by Ryan, Alison
My jaw dropped.
There had been a night where I had no memory of getting home. I’d been very sick the next day and I suspected something like roofies might have happened, but I was just grateful that somehow I’d made it home that night. Now I knew why.
“I carried you home,” he continued. “I knew you wouldn’t remember, so I took a chance, let you see me. Your eyes were glassy, but it was the first time I got to touch you. I knew it was a bad idea but I couldn’t resist.”
I stared at him, in complete shock over what was happening around me all these years. And I’d never even noticed.
“I can’t believe I was that out of it,” I whispered. “How could I not remember you? You rescued me.” I leaned in to kiss him, to thank him.
“You rescued me back,” he said, and with that I was his. Again.
********
Maybe Freud would have been able to psychoanalyze me and figure out why it was I was so drawn to a man who had essentially been stalking me the last four years of my life. But despite his confession, it didn’t sever my want for Nolan. The thought of him protecting me and keeping watch over me for some fucked up reason made me satisfied. All those times I’d felt so lonely and forgotten; yet there he’d been.
What happened from here? I wasn’t sure. And had my father known? I guessed not.
So many questions to ask. But after being with Nolan all day, I was exhausted. My body had been overexerted and I was at capacity. I fell asleep in his arms, a happy woman, who for the first time possibly ever, felt truly safe and right where she should be.
********
I awoke with a start sometime in the middle of the night.
Nolan’s side of the bed was empty, and my stomach dropped, wondering where he could be. I wrapped the Egyptian cotton sheet around my body and stood. I was sore, particularly in my inner thighs, and I couldn’t help but grin to myself. That soreness came from only one thing.
But where was he? In the kitchen?
I quietly tip toed down the staircase where I could see a light in the kitchen. Walking in, however, it was clear Nolan wasn’t there.
I thought I heard a voice coming from where his bedroom was.
I slowly walked down the hall, not wanting to scare him or surprise him, but also curious as to what he was doing in the middle of the night.
The closer I got, the more evident it was that Nolan was speaking. On a phone call? It was 3 am. Unless it was someone in a different time zone. What time was it in Europe?
As much as I hated to eavesdrop, something told me not to make him aware I could hear him. So like I had done just a couple days ago, I stood quietly outside his cracked bedroom door.
“… She doesn’t know everything,” he said to whoever was on the other line. “She’s your typical dumb, rich college girl. Only thinking about when she can get her manicured hands on her trust fund Daddy and Mommy left her…”
Who was he talking about? It couldn’t be me? But who else?
I leaned in for more.
“Yeah, I’ve been talking to her,” he said. “We’ve been stuck in this damn house half the week… Well, yes. Sex was what happened, but that’s all it was. I needed something to do to get me through this week. I think she needed it to, poor girl just lost her dad, needed to get her mind on other things… You know, girls today. They love to hook up…”
Okay. He was definitely talking about me.
And my heart broke right there. As if there was much left to break.
********
I’d gone straight to my room and started packing up my bags. I didn’t want to spend another second with him. He was clearly a sociopath, able to be whoever he needed to be in a moment. He wasn’t my protector at all. He was a lying snake, one that I’d been stupid enough to let near my body.
As I threw my clothes into my Burberry duffel I glanced at myself in the reflection of my bedroom window. My hair was wild and my face puffy from crying. I hated that I’d let him do this to me. This is why I’d stayed guarded most of my life, to keep people from rejecting me, from hurting me.
But Nolan. I had let my guard down for him. Only him.
Was anything he told me true? He did work for the firm. Clearly you didn’t do what he did without being good at lying and fooling people.
I’ve told more lies than truths, hurt people to assist other people who maybe didn’t deserve my help.
Well, he’d told me himself; he was a professional liar.
But he’d crossed a line. He’d made me feel for him.
God, I was such a fucking idiot.
I needed to get out of here. Did Uber come up to mountain mansions? I fumbled around for my iPhone. I might as well find out.
By the time I’d found the phone and was scrolling through my applications to find a driver, Nolan was standing in my doorway, a puzzled look on his face.
“Camilla,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Packing,” I said. “I’m leaving. I need to get back home.” I hoped my voice sounded cold, but I could feel it shaking.
“What happened?” he asked, walking toward me. I put my hand up, a virtual block. I didn’t want him any closer to me.
“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want you to come any closer. I want you to go back downstairs and let me go. I don’t want to ever hear from you again. If there’s probate or legal shit I need to do, send someone else to handle it. Anyone but you.”
He froze, stunned by my words.
“What happened?” he said. “You were sleeping…”
“And you were talking on the phone,” I replied. “But you know what? You’re right about one thing. I am a dumb, rich college girl. That’s the part you definitely got correct. Extremely dumb.” I slammed the top of my luggage shut and laid my body across it so I could zip it closed. “But I learn fast, Nolan. I don’t let people fool me more than once.”
Now he understood.
