Bile gathered up in the back of her throat as the all too familiar fear began to build, sending her body into full fight-or-flight mode. She might as well have been right back in that alley kicking and screaming for her life, being threatened with a knife at her neck. Several things became sickening clear in that moment.
Corporate rape was no different from the other–just a little less tangibly violent. She could feel her mind starting to tear away from the edges of reality as the room began to shrink. She closed her eyes and fought back, trying desperately to remember some of the strategies the psychiatrist had given her to deal with her episodes. If Frank watched her check out completely it really would be the end of her career.
Hatred eclipsed fear. Her breath stilled and she looked at Frank with a calculated, pinpoint stare meant to shoot straight into his heart. She’d decided a long time ago that she would rather die than go through that again. “This isn’t about Kevin and you know it. How ‘bout we leave him out of this?”
Frank shook his head. “He hired you. You work for him. You represent him and his company. Like it or not, he’s attached. Truth be known, I think we both kept hoping you’d pony up and do the right thing.”
“What haven’t I done right Frank? Tell me, please.”
“This isn’t about your qualifications. Your Curriculum Vitae is outstanding. It’s the way you do what you do. You fight and balk every step of the way, and to be honest, it’s tiresome. Men in my position have enough stress. We don’t have time to babysit spoiled prima donnas.”
Paige huffed out a short, incredulous breath and shook her head silently. Unbelievable.
“You work as if you’re being chased by bad guys all the time, so you put on a tough girl face just so they’ll leave you alone. Now, I don’t know who’s hurt you in the past and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. What I’m telling you is that it’s affecting your work and you don’t even see it. You’re so busy defending yourself that you can’t see what a pain in the ass you are to work with. You’re high-risk Paige, not to mention high-maintenance.”
Thoroughly beaten, her self-confidence ravaged, she sat silently in a fog of confusion. Part of her mind knew that what he was saying was true, but her heart couldn’t make it right–couldn’t react at anything but a gut level to the spears being tossed her way. She sat there, shrinking ever so slowly, becoming a part of the very fabric of the chair.
“The higher up you go in this business the more you’ll realize it’s a genteel sort of sport. We’ve chosen to rise above guns and knives and physical violence. We all understand the rules and we play the game…differently. It’s more about connections, Paige, and the sooner you learn that the better off you’ll be.”
The gauntlet had been thrown and she saw it lying in the middle of the desk, spanning the space between them. It was choosing time, and her choices had been narrowed down to two–three if you counted career suicide. “What, you just want to throw down right here on the desk?”
Frank appeared appropriately shocked and appalled by her choice of phrase. “My dear, I was merely suggesting you allow me to take you to dinner so that we could discuss our options. Don’t make this into more than it is.”
“Right.”
His face seemed to morph momentarily into the head of a snake. She had to blink hard a couple of times before it came back into focus. She stood up and shook his hand. “I’m sure Nate and I can reschedule our trip. I will personally see to it that this job is finished with every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed.”
“Thank you.”
Paige left Frank’s office on shaking legs. The throngs of people crowding the streets blurred into a dark mass as her feet carried her home without the benefit of her mind’s recognition. When her cell phone rang she didn’t pick it up. When a text came in she ignored the red flashing light. She was sitting on the couch, staring into the dark when she heard Nate’s key turn in the door.
__________
Nate flipped on the light and then jumped back when he saw Paige sitting there on the couch. Her cell phone sat untouched, still flashing on the table.
“I’ve been trying to call you. What’s wrong?” When she didn’t respond he took a good look at her. Her knees were drawn up and she was rocking her head back and forth, holding herself.
“Paige? Are you ok?”
When he sat down, she didn’t move; didn’t acknowledge his presence in the least. When he touched her arm she drew back. He started to panic.
“Paige, what happened? Talk to me or I’m calling the police.”
She slowly turned her head and looked at him. “Don’t.”
“Don’t talk to you or don’t call the police?”
Her eyes suddenly broke free and tears spilled out with a vengeance. “Please just hold me.” When he opened his arms, she fell completely into his embrace, crying quietly at first but unable to hold back the wracking sobs that quickly followed. She moaned with a weeping that conveyed some sort of matching physical pain. He wanted to scream at her for more information.
Instead he rocked her in his arms, stroking her hair and pushing back against the memories that stood mocking him on the threshold of control. The night of the rape she had never cried. She just entered that same catatonic state and drew deep inside herself, disappearing into the underbrush. Tracking was useless. She was the only one who knew the way and she never left breadcrumbs.
Now it seemed like all of that latent pain was being poured out in one fell swoop. The part he hated most was the feeling of utter helplessness. He wanted to scream, but finally settled on tears of his own–as if he could stop them. They ran silently down his cheeks and into her hair and the relief he felt was almost palpable. His fists were relaxed, his breathing relatively steady. No wonder chicks didn’t pick fights.
