only an hour ago—it was inevitable that internet sleuths would quickly discover Alec and Josef’s history. The connection is made by Twitter user @AlanJ140389, who dug up and photographed an old King’s College commencement program with a picture of Alec and Josef with their arms jovially hooked around each other’s necks.
Whoever the hooded woman is, Twitter has decided, she’s a victim. Specifically, Alec’s victim.
@rosestachio I am devastated. I loved AK in West Midlands but I am never watching that show again. Look at this pic and read this story. I’m gonna be sick. #AlexanderKim #JosefAnders #JupiterScandal Link to: LA Times, Jupiter Owners Caught on Video in VIP Sex Scandal
@tacomyburrito This is why we can’t have nice things. Literally every man is a predator. Read the LA Times story, too, it’s insane. #AlexanderKim #JupiterScandal.
@4KJules2000 These men are SCUM. #AlexanderKim #JosefAnders #TheTilts #JupiterScandal
My words are being used to bury Alec.
“He was helping Sunny, though,” I say through gritted teeth.
Yael says a simple, “Yes.”
“I don’t understand. Can’t he come forward and say that yes, he was there, but he was helping someone get out of the club?” I scroll through the hashtags #JupiterScandal and #AlexanderKim.
“No one will believe him now unless he gives a name. Of course anyone caught like that would say they had a good reason to be there.”
“Then he could explain that he’s helping his sister out of the club on a night she was drugged.” I look over at Yael. “It would take two seconds to fix this. We have it all written up; we could just give names. In ten minutes, he could come clean about what happened, explain what this is. He’s the hero, not the villain.”
I pull out my Batphone and text him, Alec you have to get out in front of this!!
I wait ten seconds while it slowly sends, burning a hole in my phone with my focus. Finally, I hit send on another: Let me help you!
Neither message sends. They turn green, hovering in the void. He’s shut off his Gigi Phone.
Even so, I call, and then call again. I call our room—his room, now, I guess. With a blister forming on my lungs every time I inhale, I wonder if he’ll even sleep there tonight or if he’s already on a plane back to London.
I call his phone again. Each time, it goes straight to voicemail.