“You heard my phone call,” he said. “I can explain…”
“No. I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I wouldn’t believe you anyway. I’m taking an Uber to the airport and I’m going back home.”
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Camilla, that call was not what you think it was. I had to say those things…”
“Bullshit,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. You told me it couldn’t mean anything. That it could just be one night. So there you go. You had your one night to fuck the stupid girl you were forced to babysit all these years. Was it a good hook up?”
There was pain in his eyes now. Good. I hoped I put it there.
“Camilla, no.” He shook his head, “You can’t leave like this. Please at least let me take you to the airport. I can talk on the way there, maybe change your mind…”
“That’s all you want to do!” I screamed. “Is change my mind! For your own fucked up agenda. All you do is lie! I only hope the whole stupid story about the baseball ticket was true, so you’d have an inkling of the pain you’ve caused me. Did you out on this whole charade because you want me to put you in charge of shit? Let you run the firm, have all the power? Have it, Nolan! I told you I don’t want any of it. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want the name Hunt! I’m going to change it. I’m going to change everything about me that is linked to you, my father or any of it. I’ll start a new life and try to forget how you made me feel tonight. Like I was a piece of garbage.”
He tried to reach out to me. His face looked like he might cry. But I couldn’t believe any of it. Nothing I had ever been told was true.
So why start to believe now?
Nineteen
He hadn’t said much after that. Part of me wondered if I should let him explain. Maybe there was a reason. Maybe a misunderstanding.
But that was me trying to see things as I wanted them to be and not as they were. I couldn’t be that person. I had to be smarter. Besides, he’d sounded like he meant every word of that conversation on the phone.
Sex was what hap
pened, but that’s all it was.
That’s what killed me the most.
I’d pushed past him to go downstairs. My pea coat still lay on the couch in the living room. It had been there the entire trip, just waiting for me to put it back on and get back to my real life.
Not that I knew what that meant anymore.
The Uber driver was right on time. As I walked out the door with my bags I could hear Nolan finally call to me again. His voice was calm but his words were anything but.
“None of what you heard was true,” he said. “I know you don’t believe me. But I haven’t lied to you, Camilla. And I never will.”
I turned to look at him one last time. He was beautiful in the light of a full moon. The beams reflected off the snow and onto his body. He stood shirtless, even though it was freezing outside. But as usual, it didn’t seem to affect him at all.
Did anything?
“I can’t risk believing you,” I said. “Even if I wanted to.”
And with that, I was gone.
********
The driver must have thought I was insane. I sobbed all the way to the airport. At a stoplight he’d turned to me.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head, “Nope. Not even a little bit.”
I’m sure he’d never been so grateful to drop a passenger off at Departures. Once I was on the curb with my baggage (both literal and figurative) I realized- I didn’t even have a flight. I sat on my largest suitcase and scrolled through my iPhone, but I also didn’t have a charge. The phone flickered and died.
Well, fuck.
I dragged my suitcases inside the terminal. It was deathly quiet. I realized it was now just past 4:30 am and the earliest flights probably were just leaving in an hour. I hoped to God I could somehow be on one of them.
I rummaged through my purse, trying not to cry again. I needed to find my charger.
Concentrate on one task at a time, I thought. Try to forget about the last 72 hours.
A large part of me kept waiting for him to run through the automatic sliding doors looking for me. To see me struggling to find my cell phone charger and an outlet, and I wanted him to sweep me up into his massive, strong arms and kiss away my doubts and fears. I needed him to unbreak my spirit.
But real life isn’t the movies. Especially mine. He never came through those doors.
And I never stopped thinking about him. Not even for a second.
Twenty
The flight back to Virginia was something I wouldn’t be able to tell you a single thing about if you asked me now.
I imagine I must have looked like a zombie sitting in my coach seat, huddled next to the window, staring out at nothing. I don’t even recollect how I got off the plane and back to my room in Charlottesville. It’s all a depressing blur.
But not one time did he call me. I’d even kept my phone on during the flight, hoping to feel a buzz against my leg. I disembarked and stared down at my now fully charged iPhone.
But nothing. Nolan Weston didn’t seem very interested in making me understand anything. Which told me everything I needed to know.
********
How could I go back to normal life? My father was dead, my heart was broken, and there wasn’t anything to be excited about. Before Nolan I’d looked forward to the possibilities ahead of me. The freedom. I belonged to no one, I was my own woman. Finally. After all this time doing what was expected of me, I would finally have the beginning of everything in front of me.
I’d made a list of all the cities I would visit. London. Paris. Rome. Florence. Prague. Berlin. Oslo. Then jump over to Jerusalem. Cairo. Take a flight to Phuket. Lay on a beautiful beach with a beautiful man who had been faceless all this time.
Now that face would always be filled in by Nolan Weston’s. I would never be able to see anything beautiful and not think of him. And I hated him for that.
I was also furious with myself for letting myself get this emotionally invested in a man who I had only known a week. A man who had started our relationship by lying to me about my father’s death. A man who was cold to me one moment and warm to me the next.
