“I’d rather handle you,” he grumbled, and leaned over to blow a raspberry in my ear. I could feel his growing smile against my skin, though. “I think I can maybe make that sacrifice. Only for you, though.”
I tilted up my head for him to press a quick kiss to my lips. He took the opportunity to try to drag it out a bit longer, but pulled away when I gave him a playful shove, and took the bedside phone off the hook. He made a face at me as though I’d put salt in his Cocoa Puffs before answering.
“Yes, this is Grant Devlin. Look, the party was dragging, I wanted to show Lacey the grounds—well, I would have answered my cell, but it’s probably halfway down the stream on its way to Mexico by now—look, what was so important that you had to work your way down the list of phone numbers till you hit this one?”
A pause while the other person spoke, and Grant’s face went blank. All animation left his expression abruptly. He began to speak in monosyllables.
"Yes. I see. I can see that. No. I’ll deal with it. Yes. Bye.”
He put the phone down and stared off into the distance as if he had forgotten what came next.
“Grant, what happened?” I asked, sitting up with the blanket clutched around me. Alarm was beginning to bubble in my chest. “Is everyone okay? Did someone get hurt? Is it something with the company?”
“Bad news.” He cleared his throat. Why couldn’t he look me in the eye? For a few seconds I thought he wasn’t going to elaborate further, and then he went on, as though each word were stuck in his throat. “A tape. There’s—a tape. A sex one. It just leaked.”
“Of us?!” How the hell could that have happened? We’ve only had sex this night, and that one time in his hallway—did he have cameras—did someone spy on us—
“No, no. No. A girl I…dated…last year.”
“Oh,” I said.
I could feel the floor beginning to fall out from under me.
“Well.” The words seemed reluctant to leave Grant’s mouth. “Well, two girls. Whom I…dated…concurrently.”
“You can say the word ‘fucked,’ Grant,” I snapped. “I’m not going to faint.”
He reeled backwards from me, a hurt look on his face, as if I’d hit him. I wasn’t being fair, oh God I knew I wasn’t being fair and I felt guilty as hell seeing that lost puppy look on his face, but I couldn’t let him see how shocked and insecure I felt. I couldn’t.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my ample form, wondering what those two girls had looked like. Probably glossy blonde, deeply tanned. Probably thinner.
Certainly thinner.
They’d probably been daring and adventurous and hadn’t constantly demanded that he put in time and work and commitment and responsibility when he didn’t even love—
No, no, no. There was no time for this self-pity. There was work to do.
“Don’t give me that puppy dog look,” I said. I stood, turned my back to him, and started hunting for my clothes. “There’s no time for that. What did they say? How many people know?”
“It’s…on YouTube,” Grant said from behind me. “Every time they take it down, it comes back up.” He added almost shyly, like a peace offering, “There’s already an auto-tune parody.”
If he thought I was going to find that funny, with everything at stake—
I found my dress and pulled it over my head. Well, there’d be no secrets about what we had done last night, but no time to worry about that now. “And Jennings? Does he know?”
I could hear Grant swallow. His foot scuffed along the floor. “He’s been calling the company every five minutes.”
I pressed my hand against my forehead. Took a deep breath. Oh God.
This could undo everything.
? ? ?
I couldn’t face work, not now, not with everyone knowing about that video, so Grant agreed to take us back to ‘our’ apartment and try to run damage control from there.
As soon as I’d changed into formless jeans and a billowy T-shirt—I wanted to hide my body, wanted to hide it even from myself so I wouldn’t think about what I had done with him—I started pulling up the news sites and the gossip blogs.
I could hear Grant talking on the phone while in the kitchen—ordering food? Another peace gesture. Damn the man for being sweet to me at this moment. It made it so hard to be angry at him for his poor judgment.
Not that anyone else seemed to find his judgment poor—at least, not last year’s judgment. The comments sections were full of statements like “dam lukkit the rack on that blond” and “WTF is he doing porking that butterface when he can pull tail like this LMAO.”
The whole internet seemed to be laughing at me. My mouse hovered over the video. Don’t click, I told myself. Don’t do it. You don’t care what he did with them. You don’t care what he liked about them. You don’t—
I clicked.
? ? ?
I heard Grant’s footsteps and quickly exited the page, dashing the tears from my eyes. I was torn between relief that the video had barely started, and anger at myself for clicking Play in the first place. What the hell had I been thinking? That it would all be some sort of hilarious mistake?