by Penny Reid
“How’d you know I’d go this way?”
“Who cares? What’s going on?” His phone is going crazy. “That Denny guy back there. What was that?”
I shake my head. Everything feels so enormous.
More ringtones.
He pulls it out of his pocket. “Calls from the tower. Probably Brett. What happens when I answer? I’ve had him blocked all weekend. What happens when I unblock him? What am I going to see?”
I take his phone from his hands. “Uh,” I say, pressing the cool, smooth screen to my forehead.
He waits. I’m trying not to cry.
“Well, that answers that,” he says. “A forehead print. That’s what I’ll see.”
I shake my head. “No joke,” I whisper.
He puts his arm around me, pulls me into his warmth. His protection. I have this thought that everything from here on in is a stolen moment. I guess they all were.
“What’s going on?”
“I didn’t want you to know. I thought you’d never know.”
“Know what?”
I shake my head. “The thing is, I knew if we stayed together, it would come out, and everything would be ruined. You’d need to do damage control and, god, you’d hate me.”
“I couldn’t hate you, Vicky.”
“Maybe not,” I say in a small voice. “But you could hate Vonda O’Neil. You could hate her. You probably already do.”
He shifts, speaks closer into my ear. “What are you talking about?”
“Vonda O’Neil?” I pull away. “You don’t remember liar Vonda O’Neil? The whole sordid scandal eight years back? Everyone remembers Vonda O’Neil.”
He searches my face, expression remote. I see when he gets it, because it’s like he’s seeing me new. “Wait—”
“That’s right,” I say.
“You’re Vonda O’Neil.”
“Ding.” I say it breezily, as though it costs me nothing. It costs me everything.
“And Denny Woodruff…that was—”
“Denny. The wronged victim, yeah. Falsely accused,” I say. “The poor sweet boy with his bright future that was threatened by selfish, lying Vonda.”
I watch Henry’s eyes. My blood races as I wait for the removal of the arm, the retraction of affection, the blotting out of the stars that never made a real picture anyway.
He doesn’t remove his arm, but I can practically see the gears in his mind turning. The gears in his memory.
“Remember? The trial? The world-famous mayo shirt?”
“Oh, right. The shirt was supposed to prove he’d kidnapped and…tried to assault you. You said it was semen, but it was mayo.”
“Yup. It was mayo.”
“That was you? Wait—the well. You ended up in a well.”
“You didn’t pay very good attention.”
“I was in college.”
“I hid in a well as part of my plot to destroy Denny’s future. I pretended I fell in there. Three days I was in there. All the better to get media attention. It’s what I wanted all along.”
There’s this long silence. “So this is what you’re going to do?” he finally says. “Don’t I get the real story?”
I ball my hands to keep them from trembling. Strangely, I don’t want to tell him the real story. It’s easier to let him think the worst. Because I so badly want him to believe—so badly. I gamble less of my heart if I don't tell.
“I thought you trusted me,” he says.
I regard him with bleary eyes.
“Tell me.”
I look at my kitten-heel shoes, maroon with a little sparkle. It’ll hurt too much when you don’t believe me.
“It’s me,” he says, voice so achingly tender. “Just you and me.”
And I’m thinking of being in the elevator shaft with him, how amazing he was. And the little griffin he carved me. And the buildings he dreams of making. He’s an idealist. In a world of people shooting at targets, he’s shooting at the stars. He’s making bridges from bits of string.
And suddenly I’m telling him.
I tell him about the high school party. Keg, bonfire, music, the usual. I’d wandered off, bored, not drunk enough to think my way drunker friends were funny.
That’s when Denny abducted me. He was a few years older—a year out of high school. He sealed my mouth with his giant hand and dragged me into his trunk. To his hunting cabin. I woke up terrified, half naked, with Denny coming at me.
“Fuck,” Henry bites out. “I shoulda killed him in there.”
My fingers close over his arm. He believes me?
