Authors: Hannah Ford
“Shh,” I said,
running my finger down the jagged edges of the scar he got protecting me from
Professor Worthington, the mark that would be forever on his body, a reminder
of how he’d risked everything to save me.
“Noah, please,
don’t
.”
“You know to safe
word if you need to?” he pressed.
“Yes,” I
nodded.
“Promise me.”
He tipped my chin
to his, to make sure I was looking at him when I said it.
“I promise, Noah.”
His eyes searched
mine for a moment, making sure I was telling the truth.
Only then did I feel him relax in
my arms.
He pulled me
toward him and we lay there in the dark, in our apartment, our limbs
intertwined,
our
first night together as fiancés.
“Noah,” I
whispered.
“Yes, Charlotte?”
“You make me so
happy.”
“You make
me
so happy.”
“I don’t want to have any secrets from each other,” I said.
“I don’t either.”
“We need to be
honest with each other, always.”
“Yes,” he
said.
“We do.”
There was a pause
as the two of us contemplated this.
“Colin will
contact you again, Charlotte,” Noah said.
“He will.
This is not
over.
There will be more fallout.
Him.
Other crazies.
Things at school.
We have to promise not to keep things
from each other.”
“No more secrets,”
I whispered.
“No more secrets,”
he agreed.
But as I drifted
off to sleep, all I could think was,
easier said than done.
***
I woke the next
morning to the sound of Noah in the shower, the rush of the water running and
his voice as he sang.
I’d never
heard him sing before, and I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
He was horribly
off-key.
I guess he’s
not completely perfect after all
, I thought, even though the fact that he
was singing a Katy Perry song was one of the most adorable things I’d ever
heard in my life.
I stretched
lazily, pushing my arms up over my head.
Docket, who was
curled up at the bottom of the bed, looked up at me sleepily, then rolled over
and burrowed
himself
further into the covers.
“I get it, boy,” I
said.
“Trust me, I don’t want to
get up, either.”
I sighed and
reached for my phone, which was sitting on the nightstand.
I opened my email, my heart stopping
when I saw something in my inbox from school.
It was from someone called Dr.
Cartwright, and the subject line was “
Your Continued Enrollment.”
“Shit,” I swore
under my breath, sitting up in bed and wrapping the covers tighter around me.
I opened the
email.
Charlotte,
My name is Dr.
Jason Cartwright, and I’m one of the counselors in the Office of Student Health
and Support.
I’ve recently been
made aware that you’ve taken a lengthy absence from school – college rules
require any student taking time off after a psychologically traumatic event to
attend a counseling session in order to be cleared to resume classes.
Would you be
free to meet in my office this morning at 10:30?
Please be aware that you will not be
allow
to return to school until we have met.
Please let me
know at your earliest convenience.
All best,
Jason
I groaned and
rolled my eyes.
Great.
Now not was I
going to have to deal with everyone staring at me when I went back to school,
but now I was going to have to meet with some bullshit school psychiatrist.
What did they
mean, a psychologically traumatic event?
I hadn’t even been in touch with anyone at school, which meant they were
going off of whatever they’d read in the papers or online.
It wasn’t exactly a fair system –
just because my life events had been publicized and had something to do with a
professor at their university, why did they think they had a right to force me
to have some counseling session?
If I’d gone off
somewhere and gotten myself into some other kind of trouble that they didn’t
know about, I could have just come back and told them I’d been off finding
myself, or sick with mono or something.
I wanted to write
back and tell Dr. Jason Cartwright he could go screw.
But if I did that,
I wouldn’t be able to go back to school.
So I typed a quick
email back to Dr. Cartwright, letting him know how delighted I’d be to meet him
in his office at 10:30 this morning.
I even added a smiling
emoji
at the end of it,
just to let him know how completely over my “psychological trauma” I was.
I wasn’t, of
course.
But that wasn’t
any of his business.
I’d just finished
sending the email when my phone began ringing in my hand.
My mom.
Shit, shit, shit.
I’d been avoiding
her calls for days, ever since what had happened with Professor Worthington at
Force.
Noah had been pressing me to
call her, to tell her what had happened, but I just couldn’t deal with it.
I answered this
time.
I figured now that
my day included meeting with the school psychologist, it was already
ruined.
I might as well totally
decimate it.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Finally,” she
said, sounding annoyed.
“I’ve been
trying to get in touch with you for weeks, Charlotte.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,”
I said.
“I’ve just…I’ve been really
busy.”
Docket picked his head up
and looked at me, almost like he was admonishing me for interrupting his
sleep.
He moved up into Noah’s spot
and laid his head on Noah’s pillow.
I reached over and rubbed him behind his ears and he sighed in
contentment.
“Busy doing what?”
“Just…” I trailed
off and closed my eyes.
My mother
and I had never had the best relationship.
Growing up she’d been very hot and cold with me, parading me around when
it made her look good, ignoring me when I did something she didn’t approve
of.
And it wasn’t
always clear what camp my decisions might fall into.
