“Did you watch the video?” he said.
Rachel shook her head, mostly in disbelief. How could he say such a thing? Didn't he care that someone was blackmailing them? At all?
Josh frowned. “First of all, we have to watch it, to see if it's even legitimate. Don't you want to know...I don't know? Where it is? How could someone have even gotten video of you and Xavier?”
Rachel shook her head. She could barely think. Her mind had gone now to the most awful sentence in the letter: “I have posted a segment of the video.”
“Rachel!” Josh hissed. “You've got to focus here. We need to watch the video.”
He stormed down the hallway, USB key in hand.
Rachel looked down at the letter, rooted to the ground. The words blurred and swarmed in front of her.
It was a nightmare. And she should have seen it coming. She had been reckless and she had known it. She had been taking chances with her heart, with Josh's feelings, with...everything. All because she was gripped by the most base of instincts, unable to stop herself, insatiable.
Even in the midst of her despair about the video, thinking on her sexual exploits was stirring up arousal inside of her.
She grabbed the paper and stormed down the hallway to Josh's office. She had to slide around his desk, because he had re-arranged the furniture for some reason.
A small window was already playing the video.
Rachel squinted, because for a moment she didn't recognize anything about what she was seeing. She didn't recognize herself in the woman, the main protagonist in this piece of porn, bent over a table with an enormous cock plowing into her. It looked like something from a porn site: amateurish, poorly lit. Poorly staged, though as she drew the scene into focus and into the context of her mind, it began to – and she would have been embarrassed to admit this – titillate her. The balls slapping against the woman's inner thighs and pussy were Xavier's; the cock plunging in and out of the woman was Xavier's.
And the woman. That woman, who was bent over the desk and taking that enormous cock inside of her, moaning with pleasure as Xavier pulled her ass open, that woman was her.
It was lewd. It was obscene.
And yet she found herself being overtaken by a surprising feeling as she watched it. The feeling was drenching her mind, stirring up the now-familiar ache between her legs. The feeling was making her pussy well up with excitement. It was overriding her anger about the letter, and her fear about being exposed on the internet. It was like boiling water being poured on the ice that had nearly burst open her veins just moments before.
She was enjoying watching herself. She could feel it, even if she didn't want to feel it. She liked watching what she had done. She liked the raw, visceral visual of it. It was getting her wet.
She watched, mouth open, as Xavier fucked her and fucked her. Her pussy began to throb with the phantom feel of his thick cock inside of her. She found herself wishing there was a film of Xavier fucking her in the ass. She would have to ask Josh to get a camera...
What the fuck was she thinking? She interrupted her own train of thought and gave her head a sobering shake.
She squinted at the video. Where was the person who had filmed it.
“That's the office,” she said softly. “It's...” she turned her head and moved closer to the screen, as if it would help clarify something for her. Was the camera on the floor? Had it been on the floor of her office, in plain view, and she had failed to see it?
As if he could read her mind, Josh said: “It looks like it's shot through glass.” He lifted a finger to the screen and waved it over a faint streak to make his point.
Rachel went cold again.
“So who...?” her voice trailed off.
Who did it? That was the obvious question, and it hung in the air, heavy and dark.
Rachel did not think like Josh. She often wished that she did. Josh thought in neat, perfectly ordered lines. He did so calmly, and that's what he was doing now. He was looking at the screen, and analyzing. He was in what Rachel thought of as his “Cold Mode,” though she never said as much to him.
She, on the other hand, could feel her head “snapping.” That's how she thought. Snap. Snap. Snap. Maybe not all in a line.
It had to be someone at the station. Some devious bastard, under the table like a belly-crawling animal. Snap.
All the leaked videos. The leaked footage. Snap.
Someone who could get into the station. Snap.
Bribery. The fucking nerve. Snap.
It all had to be the same person. The same person. Snap.
The simplest explanation, Josh repeated to her so often it made her head hurt, was usually the right one. Rachel loved to retort that it might be true of science, but it was not of journalism.
And yet, the simplest explanation materialized in front of her, in her mind's eye. It froze her through to the core, exactly as the letter had done.
Josh was on the internet now, clicking through window after window of internet garbage, and then there it was: the posted video.
Rachel watched it. She was divorced from her body as she did so, so she felt nothing, not even relief that it was only a few seconds and only the very beginning of the video, and so blurry and poorly shot that it was impossible to tell if it was her in the video or not.
“No one believes this is you,” Josh said. He was scanning the comments. “That's the good news. Everyone thinks it's a fake.”
Her mind went quickly down an illogical path, a path of hope. The whole thing was fake! She felt her heart bursting with hope, before her mind caught up to her emotions.
It wasn't fake. The internet might now know that, but the video was definitely of her, and the person who had posted it had a whole, lengthy video in which it was clear that it was her. And he was going to post it.
Unless she paid the money.
Again, the simple explanation formed an image in her mind. Her arteries filled with rage. The sensation, as the metaphor went, threatened to blind her. Her heart was racing and her blood pressure was so high that her peripheral vision turned orange-red.
