Mutual Release (25 page)

She blew out a breath, wondering how in the hell she would convey to him how terrified she was to walk back into her own – into her
mother’s
– front door. The porch light was on. Her mother’s car was nowhere in sight. It was her and Bart, together, for at least an hour. Nathan opened her door. When she got out, stood on the sidewalk in front of the huge house, Julie had never been more terrified in her life.

Her date gave her something resembling a kiss, walked her to the door, waited until she opened it and went inside, then disappeared. Julie watched through the huge sidelight as he got into his car and tore off, away from her and her poisonous presence. She sighed, putting her head against the cool glass, wishing for the first time in a long damn time her mother would show up. The television made its noise; the various sounds of a large house pressed into her ears. She turned, resigned, and made her way past the two large front rooms and up the steps, wondering how long it would take Bart to reach her, to take what he wanted.

But she lay in bed, unable to sleep, numb with resigned terror, wondering how the night would go, how long it would take Bart to make his stumbling way into her bedroom. And what would she actually do when he showed up? Scream? Cry? Scratch at his eyes? Tell her mother? It felt surreal, waiting for what she believed was inevitable.

But he never did come. Not into her bedroom. Not that night, anyway.

* * * *

Nearly three weeks later, Julie was back in the smelly office dealing with her homework since her mother had insisted that she not go home to the large Hardin manse for the hours after school. Something about that fact should have set off her alarm. But she chose to remain oblivious, waiting for some sort of sneak attack in her bed at the house, shocked and relieved every morning she woke up unviolated. It was a bizarre, semi-somnambulant state, lulling Julie into thinking she was safe, that Bart was not the predator she knew he would be.

But the hours between the end of the school day and when her mother would be present as a buffer between her and the scary specter of her stepfather were best spent as far from the stepfather in question as possible. So she found herself and her mother in agreement about the tiny, smelly, stifling office where she sat, her homework done, bored, trapped again but by something else this time – not poverty that forced her to eat the meal provided free by the restaurant, but fear.

She was within striking distance of her freedom. All the colleges she’d applied to should be sending responses soon, since she’d hit all their early application deadlines with her nearly perfect test scores, grades, and kick-ass essays. Julie was marking time, staying just enough out of Bart’s line of sight – and very nearly made it.

But the moment and place she least expected it, he pounced.

“Hey,” he said, sidling into her mother’s small office at the back of the restaurant his grandparents had founded and built, leaving for him to ruin.

Julie looked up, surprised to see him there. “Oh, um, hi, Bart.” She closed her books, started packing them away. The reflex to avoid him was deeply ingrained. But he shut the door behind him, locked it, and the look in his eyes was one she’d been expecting and dreading for nearly a year. She took a breath. “What do you want?” she asked, her head surprisingly clear.

“You are such a cagey bitch,” he said low in his throat.

Terror gripped her so hard she found herself breathless. But her odd command of the situation, the inevitable denouement, gave her strength. “I won’t let you do this to me. Not here.” Her whole body was frozen, stuck in his raptor’s gaze.

“You,” he hissed, as he unbuckled his belt, “need to be taught a lesson.”

* * * *

Julie woke with a start, the phantom pain that had permeated her dream now grabbing hold, making her cry out in the darkness of her room at the top floor of the Hardin mansion. But the pain persisted, working its vise-like way around her back, to her stomach. Only four weeks remained of her life as a dependent, as a high school student, as a victim. She was literally counting the days, using a Sharpie to make dark marks on the wall near her bed. The days she had to stay enslaved and victimized by her stepfather and her own mother, her tacit acceptance of the near-daily abuse Julie endured, was caught in indelible ink on an expensive paint job.

“You can’t tell her,” he would growl as he grunted and finished, leaving her alone, shattered, speechless. “No one will believe you,” he would say, his ugly, ratty face a mask of stupid male satisfaction. He would zip his nasty dick back into his pants and pat her leg while she lay curled in a ball, no longer able to cry, shocked, sore, and just wanting him gone. “I saved your greedy mother and you. Everyone knows it,” he would toss over his shoulder as he slinked out of her room, palming the used condom.

But the actual, physical pain… It had no equal and was not going to be captured on the wall. It was real, more real than anything she had ever experienced, at least up to that point. The way she compartmentalized, slinking past her mother every morning and avoiding any conversation with either of them, then suffering through the school day, watching all the normal kids around her – it was her coping mechanism. That, and her inner conviction that her mother was wrong.

She, Julie, had done nothing more than exist and somehow tempt an evil man to harm her. She did not seduce him. She was the victim. And she made a vow in the dark, tear-streaked nights she spent being repeatedly raped by her stepfather that once she escaped this, when she could move as far away from him and her mother as possible, she would never look back, would never return to this weak vulnerability bullshit ever again.

Chapter Seven

Three Years Later

“Miss… um… Anderson?”

The voice from the front of the small classroom made her shiver. Julie looked up and into the eyes of Professor Henry Kingston, Ph.D.,
New York Times
best-selling author of various books on American economics – tall, handsome, distinguished, and staring holes right into her.

“I need to see you. After class.”

She gulped as the entire room turned to stare at her. Sinking down and tugging her hair back into a ponytail; she was mortified when her mostly empty stomach made a distinct noise of unhappiness in the quiet. Her face reddened. The man looked back up from his desk, pulling the glasses off his nose. She had a thrill of fear, and something else, something like hope that he might be able to help get the master’s program thing sorted out for her. Julie had a plan, one that involved her own Ph.D., a professorship, and a place at the front of a room just like this one.