“Don’t worry, I won’t really kill him. Maybe. Then what?” He pulls me to him, more tightly.
“I always think it was my terror of him that made him ejaculate all over my shirt instead of getting to the final act. Like my terror turned him on.”
I feel him tense. I pause. “Keep going,” he says. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”
I tell him how Denny stormed off, and I thought for sure he was going to come back with an ax to chop me up.
“Left you there.”
“Yeah. And something in me kicked in, working at that knot. I freed myself even as his boots crunched the gravel outside. I grabbed my panties and my shoes and ran out the back, pounding feet over cutting branches. I barely felt it. I just had to get away.”
“In bare feet. Through the woods.”
“I hardly felt it until I fell into that well. It was deep, but I only sprained my right ankle and broke the toe of my left. It could’ve been worse, but the thing was filled with years of brush and leaves and dirt, and that cushioned my fall.”
I tell him about hiding myself under the leaves at the bottom of the well when Denny looked in with a flashlight. I hid even when the first wave of searchers came through. That was damning for me in the trial, that they looked in the well and saw nobody. Why hide? But I was scared. I thought it was Denny and his friends, come to get me.
When things got quiet, I really did try to climb out, but I couldn’t. Even without the pain of my injuries, I couldn’t. The sides were slimy and high, and there was nothing to hold on to. And it was so dark.
I tell him how I buried myself in the debris at the bottom and hid. Terrified.
“That’s why you stayed quiet.”
“Three days I was in there.” All the while I was becoming famous. Vonda O’Neil. Disappeared from a teen party in the woods, the stuff of fairy tales, but there were no bread crumbs. No bowls of porridge. No baby-bear beds.
I go on with my story. How I was in shock by the time they pulled me out—that’s what the nurse told me. Half out of my mind. I told my story to the cops. Denny tried to rape me but he didn’t, and I got away. After a quick visit to the hospital, I was released to my mom, with all my dirty clothes in a bag.
I was in such a state when they pulled me out, all I wanted was to be home, bundled up in bed with my things around me. I would’ve said anything to get warm and clean in my own bed.
“It was only later I remembered my shirt,” I tell him. “I opened up the bag and found the crusty stain and I realized he’d, you know, the shirt. Mom is the one who kept back the shirt. I was sixteen. I wasn’t thinking five moves ahead like she was.”
I pause, amazed he’s still with me, there on that dark stoop. The people of the Financial District file back and forth on the sidewalk a few yards in front of us.
They seem miles away.
“I thought we should bring it to the police, but she said we should keep it for the trial. She said we couldn’t trust the police, that we needed to keep the evidence. The Woodruffs tried to pay me off. A half a million dollars. Five hundred thousand.”
“That must’ve seemed like a lot of money to you. You passed up a lot of money.”
“I wanted to stand up for other girls. I had evidence…I felt so sure…”
I suck in a breath, determined to get through the story calmly.
“I was so sure I’d be able to prove it with that sh
irt, you know?” I continue. “When it came back as mayonnaise, I thought the police lab was lying. Like the Woodruffs paid off the lab, and I demanded an independent analysis. Mayo again. By that time, I was this monster. Months later, I found the bank statement from my mom’s account. Twenty thousand dollars deposited into it the day before we produced the shirt for testing.”
“The Woodruffs,” he says.
“It was a pretty common shirt from Savemart. I think they bought a duplicate and switched it. The mayo would’ve been the Woodruffs’ idea. My mother would never have thought of something so devious and damning. The mayo is what made me look like I deliberately tried to frame him. Like a teen without sophisticated knowledge of forensic techniques tried to frame this rich boy. Everybody hated me. The world was this wall of hate.”
“The betrayal you were talking about,” he says. “That was your mom selling the shirt.”
I nod. “There was nothing she wouldn’t do. She was a good mom before Dad died. But after…” I shake my head. “But I just wanted justice. I wanted the world to know what kind of guy Denny is.”
