by Amelia Wilde
I can see everything. Everything.
Sam, standing a foot away from the conference table in her black work slacks and a coral top. Sam, pushing away from a man who has his arm wrapped around her waist. Sam’s ponytail swaying while she jerks her weight from side to side, trying to get the arm off of her.
She’s almost the same height as the man, but I know who it is even before her weight shifts to the side far enough for me to see his face.
It’s Edison Calley, and he’s attacking my Sam, and even if it’s a fucking mistake to take control of this situation, I have no other choice. But I’m not thinking about mistakes. I’m only thinking about Sam, and getting him the hell off of her, right now.
I put my hand on the door handle and pull. Hard.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Samantha
The door to the hallway opens, but I can’t turn. I can’t do anything except try to claw Calley’s arm away from my waist. It’s like I’m caught in this singular moment, pressed against his suit by an arm that may as well be made of iron, and it is endless. I’ve been to enough bars in my life that I’m no stranger to men who get handsy and need to be told in no uncertain terms that their attention is not welcome, but this is no late night at the club. This is no drunk college senior brushing up against me on the dance floor. This is broad daylight. This is at work.
Can this possibly be what Missy was talking about? I wish I’d asked her. I wish I’d taken the time to ask her to lunch. It seems like a crucial thing to have missed in this moment.
Those thoughts fly through my thoughts for a few fleeting moments before I can get my mind to focus on anything but Calley’s arm, getting it off me. Please, get it off me.
There’s one heartbeat between when the door opens and when everything shifts to another level of hell. It’s the longest heartbeat of my life.
Then Calley is flying backward away from me, stumbling back three steps, four steps, five, and there’s another arm around my waist, pulling me away from the table. On instinct, I lock my fingernails into the exposed flesh, try to wrench myself out of the grip.
“It’s me.” Beck’s voice is in my ear, and his arms flex around me. “It’s me, Sam. It’s me.”
“Shit.” The word comes out under my breath.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing in my office?” Calley’s voice is cutting, sharp, louder than I thought it could be. But Beck’s is louder.
“Stopping you from raping a woman in your office.” I can’t see his face, but I don’t have to see him to know that he’s sneering. “It’s still illegal, even if it’s in your office, Calley.”
Calley straightens up, hands going to his tie. His face is screwed up with anger, baring his teeth, cheeks a deep red. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Beck shrugs, and I gently disengage myself from his arms and move to stand beside him. “Is it money? You think you can pull that kind of shit because you have money?” His voice is seething. He has to outweigh Calley by at least fifty pounds, and it’s all muscle.
“You’re going to regret this,” Calley growls, the whites of his eyes showing. “You are going to regret this more than anything else you’ve ever done in your life.”
Beck’s laugh has razor edges. “I don’t fucking think so. But maybe you will. Let’s go, Sam.” He puts his hand on the small of my back, but I can’t turn away just yet.
Calley’s eyes are glued on Beck, only they’ve narrowed to furious slits. “You’re one of those useless pieces of garbage who works on the floor, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Beck says, lifting his chin. “But I’ll never be a bigger piece of shit than you are.”
Now it’s Calley’s turn to laugh. “Good luck, asshole. You don’t work here anymore. And good luck finding a job in any of the other places around here that might have hired you. By tomorrow morning, you won’t be able to get a fucking job at the gas station.”
Beck just gives Calley a look that would wither a braver man, his head cocked to the side. “Wow. That hurts, Calley. It really hurts.”
My stomach turns over another time, and then the goosebumps cover my body, a violent shiver starting at my neck and working its way down to my feet. The words come out before I can stop them, before I can refine them, before I can even think it through to the end of the sentence.
“How can you even think about firing him?” My voice is too high, too shrill, but there’s nothing I can do to control it. “How? When you’re the one who’s…who’s out of line?”
This is not the badass comeback I always thought I’d make in a survival situation. It’s a pointless thing to say, and all it does is make Calley turn his frigid eyes on me. My heart speeds up, painfully fast, but I’m not falling in love. I’m scared shitless. The immediate threat is over because Beck is here, because Calley didn’t get to do to me what he wanted to do, but there are going to be aftershocks. And they’re coming right now.
“You.” He crosses his arms over his chest, his face twisted with disgust. “They send me the worst of the firm, some…some girl who would make a better piece of ass on the corner than a professional.”
“I—”
He holds up his hand, and to my awful shame, I snap my mouth shut right away. “Not another fucking word. You can get on the phone and tell your firm that our contract is no longer valid. I’ll be taking my business elsewhere.”
I open my mouth again because I can’t let this happen. I cannot let Ryder & Bloom lose a contract like this. Not when Michelle trusted me with this. I don’t know what the hell happened, I don’t know how any of this came to be, but I can’t let it end like this.
