Flawed (Ethan Frost 4)

“A couple of years. Why?” I start to get up, to go for my phone despite my father’s disapproving look. But he beats me to the punch, pulling out his own and swiping his finger across it a couple of times before setting it down on the kitchen table between us.

It only takes a second or two before the unmistakable sound of a couple having sex fills my apartment. A few seconds after that I recognize Alexander as being the guy in the film. I have a moment—just a moment—to think that the idiot actually took the less-than-genuine advice I’d given him last night when the woman in the video raises her head and looks straight at the camera. And that’s when it hits me. This isn’t some random sex tape Alexander made with some woman from Kathy and Jim’s party last night.

No, this is so much worse. Because the woman with the blue hair staring out at me from my father’s phone—the woman who is taking it doggy-style from one of Hollywood’s hottest young actors—is me.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod. Oh. My. God.

For long seconds, it’s all I can think as I stare at the screen. As my father stares anywhere but at the screen. As the sounds of Alexander’s moans—and the slap of his hand on my ass—fill the kitchen.

When he starts with his lame version of dirty talk—and how could I have forgotten how truly lame it was—I lunge for the phone and hit PAUSE before my father hears things no father should ever have to hear being said to, or about, his daughter.

Then again, judging from the frost in his eyes and the way his jaw is working, he’s already heard.

Fuck. Is it too much to ask for the ground to open up and swallow me whole right here, right now?

The son of a bitch. The dirty, rotten son of a bitch. I’m not sure what shocks me more—the fact that he leaked a sex tape of us to the press or that a sex tape of us even exists. Because I sure as hell never agreed to let him record us having sex—I’ve never agreed to let anyone do that.

I’ve never trusted anyone enough, because—let’s face it—you never know what some pissed-off ex is going to do.

Today being a fucking case in point.

I want to say it’s not me on the video, want so badly to tell my dad that Alexander altered the video because he was pissed off at me last night. But it wouldn’t be the truth. I remember the night he recorded this—can pinpoint exactly where we were when this was taken in fact, partly because I only had blue hair a few days before we broke up and partly because Alexander is a missionary guy through and through. We only shook things up a little this night because he’d smoked some weed and had a little too much to drink.

“I thought you were finally growing up,” my father growls after a minute. I still can’t bring myself to look up from his phone, can’t bring myself to look him in the eye. “I thought you were finally figuring out what it means to be a Reed.”

“I am. This was taken two years ago, when I was in Paris.”

“And you think that makes it okay? You let this man videotape you—”

“I didn’t know.”

He snorts. “Yeah, right. I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’ve always been an exhibitionist.” He waves a hand to encompass me from head to toe. “I mean, just look at you.”

“Seriously? Just because I color my hair doesn’t mean I’d let someone videotape me having sex.”

“Obviously, it does.”

“I swear I didn’t know. This was Alexander’s hotel room—he must have had the whole thing set up before he brought me in there. This is on him, Dad. He did this. And he’s the one who leaked it because I wouldn’t sleep with him last night.”

“Why the hell not?” he demands.

His answer is so unexpected that it takes me a minute to assimilate it. And still I’m stumbling, stuttering a little when I ask, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you obviously had no problem sleeping with him before. Why the hell didn’t you do it last ni

ght if you knew he had something like this on you? Jesus, Victoria, how could you let this happen? Do you ever, for even a second, think about anyone but yourself?”

For a moment I can do nothing but stare at him as I try to figure out if he’s serious or not. He can’t actually be saying what I think he is, right? He can’t actually be telling me that I should have slept with a man to keep him from releasing a tape he made, without my knowledge, of the two of us together.

Like, in what world does that blatant abuse of power even make sense?

I can see how my dad would blame me—hell, I blame myself for being so stupid that it never occurred to me Alexander would do something like this. But to blame me for not fucking him to keep the tape private—when I never even knew it existed? How the hell can I possibly be to blame for that? And for the fact that I trusted the man I was dating not to do something like this to me?

“I didn’t know there was a tape, Dad,” I explain again. “And when I turned him down last night, I had no idea he would do something like this. I mean, really, what kind of asshole does this?”