Night bled gradually into the wee hours of the morning and still he held her. Still no words were spoken. She alternately cried and slept and stared off into space. Around two a.m. she slipped out of his arms and put the water on for tea. The whistle of the kettle might as well have been gunfire. He shot upright.
“What’s that? Are you ok?”
She smiled back at him from the stove. “I’m just making tea. You want some?”
He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Yeah, sure, but I have to pee like a racehorse.”
He got up and used the bathroom, brushing his teeth and trying to wash the sleep out of his eyes. He came out in a t-shirt and a pair of boxers. By then she’d dropped the bed and changed into pajama pants and a tank top.
Nate walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, sipping gratefully on the warm cup she handed him.
“Agh! Crap that hurt!” He set the cup down and ran to the freezer, grabbing an ice cube and sticking it on his tongue. Paige couldn’t help but laugh.
His tongue stuck to the ice as he tried to be serious. “Tho – ayou theeling beya?”
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
He took the ice cube out of his mouth. “You’re mocking me. You feed me scalding hot tea and then you mock me. Beautiful.” He smiled and dropped the ice cube into the cup on the floor. “It’ll probably do me more good in there.”
Paige went to the window. Cradling the steaming cup between her hands, she leaned against the molding and stared up toward Brendan’s balcony–Frank’s balcony. “He’s going to ruin me.”
“What? Who!”
“Frank. One way or another he’s going to ruin me.”
“What are you talking about?” Suddenly Nate got very scared. “What’s he done, Paige? Tell me he laid even a finger on you and I swear, I’ll–”
“He didn’t have to. He did threaten me though–several times.” Her words were dry; rehearsed; completely disconnected from her emotions.
“You’re scaring me.”
She ignored him and just kept staring out the window. “He made it very clear that my job was on the line and he could make it surprisingly difficult for me to secure anoth
er position. He strong-armed me into canceling our trip in order to stay to the very end of this thing, and then he–”
Nate was speechless. Frozen. Waiting for the inevitable.
“He somehow implied that if I didn’t “play nice” that it might affect Kevin’s ability to land other profitable contracts once this is over.”
Nate came off the bed in a flash. “What?” He grabbed hold of her shoulders but her body was loose, like an overcooked noodle that could no longer stick to the wall. “Tell me what happened!”
“If you asked him, he’d swear he merely asked me to dinner.”
Brendan’s swollen face appeared in Nate’s memory. He’d deny everything. He’d deny me if it served his purposes… “What exactly did he say?”
She shook her head slowly, deliberately. “I don’t even remember, but I’ll bet you anything that nothing he said would stand up in court. He talked about how “gentlemen” play the game of business. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it felt slimy, you know? Like I was a piece of meat on a stick.”
Nate stood there blinking. He’d dealt with anger and jealousy in the past, but nothing had prepared him for this deep, self-possessed rage with a mind and a voice that threatened his sanity and tested the legal limits of his capacity to reason.
She looked away from the window and stared into Nate’s eyes with an anger that betrayed her pain. “You know what that makes me? Just another cheap whore with an MBA.”
His eyes snapped and fury took over for logic’s weak and rapidly diminishing hold on his thoughts. All he could see was Brendan’s bruises and they suddenly became hers. It was illogical, of course. Frank hadn’t touched her, but knowing what he now knew about Frank’s temper, his manipulation, and the game of control, it was more than Nate could handle–especially when it came to Paige.
“Nate, you’ve got that look. I hate that look.”
“What look?”
“The look you got right before you gave that guy in the bar a concussion and several broken ribs.”
“That was different.”
“No Nate. It’s exactly the same.”
His eyes glazed over with rage and pain. “He has it coming Paige! God help me, he’s got it coming.”
“He didn’t touch me Nate. He didn’t even say anything directly. It was all stealth and camouflage. His meaning was obvious, but not the kind of obvious that could land him in court for harassment. He made sure of that with the blackmail part.”
Nate tried to control his breathing. His trip to the gym had retrained his ability with the punching bag, and he started imagining Frank’s face pinging back and forth with each hit.
“In my head I know exactly what’s going on. It’s just a power play. He’s got the power and I’m his puppet.” She raked a shaking hand through her hair and rubbed one side of her face. “Only it’s not just me on the line now, it’s Kevin too, and our firm. Otherwise I’d have walked out and told him to go screw himself–you know I would have.”
Nate stood guard in front of her like a sentry, stiff and still. The only movement was the heaving of his chest and the clenching and unclenching of his fists as he planned the battle.
She looked at his stance and could read his intention. “But then what, Nate? After you kick his ass, then what? You go to jail? What good is that? No matter what you do, no matter what I do, I’m going to lose my position at this firm and I’m going to be blacklisted. He’s going to make sure that no one hires me.”
“Over my dead body!”
“I’m beginning to think he could have that arranged.”
“This is ludicrous. Who does he think he is? The don?”
She started laughing the staccato, incredulous laugh of a person in checkmate. “You know what he called me? ‘High risk and high maintenance’. Once he makes his rounds, no one will want to take a chance on someone like me, whether it’s the bad publicity or fear of losing Frank’s favor. He wins, and he knows it.”
