“I don’t want mystery here. I want hope. This song has to sound like a dream, and a gun cuts through it—it’s like a pointing a middle finger and saying, ‘This dream will never come true.’”
“Let’s Lie” was a song about Garrett, and darkening it for public consumption felt like stabbing myself in the chest. I didn’t want to add a grimness to the very hope that I was desperately clinging to. I was consumed by the fact that in two weeks I would be seeing Garrett, on my thirtieth birthday, in person for the first time since we slept together. I needed to roll around in hope so that I could take matters into my own hands and finally tell Garrett my feelings—tell him I was in love with him, tell him I wanted us to start right fucking now.
After a few minutes of back and forth on the song and the gunshot, Cole shook his head and smiled.
“You’re a pistol, you know that? I love that you believe in your music. Point, Maggie,” he said as he removed the weapon from my song. I looked down at my buzzing phone, silencing a call from Summer.
“You should be proud of this,” I heard Cole say.
I exhaled and smiled, as I found his face just inches from my face, and his hand on my knee. My heart raced furiously, and I held my breath. Instead of arching back, I froze with every muscle in my body squeezing inside itself. Suddenly, Cole’s sweaty palm was on the back of my head, and his mouth was on my neck.
I had not gone thirty years without being touched against my will. I was a woman in New York City who dared to ride the subway. Having a stranger purposefully grope my breast or my ass before he slipped out at his next stop had happened more than once. And those moments had fueled an anger inside me. I was tired of feeling like self-control was slipping through my body just because I needed basic transportation. This led me to take self-defense classes at the 92nd Street Y, hell-bent on the possibilities of publicly annihilating a groper in front of half of Manhattan. I wanted to hurt my assailant so badly that it would land me inside the “Everyday Heroes” pages of People magazine. I would no longer be a casualty of men offhandedly taking what they wanted from me in public.
But in private? In private, I had been lucky. A man had never touched me against my will behind a closed door. I knew this fact was good fortune and nothing more. I had gone nearly thirty years.
A supercut of the last couple months cascaded behind my eyes, which were the size of saucers. Had I given this man the green light to touch me in a place he absolutely needed permission to touch? And how could I politely say “thanks but no thanks” to a man who could make or break my dream? He was handing me something that had taken me too long to get, and I wasn’t sure if I could brush Cole Wyan off my body without ruining my career.
I slowly backed my body up on the couch, inching my neck away from his lips and his hands. He leaned back with wide eyes, as if he was shocked that I didn’t want his hands and his lips on my skin. He tilted his head to one side with a smile.
“C’mon,” he said. “I know what you’re afraid of…but we can still have a working relationship.”
He did not know what I was afraid of. Or he knew and couldn’t care less.
“I—I’m sorry. I just—I take all this seriously, I really value working with you. And—you have a wife, right?”
I knew none of these reasons mattered. All that held value was my no—my body language, which told a man to stop, no questions asked. I wanted to say, “Don’t fucking touch me, ever again—NO.” Women have to mollify broken, cruel men with outside excuses and apologies as to why taking pieces of our soul isn’t a smart move, for them. We are wired, even in moments of screaming terror, to deescalate a situation that could kill us. I knew this to be true. I also knew another truth: monsters don’t care about consequences. I wasn’t sure if there was a monster sitting in front of me. I was praying there was reasoning inside Cole’s brain.
He stared at me blankly, a face I worried lacked reason.
“We have an open relationship,” Cole said flatly, referring to his wife.
The wheels of his stool creaked slowly on the carpet fibers, rolling toward me. Sweat prickled on my forehead as I tightened.
“I want you to respect me as an artist, and I don’t want to cross this line with you, okay?”
Cole’s eyes darkened. The red light over the door lit up half his face. In that moment, a man I had once felt comfortable with suddenly looked like a horror movie come to life: a monster.
“Oh, so you’re that kind of girl? You think you can just lead me on, take what you want from me, and I’ll sit back and be satisfied?”
I shook my head effusively as my heart raced faster. I blinked back a dizziness behind my eyes. I couldn’t quite understand how in the span of two minutes, my world seemed to turn upside down.
My voice was as shaky as my insides. “No. No, I thought we were going to work together—that you saw something in my music, and that was that. I didn’t know you had feelings for me. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way, I didn’t know.”
The sick part was, that in this moment, I was sorry—sorry for something I had never done. Sorry for a man’s inability to understand the very simple meaning of a very simple word: no.
He squinted at me, turning his head to study both sides of my cheeks, as if trying to read me. It made me want to run, but I was still hopeful that there was no reason to run.
“Is this a hard to get thing? Like, you’re trying to pretend you don’t want me so I’ll think you’re not like the other fangirls? ’Cause I get it, you’re special. Congratulations.”
I shook my head, no longer able to hide my shock. My jaw was open and my eyes were wide. “I would like to keep this strictly professional, Cole.”
“Kiddo, I’m going to give you a few seconds to really think what you’re saying through.”
It was a threat. A powerful man was threatening me, alone, behind closed doors. I looked down to my leg as I felt his hand back on my kneecap. He leaned his face in to mine, staring directly into my eyes. I could feel his fingers circling below me as he raised his eyebrows. I could feel the tips of his fingers moving from my knee, all the way up my skirt. I had said no, and nothing I had done up to this point gave this man the right to know that the inside of my thigh was soft and warm.
There is an oval-shaped gray mass inside our brains, directly responsible for how we process fear: the amygdala. Mine was sending a signal to my brain stem, asking it to paralyze my body. My body didn’t want to be present, but there was a fighter in me that did. I could feel the struggle as my hands went numb. I could hear his heavy breathing grow louder, as if it were inside my skull. My cross-wired senses had multiplied, and nothing worked the way I needed it to. I closed my eyes tightly and found the rhythm of my own breath. I opened my eyes on his lips coming for mine, with his finger inside me.
Boiling rage itched through my bones, and all at once, I lifted my body with the force of two women, edging my elbow into his nose. He shot backward off the stool, hitting the floor as blood gushed out of his flaring nostrils.
“FUCK,” he yelled, seeing the blood all over his white crew neck.
My entire body sat shaking on the couch. I had undoubtedly broken his nose.
“You cunt,” he growled. “You can fucking say goodbye to your career,” he hissed, holding his body in a circle on the floor.