My mother and her
friends were the type that valued settling down, having children, marrying a
man with a lot of money and a steady job so that they could stay home and take
care of the children, or at least pretend to, in between trips to the salon and
meetings with their decorators.
They didn’t look
at this as being lazy or shallow.
In fact, they knew exactly the amount of effort, planning, and work it
took to make sure you could land a man who could provide everything you needed.
My mother had
worked hard to land my father, but then he’d gotten sick and she’d realized her
lifestyle was about to evaporate right in front of her.
So she’d traded him out for a new model,
my stepfather.
“Charlotte?” my
mom demanded.
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” I
said.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Is everything
okay?”
“Mom,” I
said.
“Is there any way you could
come to New York?”
“To the city?”
“Yes.”
I nodded.
“I just… I need to talk to you about
some things that have happened.”
I
braced myself for the rebuttal.
It
didn’t matter how old I was or how long I’d had to get used to it –
anytime I needed something from her was a chance for her to disappoint me.
I could imagine
her on her cell phone, sitting in her Range Rover, her hair highlighted and
blown
out,
a Starbucks iced Frappuccino in her
hand.
I imagined her pursing her fuchsia
lips (she’d worn the same color lipstick since I was a child, a shade by Chanel
called Suspense) and flicking her hand, the way she always did when I asked her
to do something she didn’t want to do.
I imagined her
filing through her internal list of excuses, of which she must have had
thousands.
I felt like I’d heard
them all.
“Okay,” she said,
her voice softening.
“Really?” I asked,
surprised.
The door to the
bathroom opened and Noah came out, wearing just a towel around his waist.
He frowned at me and mouthed,
“Who is it?”
“My mom,” I
mouthed back.
He nodded in
approval.
That was because he’d
never met her.
“Of course,” my
mom said.
“I’ll be there as soon as
I can.
Let me check flights and
I’ll get back to you with plans, okay, honey?”
“Okay.”
We hung up and I stared at the phone in
disbelief.
“She’s coming here,” I
said.
“Good,” Noah said,
choosing a tie from his drawer and then disappearing into the closet.
“You told her what happened?” he called
to me.
“No,” I said.
“I’m going to tell her when she gets
here.”
“Good thinking,”
he said, reappearing a moment later in a pair of boxer shorts and dress pants,
his shirt unbuttoned.
“So now I have to
deal with that,” I said.
“We’ll deal with it
together,” he said.
“It’s good that
she’s coming here.”
He sat down on
the side of the bed and Docket rolled over, exposing his stomach for a scratch.
Noah obliged him.
“You don’t know my
mother,” I said.
“She’s crazy.”
“Oh, I know
crazy,” he said.
“Trust me.”
His phone buzzed
and he pulled it from his pocket, frowning as he looked at an alert on the
screen.
He began reading something,
his eyes darkening as they moved down the screen.
“What is it?” I
asked.
“Is it something about the
Lilah Parks case?”
“No.”
He shook his head.
“It’s something about the Charlotte
Holloway case.”
He held the phone
out to me, and I looked at the screen It was an article in the New York Post,
about the attempted murder of a law student (me) at the hands of her law
professor.
I scanned the
article, looking for whatever was making Noah’s eyes darken.
But as far as I could tell, the article
was nothing new, the same facts that had been reported by most of the
newspapers in New York – Force had been shut down, the Professor was
facing murder charges, Noah Cutler had been cleared of all charges,
etc
etc
.
And then I got to
the good part.
“We reached
Pamela Holloway at the Holloway home, who told us that her daughter may have
been dating the professor.
‘I had a
feeling she might have been involved with someone,’ Pamela said.
‘Charlotte doesn’t make the best choices
sometimes.
She must have just
gotten mixed up with the wrong character.’ “
The article went
on to speculate how the professor and I may have gotten together, how we were
probably at Force to partake in some kind of kinky BDSM play that had gotten
out of hand.
‘
Story
developing’
it said at the end.
My mouth
dropped.
“I can’t believe this!” I
said.
“She knew this whole
time!
She knew this whole time and
she didn’t ask me about it.
Why the
hell would she pretend she didn’t know?”
“You tell me.”
I thought about
it.
“She wants a moment.”
“A moment?”
I nodded.
“She wants to come here and have me tell
her in person, so she can wring her hands in front of me and make it all about
her.”
My heart pounded.
“I don’t want her coming anymore.
Why the hell would she say I was dating
Professor Worthington?”
“It’s not true,”
Noah said.
“So what do you care?”
“I care because
it’s printed in a newspaper.”
He reached out and
took my hand.
“Charlotte, a lot of
things are going to printed about you in the newspaper.
There is going to be a trial.
You will have to testify.
The prosecution is going to try and tear
you apart, make you an unreliable witness.
You need to be ready for that.”
“This is
different,” I said.
“Because it’s your
mother.”
It was a statement, not a
question.
“Yes.”
He squeezed my
hand.
“You’ll get through it.
We’ll
get through it.”
I nodded.
“Thanks.”
He tipped my chin
up.
“Don’t let this ruin your day,”
he said.
“Don’t give her that
power.”