I look up at him, blood racing, waiting for questions, but all I see is affection. Concern.
“You believe me?”
“What? Of course.”
I search his eyes. “Because of how I was in the elevator?”
“No, because of how you are period. Because I know who you are.”
My belly flip-flops. “You didn’t even know my name until now.”
“A name isn’t who a person is.”
I put my forehead to his chest, smash my face to his chest. The relief I feel is nearly overwhelming. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. After what you’ve been through? I don’t remember the specifics of the case, but I sure remember the Vonda O’Neil feeding frenzy. I remember that. And you were innocent all that time. God.”
The world feels like it’s raining, and the rain is a mixture of tears and pure water that’s washing everything clear.
He believes me. He’s with me. I want him to say it again. And again and again.
“That’s when you came here?”
I sigh. “My mom took a year to burn through the money. She had a lot of bad boyfriends. She was going downhill. It got less and less safe for me and Carly as the money dwindled. I’d been secretly saving, though. And then I did an interview they paid me for, and that was a lot of money. That was what I used to move one night. I just took her and ran. I didn’t want Carly to stay back there. It wasn’t safe for either of us, but especially not Carly. I mean, it wasn’t always so bad. Before my dad died, we were a normal family. A happy family.”
He sets a hand on my arm. “I can’t even imagine.”
“You believe me,” I say.
There’s an angry edge to his voice. “Of course I do.”
I feel like laughing.
“I don’t know how you could doubt it,” he says. “I mean, after all those hours we spent in that little workroom toiling side-by-side using toothpicks and glue to get tiny paper curlicues to stick to tiny paper tree trunks? When two people go through an experience like that together…”
I snort and scrub my face with my hands.
“Seriously, even if I hadn’t been in that elevator shaft with you, where it was, let’s face it, pretty obvious you’re not somebody who would’ve gone into a well voluntarily—”
“I would never,” I say.
“I know. And also, Denny? That’s not a good guy there.”
“You know him?”
“Jesus, the way he came at you? Don’t need to taste much to know if it’s cottage cheese.”
“You punched him.”
He gets up from the stoop, stands in front of me, reaches down, and pulls me up into his arms. “If I knew what I know now, I would’ve put him right through that glass.”
Chapter 29
Henry
We walk forever. It seems important for her to move, like she needs to put physical distance between Denny and herself, and a car won’t do.
She needs to grind it out. I get it.
I’m trying to keep my anger in check, because an angry guy isn’t what Vicky needs now.
But honestly? I want to be rearranging Denny’s face. My fingers curl with it. The battles I wage are usually about money and boardroom maneuvering, but this one I want personal and painful.
It won’t do anyone any good, I know. Still.
And Brett. What the hell was he thinking?
Of course I know what Brett was thinking. Our PI cracked through her fake identity, figured out she’s Vonda. Brett thought that if he put Denny on the board, it would run her off and add fuel to the incompetency fire. He would’ve been recording it.
I know she’s feeling better when she points out how dazzlingly blue the sky looks against the yellow Reynard Electric building. “It hums with blueness,” she says.
“Unbelievable,” I say. But I’m looking at her. I’m looking at her like she’s a gift. Vonda O’Neil. Strong as steel, with what she went through.
We grab chicken and rice from a halal cart and eat it on a bench at Marcy Place triangle park on the Lower East Side. We throw leftover bits of bread to the pigeons. She’s still shivering, so I give her my jacket to wear. She wraps it around herself and snuggles into me on the bench there. I keep my arm tight around her. “I’m so sorry,” I say into her hair.
“What did you do? You didn’t invite him.”
“I started those wheels in motion. Scheming with Brett.”
“I don’t blame you. In no universe would I blame you for that.” She puts a finger to my lips when I start to protest.
We end up walking clear up the East Village and taking the East Side Line the rest of the way to my place. It’s afternoon by the time we get up there.
