Too bad the only enemy was her. The things, the desires, in her.
“Everything kind of came to a head—bad choice of words, you’ll see why in a second—when I met this guy at a club. Colin. I really liked him. We met up and danced a couple of weekends in a row and he asked if I wanted to ‘get out of here,’ which, you know, means that a guy wants something from you. I was drunk and feeling like giving it because he was hot and I liked him. A lot. He was handsome, and he had a nice smile. He thought I was pretty.” She rolled her eyes then looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to look at Alex right now.
This reminded her of standing in her father’s office, sweating and shaking, about to embarrass herself fatally, because she didn’t know what else to do. Because if she didn’t expose herself to her father, she would be exposing herself to the whole world.
“Anyway, I ended up in the backseat of the car with him. Which... You know what that means. We parked at the beach. At least it wasn’t a back parking lot somewhere—that makes it less sordid. Kind of. He got out his video camera. Pre the days of cell phone recordings, and thank God because the whole thing was much more concrete back then, not this nebulous digital web that could have had it in a thousand places immediately.”
“What did he do?”
“He filmed me. He asked and I thought, why not? I thought it was hot that he wanted to commemorate the event. I was drunk. I was seventeen. And right when he asked me to do it I thought maybe I even loved him, because being drunk and seventeen is basically all it takes to feel like you love someone. He wanted me, and I... Well, what I really loved was being wanted. For me, you know. Because, clearly, my blow job skills were the essence of me as a woman.”
“He videotaped you...”
“Going down on him. Yes. And the next morning I woke up with a raging headache and very little memory of it. Until he came around the villa the following evening looking for things to go further. I said no because...I didn’t feel ready for sex yet. Which maybe doesn’t make a lot of sense but...I just knew I wasn’t. He got mad and he threatened me. Because he had the video and he was going to send it out. To the media, to the internet. And I was...so afraid that he would. That...that would be out there. Me...doing that. Thinking about it makes me panic even now. I just...can’t imagine anything more exposing or humiliating. Though telling my father about it and begging him to bail me out was a close second.”
“And what happened?”
“He made it all go away. He protected me, because that’s what he’s always done. But he...he was so disappointed, I could tell. And that was when he told me he wasn’t protecting me anymore. He told me that anything could have happened to me. Driving drunk, going off with strange men... He said I was going to get myself killed and he wouldn’t watch while I did it. He wouldn’t enable it. No more help. No more money. No more family. He said I had to behave myself, or lose everything. And...I have. Until now. Probably I’m cut off, I suppose, but...but...”
“That’s why you aren’t calling home.”
She nodded silently. “I don’t want to know.” Her eyes stung, but still, there were no tears. “I don’t want to see him look at me that way ever again. Like I’m a...lost cause. I don’t know why I did all that stuff, not really. But I know why I stopped. Because I wanted more out of my life than what I was going to get partying until my brain fell out of my ear.”
“And that more was marrying a man you didn’t love or even want to sleep with?”
His words hit her, cold and hard in the chest.