Reaching behind her, she threw the door open. And then she was gone, racing up the stairs and disappearing inside her dorm before I could get her full name to leave my throat.
I knew I was in the right, but I didn’t feel righteous. Not after last night. Not after we’d opened up to each other, fell asleep together, tore apart regretfully at sunrise. I’d been thinking maybe this could be real. Maybe I was ready to start something deeper. If I did with anyone, it would have been her.
A bitter laugh clawed up from my chest when I imagined Andrew finding out my girlfriend was a stripper. He’d have a field day with that, revoke my tuition, disown me. Whitlocks didn’t lower themselves that way—barring the time he’d screwed my eighteen-year-old stripper mom in the champagne room without protection. But we didn’t talk about the circumstances surrounding my conception because, like I said, Whitlocks didn’t do that.
Even if I was in a position to tell my dad to fuck off, I wouldn’t. Not for Helen. Not when she’d lied, omitted, made a fool out of me. I would never knowingly be with a woman who sold her body to other men. I saw what that did to my mom. I wasn’t interested in a replay.
Helen wasn’t who I thought she was in the beginning. I figured that was why my chest felt like it was being pounded in one spot with a hammer and chisel—disappointment that the woman I knew didn’t really exist.
It couldn’t have been anything other than that.
Chapter Eighteen
Helen
He’d staggered me, both literally and figuratively. The way he’d looked at me. The cold that had rolled off him the second I’d climbed into his passenger seat. He’d never once looked at me that way. Not even when I was beating the shit out of his car.
I had to hold on to the rail in the elevator and then support myself on the wall in order to make it to my suite without collapsing to my knees. They were so weak, they would have shattered if I had.
It was late. So late. I’d wished, I’d hope for, I’d needed the living room to be empty. But like everything in my life, I didn’t get what I wanted.
Zadie and Elena both jerked their heads toward the door when I flung myself inside. They were side by side on one couch, a bowl of popcorn between them, something playing on TV. But they were watching me now, eyes wide and attentive.
I touched my chest, which I swore had caved in, but there it was. Solid and whole.
“I can’t do this,” I rasped. “How do I keep doing this?”
It was a question that couldn’t be answered. Besides that, they had no idea what I was talking about.
“Helen, are you okay?” Zadie rose from the couch as I trudged past into my bedroom. “Helen?” She followed me, hovering over me as I collapsed onto my side on my bed and curled into a ball.
A hand on my shoulder, another in my hair. Soft, so soft. I wasn’t crying, but the tenderness of those touches sent me as close to tears as I’d been since I lost my Mads.
A weight depressed the bed in front of me. Another behind me. I opened my eyes to find Zadie in front of me, which meant the gentle strokes on my hair were coming from Elena. That alone would have sent me off the deep end if I wasn’t already there.
“Honey, what happened? Are you hurt?” Zadie asked in her sweet Zadie voice.
Elena brushed my hair from my face, peering over my shoulder to look at me. “Do I need to call Penelope? Do you need her?”
“I don’t know.” I scrubbed at my cheeks and forehead, but there was no removing the cloying film of shame that coated me. “I don’t know how to keep going when there’s so much hurt, you know? I thought...I thought I could have one good thing after so much bad, but not me.”
“You can have every good thing, honey,” Zadie promised.
Elena rubbed up and down my arm. “Tell me who I have to bitch slap.”
“I’m filth.” I threw my hands out blindly. “I’m at this beautiful school, in this lovely room, but I’m still filth. I don’t know what Mads was thinking sending me here. Sometimes I hate her for doing it.”
I hated myself for saying that out loud. How could I hate Madeline when she’d given me the world? But I did. Because she wasn’t here and I was. She’d shown me more, made me want to strive for it, even though sometimes it was so hard, all I wanted to do was curl into a ball until I faded away.
Elena’s hand paused. “Who’s Mads? What did she do? Is she your girlfriend? I don’t mind cutting a bitch if I need to.”
I almost laughed, but I was too far past humor. I was...I was sad. So fucking sad. I had been for a long time. I just never admitted it, not even to myself. I didn’t have time to be sad. I had a job, a sister, a loan, gangsters, strip clubs, school, studying, a boy…
“Madeline. I took care of her last year while she was dying.” Something ripped inside me. Netting that had been holding back a flood. Tears, two by two, marched down my cheeks like good little soldiers. “She passed away in May. I had ten months with her, and we spent every moment together. She was only thirty years old, but she’d been dying her whole life. And I miss her. I miss her so deeply, I don’t like to think about her, because when I do, I sink, and I don’t know how to swim back up. But I can’t help thinking about her because she gave me everything.”
Elena settled behind me, wrapping her arm around my middle. Zadie followed suit, lying in front of me, holding my hands in hers.
“You’re not filth, Helen. I live with you, so I should know. You’re so kind.” Zadie squeezed my hands. “Madeline sounds like she was very important to you.”
“She was. She is,” I rasped. “Mads left me money to go to school, but I had to come here, to Savage U. I don’t fit here. I don’t know what she was thinking, I just—”
“You fit.” Elena rested her chin on my shoulder. “If any of the bitches here try to tell you otherwise, it’s because they’re jealous.”
I let out something between a sob and a scoff. “No one’s jealous. I’m a filthy stripper from a trailer park.”
“No.” Zadie cupped my cheeks. “You’re Helen.”
Nodding, I tucked my chin into my chest and let myself feel the stabbing in my gut. It wasn’t all Mads. This was for Theo too. He’d seen me as Helen, but now, he saw me as nothing more than a desperate body. And I was that, I couldn’t deny it. I hadn’t been born with much, except I had this shell that appealed to men, so I used it. I used it and hoped Theo would never find out because I knew a boy like him would never be with a girl like me. Not if he had all the information.
I’d be angry at Theo later. For now, I was staggered. The way he’d looked at me from the shadows of his car...
“What happened tonight?” Elena asked.
Another sobbed ripped through me, so deep and gut wrenching, it nearly rendered me in two. It wasn’t for Theo. He hadn’t torn me apart. But his blow was the last in a line of vicious pummels that just kept coming. Worse, because when he punched, I hadn’t been prepared, so it hurt on a deeper level than all the others.
“Theo. He found out.”
Elena pushed herself up behind me and peered down at me. “He found out what? That you stripped?”