Josh was still cold, analyzing. “Yeah, no one in the comments thinks this is real, Rach. So now you just have to...”
But she was already turning down the hallway. Already marching toward the kitchen.
Josh followed her. “Rachel? What are you doing?”
“Looking for my bloody keys!” Her own voice shocked her. Her American accent, the accent she cultivated, was destroyed. She practically spit as she yelled.
Josh's eyes went around the room ahead of her, and he jumped at the counter top where the keys were sitting and held them in his hand. “What are you doing, Rachel?”
“Give me the bloody keys.”
Josh shook his head. “I'm not letting you drive in this state. Tell me what you want to do and I'll help you do it.”
Rachel felt her anger, which was at fever-pitch, easy to point in any direction. It pivoted away from her original target and toward Josh, Josh and his cool head. Josh and his analysis, Josh and his rationality.
“Give me the fucking keys.”
She watched his face. What was his expression?
“No way,” he said. “Not until you calm down.”
He was right of course. There was a part of her that knew it.
She grabbed her purse, and stormed out through the living room, jerking a coat from the coat tree and knocking it over. “I can take the bloody train!” she shrieked.
Did he call out after her? She had no idea. Her ears were pounding with anger and she was enervated by something wild. Wilder than she had ever felt before.
And wasn’t that just the way of things now?
Her eyes burned with the stress as she stomped down the street and into a subway station. People gave her odd looks.
She caught a northbound train, choosing a random line, burning her stare into the windows.
After all, she started to realize, if she was headed to Xavie
r's house, she had absolutely no idea how to get there by train. Her mind felt shattered in a million pieces, unable to recall his address for blocks and blocks.
When she finally managed to remember the cross streets and organize her plan: to get a taxi; she was in an industrial wasteland. She walked a few blocks from the light rail station before it became clear that there was nothing but office parks, and she walked back.
The next train was half an hour in coming.
So she sat, and her rage built.
By the time she knocked on Xavier's door – a train ride, a cab ride, and a half-mile walk later, her eyes were criss-crossed by reddened capillaries and she must have looked insane. He stared at her. “You okay?” he said, tenderly.
“You,” Rachel seethed.
V ARIABLES
Things never went as you expected, when you implemented a plan. This was a known danger. There was always something out of control.
And this was a crazy plan to begin with.
Josh had expected Rachel to cry. He had expected her to mortified, to slump on the couch, to re-think everything she'd been doing.
He had expected to have to coax her to where she seemed to have gotten. He had expected to have lead her thinking – her non-linear, criss-crossing, branching, wild thinking – down a path to the conclusion she seemed to have arrived at.
And that was just the thing. Just the problem.
She seemed to have arrived at the conclusion he wanted her to, but he had no way of knowing if she had or not. Because she had flown so completely off the handle. Because she – his wife, Rachel Elliot – had stopped talking.
He had not counted on that.
Sitting in his office, wondering where his wife had gone, grateful he had been able to stop her from driving in a blind rage, Josh felt the full insanity of what he had just done, all of his stupid actions, converging upon him.
There were stories of people doing incredibly stupid things that fascinated him. Of people digging themselves in deeper and deeper to some kind of mess, that left the average person in awe. That guy who stacked up all the bodies in his crematorium until there were just hundreds of them. Lance Armstrong, just lying and lying until it became an avalanche.
Josh had always held a fascination for these stories, because he felt a certain empathy for these people.
And now, here he was. A man who had just kept digging himself into a hole.
This was utterly ridiculous. What the hell had he been thinking?
He sat in his chair, a portion of his mind dedicated to reading the comments about the video. This, at least, he had predicted correctly. No one believed (though everyone wanted to) that the video actually showed Rachel. Only Rachel knew it was real, and so she would stay quiet about the blackmail, Josh would dig up $20,000 and send it to himself (he could tuck it back into their savings over years), and Rachel would be relieved.
And all the while, Josh would muse: who could have done it? Who would have had access to the station? Who knew you were there?
And why, Rachel? Why would somebody do this?
His hope had been that Rachel could be guided to the obvious: it was Xavier. Xavier was the only thing that made sense. It was unfortunate that he was such a shit, unfortunate that she would never be able to prove it...but at least she could cut things off with him. What a terrible mistake. Who could have known it would turn out like this?
(Or another variant, in which Josh “went out to talk to Xavier” and got everything cleared up. Like a man.)
But he had nixed that idea because it was too farfetched. Which was of course a little laughable, all things considered.
So what would happen? Rachel would confront Xavier, and Xavier would of course tell her he had nothing to do with this video or blackmail. Naturally, he would seem convincing, because he didn't have anything to do with it.
But Xavier's problem would be that the truth was something so ridiculous, so farfetched and insane, so unlikely, that no one would ever think of it.
And so, he would look guilty by default.
