She’d gone all “Psycho Shay” on him, and thrown him out. All because he had used the john in the middle of the night.
Shay cringed. It had been a long time since she’d had that particular nightmare. Seeing the shadow of feet beneath her bathroom door had set it off.
Now she’d never see James again.
She dragged a hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear she had not given her body permission to spill.
That was her only consolation. She’d never have to look James Cannon in the eye and see the expression of fear tinged with revulsion that had made her high school years a constant misery.
She eased into her chair in her cubicle. Her space was pristine compared to Angie’s. That was because she didn’t leave clues to her life around. No pictures, cards, memorabilia. For an IT specialist, she was very low-tech in her personal life. No social media or tweets, not much e-mail outside of job necessity. Today the only thing on her desk was a shiny brochure.
The hair on Shay’s neck lifted as she recognized it. It was for a private luxury island resort in the Caribbean.
She snatched it off her desk and glanced around quickly. It was a souvenir of the most recent of several weekend getaways Eric had taken her on, at his bank’s expense. No one else was supposed to know about it.
When her gaze came back to the brochure she noticed the slanted spidery script in the upper left-hand corner. It read: “Ready to make up?”
“Shit!”
Angie’s head popped up over her cubicle wall. “What’s wrong?”
Shay thought fast. “Ah … paper cut.” She stuck an uncut finger in her mouth for emphasis.
“Hate that.” Angie slumped out of sight.
Shay bit her lip to keep from asking Angie any of the questions chasing each other in her head.
Eric had been here? When? And why, of all the trips, would he think she’d want to repeat that weekend?
A searing flash of their final night at the private resort lasered its way into her consciousness. Eric had brought her along to an international banking convention. The executives at the after-hours party were wasted on expensive booze and cocaine when one of them suggested a dance-off with their female companions as contestants.
She had suspected many of the women were paid companions. But when a dozen of them gamely shimmied out of their clothing to bump and grind in sexy barely there undies and less, she knew.
Shay closed her eyes, remembering how humiliated she’d been when Eric had pulled her to her feet and pushed her out on the impromptu dance floor, hissing in her ear, “Act like you’re begging for sex. Don’t embarrass me. Make them believe it.”
He expected her to swing her ass for the amusement of a bunch of drunk strangers.
Worse than stumbling through suggestive dance steps to music with crude sexual lyrics was withstanding the expression on Eric’s face as he watched her efforts. Because she wouldn’t undress, she was voted off the floor first.
On their way back to their suite, in defense of his scathing review of her poor performance, she’d burst out with, “Unlike some of those women I’m not a whore.”
“True,” he’d answered. “You’re not skilled enough to survive as one.”
Shay rubbed the too-tight sensation between her brows. There were so many memories she wished she didn’t have. Then, using two fingers, she picked up and flipped the brochure into the wastebasket. If only she could lob Eric in there with it.
To distract herself, she pulled open a drawer to survey its contents. There was a half-eaten bag of chips, a partially eaten power bar, and three pieces of candy that were at least eight weeks old. She tossed them after the brochure.
The tactic didn’t work. Memory ambushed her a second time before she could steel herself.
One second she was sitting in her cubicle, the next her world was imploding, sucked into the deep shadows of an unlit apartment bathroom on a night when she was fourteen years old.
She began to vibrate as the memory moved and settled with disturbing familiarity into her psyche. Fingernails bit into her palms as her stomach cramped in fear. The phantom smells seemed to fill her nostrils until she was near suffocating.
She was alone in a new place, an apartment over a Chinese restaurant. Years of orders of stir-fried vegetables and General Tso’s Chicken had soaked into the carpeting and drapes. The odor made her feel either constantly hungry, or queasy. It was supposed to a short-term solution, until her mother got established in Raleigh.
Her mother, an LPN, was working extra shifts at the senior care nursing facility so that Shay could finish another school year without needing to get a job, too. “You make the grades that will take you out of this life, Shay. I’ll support that.”
Always a sensitive child, she locked her bedroom door when her mother was away at night and never ventured out until dawn. But tonight that extra large Slurpee she’d insisted upon with a burger dinner was pressing hard on her bladder. She needed to go. Bad.