She was doing worse than scrolling through—she searched for her name.
Though somehow she didn’t really expect to find it. His in-box was largely flotsam and jetsam, party invitations jostling alongside subscriptions to typical him-type stuff like stress balls that farted when you squeezed them. There was nothing personal, nothing serious…until she hit Return and there they were. Email after email with Letty as the subject line, sent to some joker’s address: [email protected], she read, and just knew.
It was probably Jason’s email address. Or was it Patrick’s, or Chad’s?
It was hard to tell judging by the content, because there wasn’t much of it. A few of them were just pictures of her—the one he’d taken when they’d eaten outside and a leaf had blown into her hair at a funny angle, and another of the weird hole she had discovered in her jeans, by the knee. A couple contained no more than a few sentences that she seemed to recall saying to him. No names, no sign off, no commentary—just the straightforward facts, like he was compiling some sort of dossier to give to the court.
Here are the things she did wrong, Your Honor.
Only it wasn’t her that had done wrong. It wasn’t her.
She hadn’t sent anyone a video of them having sex.
God, God, he had sent a video to someone of them having sex. She watched the crooked, half-obscured vision of her as she kissed him and touched him and closed her eyes in ecstasy and happiness and love for him. Oh, you could clearly see how much she loved him—more than she’d ever said, more than she’d ever wanted to reveal. She thought she’d guarded her heart a little better than that, but no no no. It was raw and open and right there for anyone to see. He probably noticed it a thousand years ago, when she was busy still thinking she hated him.
And now she could never go back to that.
She couldn’t go back to that perfect state where nothing might penetrate her armor. He had gotten through, and now the whole thing was full of holes. All he needed to do to wound her was half of this, one tenth of this, and yet she suspected he wasn’t even done. This stuff was clearly leading to some big thing. Broadcasting it to the whole of campus maybe, or creating some kind of YouTube nightmare. She could imagine Jason having a vlog, full of mean pranks and cruel jokes.
And that was before she flicked through the pages to the first email, in search of the beginning of this elaborate scheme. Some word, some sign of what they were plotting together, some hint of revenge or festering resentments. Though she didn’t really brace herself for how bad it could be. She imagined a sniggering email to Jason, and instead found an email to her.
One that he had sent the day after the accident, only to have it bounce. Probably because of her father, she thought, and thanked god for that. If she had read it at the time it would have destroyed her.
Though the destruction was much more complete now.
She read the lines with blurry eyes, sick with despair and disbelief:
Letty,
If you think I care that you’re hurt, I don’t. I’m not sorry about the shit that went down—it was your fault. Everything was all your fault anyway and you deserve all of this.
Fuck you, Letty, for doing this to me. Fuck. You.
Tate
Then sobbed, for all the things she had lost.
Chapter 22
She couldn’t remember the twenty minutes it took for him to get to his room. Something must have happened in the interim, but she couldn’t say what. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was still sitting in his desk chair when the door opened, that email still open on the laptop in front of her. Face wet and insides sort of hollowed out, as though that fuck and that you had reached in and scooped it all up.
And the only way to get any of it back was to rewind herself.
All the way back, to the girl she had been on that bluff.
“Man, I knew you could stoop low. But this a steep drop, even for you.”
“What? What are you—”
She knew what cut him off before he could finish the question. He’d seen what she was looking at. That fucking email, the pictures she’d left up, the video still playing on an infinite loop in the corner. It made her bleed to see her own tender-hearted face over and over, but it was worth it somehow. This was the scene in their movie where the villain was confronted with the evidence of his wrongdoing.
Only the villain in this case was him and, oh god, she could hardly stand it.
Just hearing the bafflement in his voice. The vulnerability.
The fake, fake, fake fucking vulnerability.
“You went through my emails? Why would you…How could you…?”
“I don’t think demanding answers from me is really the way you want to go.”
“I don’t know which other way I should go. I don’t know what you think this is.”
She stood up then. She had to. There was too much roiling emotion in her to stay seated.