I was terrified that he was right. I was nearly thirty, and thirty-year-olds in the music industry didn’t get first chances to succeed, let alone second ones. I watched as Cole started to unfurl his body. He was about to stand, and I didn’t know what would happen when he regained use of his limbs. Would he use them to pin me down and take even more than my career from me? This was the flight part—the part where my self-defense instructor had told me to “fucking run.” Fight and flight. Both were prominent factors in survival.
I scuffled off the couch, away from his standing frame. My shoulder slammed past the door, sending a seething pain through my upper body. I held my arm across my pounding shoulder as I flew out of the studio and into the empty, dimly lit hallway, inhaling industrial carpet cleaner—a smell so pungent that it punched the back of my throat. I could taste the bile against my tongue—nausea rushing out of me like a volcano. Tears in my eyes, I stumbled past the shiny platinum records that lit the walls. When I had walked into the studio hours earlier, I had beamed with a giddy hope, seeing these records as aspirational: this’ll be me one day. They had lifted me up and floated me into the sound booth with heart-fluttering, glittery promise. Now, one after the other, they seemed to taunt me, illustrating how a mountain of possibilities had died inside a shitty man’s hands. The impossibly long hallway started to swirl slowly around me—the air thickening like molasses. My vision was hot and blurry, and I wasn’t sure if I was on a moving sidewalk, or if my legs were doing the moving. I looked back, seeing Cole open the studio door. Heart pounding in my ears, I flew toward a neon-green sign atop a door, just yards ahead of me. EXIT. Somehow, my feet tugged my entire weight outside.
I blinked back the harsh afternoon sun, gasping for air. The sounds of cars honking and teenagers laughing and mothers yelling and babies crying. The smell of burning rubber and cement and sewer and body odor and perfume. The pressure of a strange woman’s fingers against my bare shoulder. The words “are you okay?” echoing over and over as white flurries filled my vision and hot pavement scraped my knees.
He had turned my dream into a nightmare.
44
THIRTY-FIVE
I COULD TASTE THE MEMORY—ACID rising up from my throat inside Carbone. There was a terror roaring through my body—a dizzying, red-hot alarm swirling inside my veins, warning me that I was in danger. I held my breath and clenched my stomach inward—desperate to keep from emptying my insides out on the crisp white tablecloth in front of me.
The room moved in slow motion. I was a deer in headlights, watching the man I loved converse joyfully with the man who’d tried to rape me. I couldn’t hear a word they were saying—all I could hear was the loud beating of my own heart pounding in my eardrums. Asher nodded and grinned toward me. I guessed he was lavishing praise on me. I did my best to force my lips into an upward curl—a tiny hint at a smile. But then, Cole’s smile beamed in my direction, like tiny knives under my skin.
“Excuse—excuse me,” I said, the words trembling.
I stood up too fast, and white-hot flurries flew behind my eyes. I pushed through, edging my way past Asher, then I picked up my pace, as if running for my life. I needed air. I needed the exit. I didn’t stop to consider who was outside—I couldn’t wrap my head around my own reality. I pushed my way out of Carbone’s front door, and the white flurries in my eyes were replaced with flashing cameras—more than I could ever count. Fuck. I could feel the bile rising, and suddenly, an arm linked in mine and pulled me back into the restaurant. My vision was blinded, but I felt my legs moving, I felt someone leading me a few steps away, past a door, and into bright fluorescent lighting. I slung my body into the open bathroom stall, emptying my stomach into the toilet in one swift move.
I leaned my back against the cold door, inhaling and exhaling deep breaths. My hands were shaking. For five years, I had worked tirelessly in therapy to alleviate the unfounded guilt that mounted in regard to Cole. He was the guilty party, but it was hard for my brain to conceptualize how a man who had my best interests at heart one moment was a man refusing to take no for an answer the next. And so, I filled in the blanks, blaming my ebullient energy for the reason why Cole heard yes when I said no. I was racked with specifically horrifying guilt for breaking his nose—even though I should have been patting myself on the back for defending my body. I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t fought back. It was a thought that crept into my brain every now and then, and it took two edibles and a Friends marathon to make the nightmare leave my mind.
“Maggie?” a voice said.
I suddenly remembered that I wasn’t alone. That someone had tugged me into the women’s restroom. I peered down at the penny-tile floor, seeing Raini’s suede pumps.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I looked up at her face—her eyes were wide, and her hands were open, as if she was ready to catch me if I fell to the floor.
“Yeah,” I lied.
I moved slowly, uneasy as I found the sink. Raini watched me in the mirror, studying my ashen face for a long moment. I wasn’t sure how long it was, maybe a minute or two, before Raini put her hands on mine. I looked down, realizing that I was scrubbing my hands under scalding water—hands which were now raw and bright red. Raini grabbed a towel and dried my hands as I stared wide-eyed at her.
“Did he do something to you?” she asked, her voice small.
“Who?” I cracked, looking away from her Disney princess eyes—doing a bang-up job of playing dumb while my insides ran a traumatic marathon. My pulse was racing. I knew very well who Raini was referring to, but I did not want to acknowledge it aloud—especially not to someone who I didn’t know like the back of my hand. In five whole years I had told only three people about the day my career started and died—and one of them was my therapist.
“I’ve heard things about Cole. From my older sister’s best friend.”
I looked up, seeing Raini raise her thick brows at me, as if telling me it was okay to speak freely. Instead of taking horrified solace in knowing that I wasn’t the only human Cole Wyan had ever attacked, instead of letting Raini in, I felt armor move around my body. In this moment, I didn’t know how to relive it aloud without being carried out of here on a stretcher.
“I’m okay. I just got a little dizzy—I drank too much before the appetizers got there.”
“You’ve had like one glass of wine.”
Who was this kid? Fucking Sherlock Holmes?
“Just wait until you get to be thirty-five. One glass is enough to trigger a three-Advil-and-Gatorade morning.”
“What did he do to you?” Raini asked, wide eyes on me, voice small.
It was the way she held herself in front of me that made me grip her hand tight as tears fell down my face. She shuffled in her beautiful pumps with a fragile brokenness, as if her road hadn’t been all rainbows and sunshine. I let my shoulders fall, a dropping of my guard. Instinctively, I hugged her. She hugged me back. We both held on to each other, acknowledging some sort of different but shared nightmare.
“Can you look out there, and tell me if he’s gone?” I whispered.
She pulled back and nodded, and then poked her head out the bathroom door.
“He’s gone,” she said, coming back to me.