She had been accepted to every single college she’d applied to, but after the desperate drama that comprised the end of her senior year, she found herself past all their deadlines, with nowhere to go but to the college in Ypsilanti, Eastern Michigan University. She’d begged them to take her, filled out forms proving her independence and her stellar grades. They’d thrown money and free housing at her, and here she sat, within a semester of graduation, in the five-hundred-level econ class with a surprise semi-celebrity guest professor. How the guy ended up here, at a down-market, stepsister university like this one gave her some pause.

She barely heard the lecture and when it was over, sat unsure if she was to follow the man to his office, or meet him there later, or what. Finally, he walked out of the room without a glance in her direction, laughing with a few of the less awestruck students. She stood and made her way along the business school hallway behind him, hovering in the doorway to what was obviously a temporary office, until he graced her with his acknowledgment.

“Please. Come in. Shut the door. I want to discuss your advanced degree plans.” His eyes swept her from head to toe. Julie smiled and shut the door. “I’ve been thinking about you, and I believe I’d like to help you.” His smile was wide, his face handsome enough. But the predatory look in his eye was instantly familiar.

She put a hand to her throat, spent approximately ten seconds being scared. Then she shoved that aside, grabbed hold of something she’d later label somewhat erroneously as power, and forced herself to stay focused on her goal – the Ph.D., the professorship – and how this man could help her if she gave him what he was obviously seeking.

He rose from behind his desk, stuffed his hands in his pockets. She slipped into the seat, crossed her legs, and leaned back. If down this road was where she had to go, well, she was at least determined to make the old asshole work for it a little.

He walked around to the front of the desk, leaned there a moment, studying her. She gave him her best “You? Interested in little old me?” look, then bit her lip. He put a warm hand on her denim-clad knee and leaned in close. She sucked in a huge breath of old cigarettes and cologne that wasn’t as bad as Bart’s but made her shiver nonetheless. He grinned and whispered in her ear, mistaking her reaction for something positive.

“I thought you might be interested in my… help.”

She spent the next two months embroiled in an affair with the man, letting him use her not much differently from the way Bart Hardin had. Only this time she pretended to enjoy it in order to get his help with her application to Harvard MBA school. The entire time she kept separate from all the sex acts, using well-honed powers of compartmentalization to remove her real self from the physical Julie that had gotten really talented at blowjobs and fake orgasms. The power she exerted was weak, but it was power nonetheless and she had gotten good at wielding it, making him write glowing recommendations for her while she crouched between his legs, his half-limp dick in her mouth.

The day they were to finalize it, over the expensive wine he liked to drink and more celebratory fucking – doggie-style, her illustrious professor’s favorite position – she stood in the doorway of his office, jaw hanging open. The place sat empty, cleared out, stripped of all his books, his awards, the various photos of him with presidents and other celebrities. The desk where he’d seduced her, fucked her repeatedly while she kept her mind trained on her goal, was devoid of his usual clutter.

The room echoed with her shame. She was no better than her mother – worse, even, by anyone’s standards. She slumped in the doorway, snagging some random flunky who scurried by, demanding to know what happened. The guy filled her in, making her head and heart pound in a familiar “Julie is an idiot” rhythm.

The professor – the very man who’d declared his undying love for her while she serviced him the same way – had been discovered with his cock down the throat of a different student in the study carrels. He’d been quietly fired overnight, leaving Julie with an unfinished application and zero real recommendations.

Her body ached, stung, in the various places he had used her, but her heart grew another layer of resolve as she ran out of the building into the cold winter day. Tears froze on her face when she realized just how much stock she’d put in the dirty old fucker’s need to get off with her, thinking he really did mean to help her. No, it was yet another perfect example of why she would never, ever trust another man as long as she lived. Her life was up to her and to no one else.

A new goal was born, and while she sometimes regretted her few months fucking around with the professor thinking it would do her good, most times she thanked him silently for teaching her that final crucial lesson. The goal of self-actualization included no one but herself, what Julie could accomplish for Julie, period.

She leaned against the business school building, trying to stay out of the freezing cold wind and pulled a scrap of paper from her coat pocket. It contained a single help-wanted ad for a personal assistant to a man who owned a beer distribution business and contained the words that had caught her eye the day before, making her tear it out of the newspaper in the library – “College degree not required, but only highly organized self-starters need apply. Opportunity for advancement based on ability. Adapt, work harder than anyone else, and prove you deserve it.”

* * * *

Julie stared at the man behind the desk, willing him to say the magic words “You’re hired” so she could relax for the first time in three and a half years. She had long ago given up on finding that normal life – the one she’d envied to the point of obsession during the brief period she lived with Amy’s family. Truth be told, all she wanted now was some money of her own, a small apartment, and to be left the hell alone.

College had been okay, but it was crowded with boys who would stare and drool and act like primates and idiots whenever girls were around. Julie had no tolerance for it. She had not gone out on a real date since the first and last time Nathan took her out – right before her life dropped into a black hole. She refused to count anything she did with that dirty old professor as a “date” lest it sound normal, which it most certainly was not.

Julie refocused on the very handsome man who was looking at her resume and frowning. He put a finger on something and glanced up at her, a puzzled expression on his face. She smiled, crossed her legs, and was gratified to see a familiar goofiness take hold in his blue eyes.