He’d shared things with me though. The man had been inside me! He’d whispered all of his deepest desires into my willing ears.
His mouth… I missed it.
His hands… I missed them.
His voice, his body, his everything.
How could I function? The love had been quick, but the heartbreak would last forever.
Twenty-One
One person did call me.
It was the Monday after I’d arrived back in Virginia. I was about to leave for my Renaissance Literature class when my phone buzzed on my desk. I’d considered walking away from it, but at the last second I answered it without even looking at the Caller I.D.
“Hello?” I said. Part of my stomach still got nervous hoping it was him. Even though I’d told myself I would hang up.
“Yes, Camilla Hunt?” It was a woman’s voice. I looked at my screen to see the number she was calling from but it said Unavailable.
“And who would be asking?” I said.
“Sorry, I’m Jessa Ladson. I work for the Hunt Group. I’m also handling your father’s estate. I am truly sorry for your loss, Camilla. Your father spoke so fondly of you every time I saw him,” she said. Her voice was genuine and kind. But I was confused.
“I thought Nolan Weston was handling probate,” I said. “I just… Saw him. In Tahoe? I’m confused.”
“Yes, sorry,” Jessa replied. “Mr. Weston was handling the estate but he has very suddenly resigned his position at The Hunt Group.”
An awkward silence sat between Jessa and me.
“He no longer works for the firm?” I asked.
“Oh, he does… It’s not that simple to resign from the actual company,” Jessa said cryptically. “But he’s resigned from his position. We are actually all very much at a loss as to why that is, but I assumed you might have an idea of why?”
“Nope,” I said, flatly. “I was stuck in a house with him for 3 days. I found out what my father’s firm does, but I didn’t get into any details of what that has to do with Nolan.”
“I see,” said Jessa. I could tell she didn’t believe me.
“Anyway,” I said, hoping my voice sounded more assertive. “I am the sole owner of the Hunt Group now, yes?”
Jessa cleared her throat, “You are. Which is why I’m calling. It’s very important that the board meets with you. Tahoe ended up being a disaster, none of us were able to fly in due to the weather, so we were thinking we could set up something this week? We would send a plane for you, of course. Meet somewhere warmer? We have offices in the Bahamas.”
“Jessa, right? I don’t know if you’re aware, but I have a life outside of my father’s. As a matter of fact, our lives barely intersected, and though I have an idea of why that is, I am still not willing to interrupt my life again. I graduate college in 3 months. I don’t want anything to prevent that from happening, it’s been too long a four years, and I’ve worked too hard to delay that goal. Were you aware my father has been dead almost two weeks?”
A long pause. It was the only answer I needed.
“Right,” I replied. “We’re on my time now. I have no interest in meeting with the board or anyone else until I graduate. I have classes, exams, things to prepare for. So run your business as usual. Otherwise, close down shop for all I care.”
“It’s not that simple and I’m sure you’re aware of that,” Jessa said, her voice more assertive now, very different from the chipper, sweet girl I had first spoken to minutes before. “We have very powerful men and women who depend on our services.”
“Well, then figure it out without me,” I said. “I wouldn’t be a lick of help anyway. So just pretend my father is on vacation until June. I’m sure that happened sometimes, right?”
“Yes,” Jessa said. “If that’s what you wish.”
“It is.” And with
that, we both hung up.
Twenty-Two
The next three months were a blur of classes, exams, sleep, carbs, and wine. I was a girl who ate her feelings at times, and the wine washed all the pain away.
But it worked. I made it to graduation in one piece.
I hadn’t heard from Nolan or the firm since my call with Jessa. I was grateful for it, sometimes trying to trick myself into believing it had all been a weird fever dream, something I made up in my head.
But the pain in my heart reminded me of how real it had been.
I would dream of him. His face, his body, and the way he looked at me when I came for him. Mr. Weston, please. I would beg him. Another one. Another one. One more time.
No one would be coming to my graduation. My Aunt Beth had met a new man and when that happened, nothing else existed. Including me.
But I was used to being alone.
I’d half-heartedly bought plane tickets to Europe. First stop, Salzburg, where my father and I had spent the best week of my life as a teenager. Nolan had done one last good deed; he’d made sure my father’s urn was sent to me. So now I had his ashes on my desk next to my old English lit papers. I hadn’t known what to do with them, but I’d decided I would spread them all over the world, in every place I went. So in a way, he could be with me.
Part of me hadn’t even wanted to go to the graduation ceremony. But I knew it was a once in a lifetime memory, even if it was one I would have alone. I’d donned the black robe and matching mortarboard. Listened to the commencement speech from former United States President Castleberry. A cruel twist of irony. His wife sat in the seats behind the mic stand, a plastic smile plastered across her face. I thought of the dossier of secrets and wondered if she knew my father’s firm had photos of her. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and for a moment it brought me out of my funk.