I settle her into a chair out on the veranda overlooking the park. I drape a light blanket over her shoulders.
She smiles up at me. “Come here.”
I set my hands on her shoulders and kiss her.
“I feel better,” she says. “Thank you.” Her neck is warm under my thumbs. She’s so beautiful, she doesn't know. I slide my hands over her blanket-covered arms, warming her more.
I leave her out there and make her tea and bake cookies out of the premade cookie dough I keep in the refrigerator. “Cookies and tea,” she says when I bring them. “Next thing I know I’ll come over and you’re knitting tea cozies.”
“I think I’m man enough to knit a tea cozy,” I say. Whatever that is.
She grins. “Oh, you’re man enough to crochet a doily.”
We watch the people in the park and talk about nothing. Doing useless things with her feels more important than the most massive asset takeover.
She complains about me fattening her up, but we nearly finish the pan.
She drains the rest of the tea and straddles my lap, kissing me, her cocoon a tent around us. It’s a slow, lazy kiss. The sunlight behind her tips the edges of her brown hair gold. She feeds me little bits of the last cookie and kisses me some more.
We need to talk about the Vonda situation, but now’s not the time. There’s been enough Vonda today.
She slides the pad of her pointer finger around my lips like she’s memorizing the shape of them. “I like feeding you cookies,” she says.
“That’s convenient,” I say. “Because I like your fingers in my mouth.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
Her gaze turns mischievous. She removes her hand from my lips and trails it down her neck. My heart begins to pound, because I’m also man enough that every ounce of me is focused on the pink and succulent end of the path her fingers are tracing.
Slowly she slides it down her shirt and into the waistband of her blue pants.
I feel her eyes on me, but I can’t tear my gaze from the shape her hand makes in her pants, between her legs.
I watch, mesmerized. It’s so sexy, I just want to flip her over and con
sume her like wildfire, but I hold back. It’s not what she needs.
She strokes off, thighs rocking above mine. My cock grows hard as granite. Even the weight of her on my lap is hot.
I slide my hand over hers—just lightly, just to be there with her, to feel what she does.
My breath gusts in and out. I can feel my nostrils flaring. I’m starving for her. I need to feel her naked against me, skin to skin, belly to belly, heat to heat.
I tear my eyes up to meet hers, beer-bottle brown, translucent in the daylight.
“Mmm,” she says teasingly, lips curling.
“Vicky.” My voice sounds strangled. Like it might be coming from somewhere else. “Vicky, Vicky, Vicky…”
Slowly, eyes still locked on mine, she draws out her hand, holds up two glistening fingers.
I grip her wrist and my lips are closing over her fingers. She yelps at the speed and violence of my grab. “What are you, a vampire?”
I suck every last bit of her off of them. She tastes sweet and dirty. She’s trembling. Vibrating. I feel it where my skin meets hers.
I run my tongue along the underside of her fingers, giving her the wonderful world of the human tongue and the sparkle in her eyes tell me she’s thinking that, too.
She yanks her hand from my mouth and runs sloppy fingers down my chin and down to my straining dick.
She cups me, squeezing. A shudder thrums through me. I’m about to burst out of my skin for her. I cannot get enough of this woman. I think I never will.
“Carry me,” she says. “Hurry.”
I don’t need to be told twice. I palm her ass cheeks and sweep her up. She locks her arms and legs around me as I whirl her around and walk her in, stopping once at a wall just to press her there and kiss her.
I bring her into the bedroom and lay her down. I unbutton and unzip her, kissing silky soft skin. She wriggles under me, soft limbs in a nest of sheets and clothes and the blanket from the porch.
Her panting has a music to it. A high, shaky note, in and out. Her breath gets shakier when I touch her pussy. She grabs onto my hair, pulling as I do her, as I expertly match the speed she did herself with. She groans and pulls. “I won’t last if you do that!”
I’m stunned at how bad I want her. I want to tell her, but I don’t want to scare her.