Josh would convince Rachel, quite easily, that Xavier must be lying. He would tell her they should send the money, be done with this whole business, forget any of this ever happened.
And she would never feel the same about Xavier again. She wouldn't trust him, she wouldn't want to keep seeing him.
And voila. Problem solved.
Rachel, though, had not reacted as he had predicted.
There was the anger: he had certainly not expected her to disintegrate into a rage.
There was the quickness with which she had done so.
Josh had fully expected to have to use his “it's-usually-the-simplest-explanation” line. Don't look for zebras. Rachel, though, had tried and convicted someone, there in just a few short minutes. He never had the chance to lead her to the conclusion he wanted her to arrive at.
All of these things were very, very unusual for Rachel.
Very unusual.
Josh felt a very unpleasant fear cooling his insides:
Good god. What had he done?
A CCUSATIONS
“Calm down and tell me what happened.”
Rachel's eyes were blurry. Her mind was snapping back and forth between several ideas, idea she probably should have thought out completely before she had banged on Xavier's front door. She had plenty of time, on the train, and the next train, and walking to his house, but in all of that time she hadn't thought anything through at all.
Once Xavier touched her, one hand on each of her biceps, her anger had melted away. Not a lot, just a little. His face was genuinely perplexed, and concerned, which only chipped away further at the conclusion she had drawn back at home: that Xavier was the one, all along, who had been filming her and leaking videos on the internet.
That Xavier was blackmailing her now.
She had been so sure of herself, and she had allowed herself to be carried away by the anger. Maybe a part of her, she realized, had been relieved to have a reason to hate Xavier. Part of her – that part she felt she couldn't get under control – was thrilled to have a way out. That part of her, she was starting to realize, had perhaps jumped on a conclusion that really didn't make any sense.
On the other hand, what was the other explanation?
Now, after only minutes of thinking about it, she was faced with a strategical decision: she could tell Xavier why she was upset. But if she had been wrong, and he wasn't the one blackmailing her, there was no telling what he would do in response. Maybe he would call the police. Maybe he would lose it. She could be setting off a whole chain of events that were not a very good idea.
She clutched her stomach and pretended to hyperventilate. It was a cheap trick, but it would buy her some time. Time to weigh her options.
If Xavier was the one who was blackmailing her, then he was certainly putting on a very good show of having no idea what was going on.
Anger flickered around inside of her again, though not as furiously. What a psychopath he was, if that was the case.
She sat down on a dining room chair.
Should she tell him? What was the right move here?
“Sod it,” she muttered. She was no good at strategic games. It just wasn't in her nature.
Xavier had been talking to her this entire time, trying to calm her down and repeatedly asking her to explain what was wrong.
By now she had faked hyperventilating so much that she was certain she actually was, in reality, hyperventilating. She couldn’t slow down her hysterical, rapid breaths.
“There's a video,” she said finally. “There's a tape...a video... It's on the internet.” She waved her hands in the air, not sure herself what the gesture meant, and Xavier caught them.
“Rachel. Rachel, hey, take a deep breath.”
She tried.
“Now. Video. Video on the internet. Video of what?”
She started breathing hysterically again. This time it was again a ploy to buy herself time. Her head
was muddled. She wished she wasn't there, in Xavier's room. She wished she had given her tactics more thought. She wished she wasn't acting like a crazy person.
“There's a video on the internet,” she repeated. “It's of us.”
Xavier, who had been crouching next to her, fell back on his heels. His face changed from one of concern to a sort of angry seriousness. “Of us,” he repeated.
Rachel watched his face carefully. In her line of work, it wasn't uncommon for people to lie and to exaggerate. They were also often telling a story about something that had already happened. There was a certain innate artfulness that nearly everyone had when they told or story, and their face changed to emulate their shock or surprise, or their anger, or their compassion, for what they had seen moments or hours or days before. But that expression was never anything like the real expression of shock, or surprise, or anger, that a person had when the news was truly new.
Xavier seemed to be genuinely reacting to news about something he knew nothing about.
But there was a part of Rachel, of course, that wanted him to know nothing about this. A part of Rachel that was relieved by the touch of his hands on her knees. This part of Rachel did not want Xavier to be the man who had done all of these awful things. This part of Rachel did not want an excuse or a way out of her relationship with Xavier.
God, she was a mess.
“Where?” Xavier said, after a long pause. His voice was cold.
Rachel blinked. “What?”
“Where? Where is the video?” Xavier was barking at her now. He stood up from his low crouch.
Rachel shook her head. “On the internet...”
“No. Where was the video filmed?”
Rachel wiped her eyes. “In the office. In my office.”
Xavier stared down at her, incredulous. “How, in your office? At the station?”
“It was under the...under the table, the next office over. Through that glass...strip...down the...” She found herself unable to finish the sentence.
Xavier was already turning around and marching into the kitchen.
Rachel followed him, after a moment she took to try and compose herself.
Human Interest 2: A Wife-Sharing Exposé Page 7