Now the video blackmail I had on Penny was out of the question though. I had shamed her once in her life and I would never do it again, no matter what the personal cost to me might be.
I sat with those feelings for hours, until my desk chair became so uncomfortable that I had to get up. The sun was starting to rise and it was Sunday morning. I knew what I needed to do.
I picked up my phone and dialed Penny’s number. There was no answer, so I left the message I should have given her a decade before.
“Penny, I am so desperately sorry for what I have done. There’s no excuse and no way to explain it all away. Please let me have the chance to tell you this face to face. We can talk it out. Come to my apartment. I’ll be here all day.” I paused for a moment, realizing that the message was still vague and that she might not understand what I was apologizing for.
“I remember you,” I said, then hung up the phone.
Chapter 10
Penny
I was grateful then that it had been the end of the school year when it had all happened. It made it easier that way. I wasn’t going to have to stick around for a long time, not like if it had happened in the middle of the year. That would have been an entirely different story. In all likelihood, I would have dropped out and ruined an entire year of college credit.
But as it was, I had one final left to take a few days later and my plan was to finish that and head home. There was no way I wanted to take a chance that I would see Pete anywhere on campus between now and then. I packed up my things and tried to make the best of what was a very embarrassing, but thankfully private situation.
That lasted all of twelve hours. When I woke up the next day there was a video entitled “Nerdy Girl Asks Jock to Fuck Her Hard” making the rounds on social media and I could have died. I didn’t leave my room and when my roommate asked me about the video I remained silent. It was everywhere. It had been tagged and shared all over campus so that most people knew what had happened. A few people recognized me and named me in the comments. It was out there and it was everywhere. The story got some traction in the campus newspaper and no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, the thing was there. They had thankfully left my face off of the video, instead choosing to focus on Pete.
Even that had been a failure though. You would think that if his face was plastered everywhere that the focus would have shifted to him and he would have been the one dealing with the backlash. But the place they had set up the camera made it impossible to tell who Pete was in the video. No one knew it was their start football player. Nobody could have guessed that it was one of the rising stars of the business college. He never received any kind of backlash or reprisal for what he had done, which seemed like a particularly cruel twist to the story.
I had ditched my glasses and straightened my hair, pulling on a ball cap before I headed to my last final. It was enough to change my appearance so that I wasn’t immediately recognized when I exited the dorm. As soon as the test was over I rushed back to my room, gathered up the rest of my things, and left the University for good.
Even ten years down the road, I knew that if I looked hard enough, typed in just the right keywords in a search, I could find the video that made my skin crawl and my heart break into a million pieces.
He had hurt me, badly. So why was I now taking the elevator up to his top floor penthouse on a Sunday morning at the crack of dawn? I didn’t know if he was really going to apologize to me or if this was some other kind of cruel prank he was going to play on me. Maybe he was angry about Expose and the story we were going to do on him and Club V. It would be his livelihood that was up in smoke.
The chimes on the elevator rang and I wondered if elevators were my lot in life as I stepped off and straight out into Pete Wilson’s living room.
He stood there by his dining table in a pair of jeans and a tailored shirt. He was still dressed far more casually than I was used to seeing him. And god did his body still look great. Even though I was mad as hell and didn’t plan on changing that anytime soon, I could still admit that Pete Wilson was one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen and definitely the hottest I’d ever had sex with.
“Thank you for coming,” he said in a quieter, lower tone than I’d ever heard from him.
“Listen, I don’t really want to be here and I don’t know what you could possibly have to say to me.”
He took a step in my direction and then stopped.
“You’re so beautiful.”
I looked at him curiously. “Compliments aren’t going to get you anywhere.”
He shook his head as if he were trying to clear his mind. “No, I know that they aren’t going to. That’s not what it’s about. And like I said in the message, there is no way I can explain what I did, but there is something about all of that I need to tell you. Will you have a seat?”
I took a breath and moved to sit on the couch in the middle of his living room. He joined me there but kept a respectful distance.
“I’m not going to try to put the responsibility on anyone else, but I do want you to know it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want to do that to you. Yeah, they dared me to ask you out on a date, but you want to know something about me, even then? I never did anything I didn’t want to do. You might have thought you were an ugly duckling, but we all have our awkward phases. Hell, I’ve got a few pictures from when I was in high school that you should see.”
“You can’t possibly mean that you wanted to go on a date with me.” It was a crazy thought and one that I wouldn’t accept as truth.
He nodded his head though. “What can I say? I heard you discussing some things in that chem lab we had together—yes, I remember you from the chem lab. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you…well…I mean, you’ve clearly flowered into a ver
y beautiful woman and some things have changed, but your voice. Your voice is still very similar to what it was when we were younger.”
I shrugged. “Thanks, I guess. I still don’t know what this is about.”
Pete let out a deep sigh. “I wanted you.”
“What?”