“You don’t have to—”
“Shut the fuck up, Calley.” Now the words are deadly. Beck steps toward Calley, arms at his sides, and Calley goes a whiter shade of pale. “Shut the fuck up. Don’t say another word.” He doesn’t have to threaten him. It’s implied.
Calley swallows hard, then turns his back and moves behind the desk. He scowls at Beck like the desk could protect him if Beck decided to—
“Security will be here any second.” It’s the last thing Calley has to say, because Beck takes another step toward him, and he backs up, despite the space between them.
“Sam, it’s time to go.” Beck’s voice is so firm that I choke the rest of the sentence back. He’s right. Of course he’s right, but I’m pissed at him, too, for cutting me off, for trying to control everything about this situation, even though there’s nothing here to control. This situation is well outside those bounds. Well outside.
The icy fear is being replaced by a hot anger. Somewhere in the deep reaches of my mind, I know that this is just a way to get over what happened, a way to protect myself from falling apart, but my fists ball up, and I answer Beck through gritted teeth. “Sure.” The word is a low hiss, and then we’re moving toward the door. Beck pulls it open, there’s a gentle pressure on my back ushering me through to the hallway, and then we’re turning in the wrong direction. I hesitate.
“My car’s out back.”
“Mine’s in front.”
“I’ll drive.”
“No.” I shake my head, holding my hands in the air. They’re still trembling. “I’m—I’m going to go back to my hotel.”
Beck’s eyes are instantly blazing. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
All of the air goes out of the hallway.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Beckett
Sam’s eyes are wide, scared, and what she’s saying makes no damn sense at all.
“You seriously want to go back to your hotel, by yourself.”
“Yes.”
Her voice is shaking, and her face has gone pale other than for two pink spots high on her cheeks. “Why?”
On one level, I can understand it. She was just assaulted in fucking Edison Calley’s office. She should be going to the police. Yes. That’s what we should both be doing.
“No. Not the hotel. The police s
tation.”
Sam’s mouth drops open. “What?”
“You need to file a police report. This is fucking serious, Sam. He attacked you.”
“Oh, really?” The sarcasm in her voice makes my head spin, it’s so out of nowhere. “I didn’t realize. Thanks for telling me.”
“What the hell…?”
“I know what happened in there, Beck. I get it. But I’m not—I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. You can go to the fucking police station and give them a report, right now, before he has a chance to call anybody with his bullshit story.”
“What makes you think he hasn’t called them already?”
“He probably hasn’t—”
“Right. He probably has. He went to his desk, right by the phone.”
I don’t know what the hell to say. I don’t know what the hell to do. My only plan was to come over here and make sure that Sam was okay. She wasn’t, so I intervened…and now what? She’s still not okay. Everything is still coming down in shambles around us, for some reason I can’t quite wrap my head around with so much adrenaline spiking in my veins.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to go back to my hotel.” She says every word like they’re individual arrows shooting right into my chest. It’s all I can do not to jerk back at the impact.
“Okay. Do you want me to come with you?”
“No.”
“Is there anyone I can call?”
Her mouth pulls upward into a smile that doesn’t contain a single fucking ounce of happiness. “Who would you need to call for me, Beck? I think you’ve done everything you could already, which is quite enough.”
Under another circumstance, her words might be calming. Soothing, even. But now, she’s hurling acid at me. Pure, burning acid.
“What the fuck?” I can’t stop myself from whispering the words. I can’t stop myself from seeing that Sam’s eyes are a bottomless pit of distress. At the very least, we have to get the hell out of this hallway before Calley comes storming out, which he could do at any second.
Only there’s a sense of gravity pulling me toward her, and it’s not easy to break away.
Something in her face shifts, and it’s like I’m looking at the Sam from eight years ago. It’s like that is the girl who is standing right in front of me, and when I see it, my blood runs cold.
I’m fucking it up again.
I’m fucking it up again, even though all I wanted to do was help. Even though my only goal in all of this was to make sure that some creep wasn’t pulling anything shady over on her, and he was. I was right about it, and he was going to harm her, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference.
It’s all still my fault.
My hands bunch into fists. It’s like she’s the girl from eight years ago, and I’m the stupid kid I was when my dad died, bleeding out in front of me because I couldn’t fucking find a phone. She’s just lost this job and maybe her entire career because I was so damn determined not to do nothing.
Maybe I should have done nothing.
Maybe she had the situation under control.
My mind rebels against the thought because clearly she didn’t. Clearly she was fucking struggling. Clearly, Calley has more strength than anybody gave him credit for. I’ve seen plenty of rich assholes around Lockton during the summer, and they all exuded the same entitled attitude that Calley does, but I never thought he’d go that far until…
Until he did. I never thought about it, and then it fucking mattered.