“He threatened your career, Paige. You can fight this! Talk to Kevin. Tell him what’s going on. Even though I hate it, at the very least you know you have favor with Kevin.”
“Kevin trusted me to do this right! Ever since this thing with Frank started, he’s got this thing about the money and the future clientele.”
Nate snapped out of it momentarily, his brain picking through the remains of the facts, trying to find some tiny shred of hope. “There’s got to be something more. Something we can use against him.” Nate bent over and held his head in his hands. “Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m even talking about this. I know exactly what to do. That bastard has no idea who he’s-”
He pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed his keys.
“Nate! It’s two-thirty in the morning!”
It didn’t show itself very often anymore, but the red-hot poker had already begun searing his chest from the inside out. He knew that if he gave in to it there’d be hell to pay on all sides, and what he stood to lose was formidable, but he had to get out of the apartment.
“I need to walk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“It’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.”
- Braveheart
Nate left their building and started to walk the empty streets–empty being relative in New York City. It only annoyed him further that people were still out at this hour. There was nowhere to get away–ever. He tuned out the rest of humanity and disappeared into his thoughts as he walked. There had to be a solution that didn’t end with Paige paying the highest price–again.
To men like Frank and his father, control was the same as money–a commodity to be hoarded and hardly ever traded. Frank was into control for control’s sake, and Paige was merely the latest pawn on the board. Her career meant nothing to him. He was the captain of an enormous powerboat, unafraid to use her and anyone else to get to his destination. No one argued with the captain. That was just how the game was played.
Nate played the game too, but he played it differently. For him the decisions were more humane. They were more about holding back. He was careful with his words and calculated his actions. Always alert to the wind and the waves, he adjusted the tack according to the conditions on any given day. His was a sailboat, but he was definitely the skipper. Maybe his was just a different kind of control.
He took the shortest route to Madison Avenue. Rounding the corner with a vengeance, he stopped just short of the awning on Frank’s building, stuffing clenched fists back in his pockets. Three a.m. was hardly the right time for a confrontation. Besides, Paige was right. After the arrest, any meaningful conversation would be virtually impossible.
Knowing his enemy was an advantage that couldn’t be overlooked. It was a matter of beating him at his own game. He neither wanted nor needed Frank’s business. Nate’s reputation was impeccable. Frank couldn’t really hurt him.
There was always Nate’s father. As strained as their relationship had been in the past, blood was still thicker than water, and Gregory Banks would go to bat for his son in a heartbeat if it had to do with an altercation in the business world. He wielded just as much power as Frank, but on a whole other level. His was old money–the kind that talked.
When he walked back into the apartment, Paige was lying in bed but the lights were still on. She was facing away from him and she didn’t turn around when she heard him come in.
“Did you kill him or do I still have to go to work in a couple of hours?”
He walked around and knelt down next to the bed. Gently brushing the hair back from her forehead, he kissed the spot it cleared, then put his face down next to hers.
“What? What is it?” She looked confused.
“Nothing.” He just smiled at her. His love for her went deeper than the rage, covering the anger like a blanket on its way past the fire.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“No.”
“No you won’t answer my question, or no you didn’t kill him?”
“I didn’t even talk to him. I walked over there but I couldn’t go through with it. Not at three in the morning anyway. You were right, he probably would’ve had me hauled away in the back of a patrol car, and I don’t need that kind of hassle if we’re going to fight this thing.”
“Fight it?” Paige scoffed. “There’s no fighting this. It’s hopeless.”
“I’ll find a way. This is not going to end here, I promise you.” Nate sat down on the floor and looked out the window. “I’m going to talk to my father.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve heard you utter that phrase in over a year.”
“Yeah well, desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“I’ll say.”
He turned back toward her and looked her in the eye. “Listen, I want you to keep an eye out for anything you could use against him–just in case. Make copies of documents, email files to yourself, whatever you have to do. I don’t want it to have to come to that, but it’s probably not a bad idea to hedge our bets. Frank’s biggest enemy is his own pride. He thinks he’s untouchable. We need to prove him wrong in that.”
Paige rolled away from him and started to cry again. He slid into bed behind her and held on.
“I don’t understand why I’m crying so much. It’s like a switch got flipped on and the water works started and now I don’t know how to turn it off.” She reached for a tissue and wiped her face. “I feel so stupid!”
“It’s ok. Just let it go. Maybe you’re making up for lost time–or tears.” He looked out over the top of her head and tried to come up with a solution.
“Nate? I’m so sorry–about Barbados. I really do want to go.”
He kissed the top of her hair. “Shh. Don’t you worry about that. We’ll go. When this is over, we’ll go.”
__________
By Saturday the swelling had gone down considerably in his face, but his mother still caught a glimpse of it while he was making a sandwich in the kitchen. She stopped cold.
Letters From The Ledge Page 23