I can’t get my thoughts under control, and part of me doesn’t want to. Part of me wants to get into my car and drive to the bar and drink myself into a kind of peaceful fucking oblivion, where my dad’s pale face against the sprinkling of snow can’t touch me, where Sam standing in a pool of blood in her bathroom can’t touch me, where Sam’s frenzied eyes, darting back and forth from me to Calley’s doorway can’t touch me, can’t ever touch me again, at least until I wake up tomorrow. A few hours of refuge is all I need. That’s it.
The walls tighten up, close in, and it’s like her panic reflects on me, wrapping around me like an iron version of Calley’s arm, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I have to get the fuck out of here.
The sooner I get the fuck out of here, the sooner I’ll stop doing the same kind of damage I’ve always done. The sooner I get the fuck out of here, the sooner life can go back to normal, the sooner we can sort this out, the sooner we can put this behind us, far behind us, farther behind us than anything else that might rear its ugly head.
“I’m leaving.” Her voice is too loud, but Sam doesn’t move, she doesn’t even shift her weight toward the front lobby. She just says it, and in the moment I don’t read it as anything but a factual statement. It falls on my ears without a fucking hint of a question, without any indication that it’s the last chance I have to change her mind about leaving by herself. If that’s even what it is. I can’t tell what’s happening. My jaw is locked so tight that it hurts, spikes of pain shooting down my neck, and prickles of cold sweat are rising on my skin. It’s a matter of seconds until I lose control completely. I’ve already been fired, so who the hell cares, really, but I don’t also want to be arrested, which might be the next step if both of us aren’t off Cerberus property before any more time goes by.
“Then go.”
But it’s me who goes, in some kind of sick parody of eight years ago. It’s me who turns my back on Sam and moves down the hallway, picking up speed as I go, desperate to escape out into the light.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Samantha
It’s like a seismic quake beneath my skin. Am I going to be sick? I might be sick right here on the carpet in the hallway at Cerberus, and Jesus, what would I do then, just walk out? Or would I have to talk to that lovely receptionist and admit what I’d done? Or would Calley discover it on his way out? My stomach lurches, and I clap my hand over my mouth.
Beck is leaving. He’s leaving, and I can’t say a word. All of them have shriveled in my throat, leaving me silent and stupid. I was being an ass and I know it, but can anybody blame me? Can anybody blame me?
Calley can. Michelle can. My hand is forced now. I’m going to have to tell her what happened. There’s no other choice. I should have said something on Monday, I should have said anything on Monday, but I didn’t, and now this…
I was ready to run a few seconds ago, and now my legs are lead weights underneath me.
The door at the farthest end of the hallway swings shut behind Beck. He never once turns around. He never once turns back, and the image washes over me like boiling water, scalding, bringing back the memories of eight years ago, when we fought, when I was also an ass, when I was also hurting, wounded, when he left, pain etched into his face, and I could not call after him then, either.
A door halfway down the hallway opens, and every muscle tenses. I freeze. I’m frozen. I can’t do anything, and now I’m caught out here. I’m caught, and at any moment, Calley could open his door. Why hasn’t he opened it yet? Is he already on the phone with Michelle? Is he already—?
The eyes that meet mine aren’t cold. They’re Missy’s green eyes, in a reflection of what happened the first day I was here, only things aren’t nearly so rosy now.
She’s distracted, several folders in her arms, and at first I think she doesn’t register that it’s me standing in the hallway, only that it’s someone standing in the hallway, and then she smiles, teeth white, grin wide. “Sam! It’s—” Another beat, and she takes in what I look like. I don’t know what I look like, but it feels like the blood has drained from my face, collected in my gut, and I’m standing here with my hand over my mouth like a statue of a woman who was once a professional and is now just a hot mess.
Missy rushes over, the sound of her kitten heels muffled on the carpet, and hooks her arm into mine. “What’s wrong?” She searches my eyes, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Come on. Let’s—” She casts h
er gaze back over her shoulder, then toward the lobby. “Let’s step outside.”
I take my hand away from my mouth, let her steer me toward the lobby, and then through the lobby. Her voice floats over me as she greets the receptionist, saying something I don’t bother to process. I won’t be back here. I’m never coming back here.
The light outside is golden, gorgeous, and the air is still warm for early fall, even though it turned October while I was in Beck’s bed. I didn’t care what month it was when I was in his arms. I didn’t care what year it was. Maybe I should have cared more.
“I—I should go.” My voice trembles, and Missy turns me so that I’m facing her, and her eyes are on mine.
“Are you sick?” Her eyebrows come together with concern. “You look really sick, Sam. Are you okay to drive?”
I take a deep breath of the air, as clean as it can be next to a cement plant. “No. I’m not—I’m not doing very well right now.”
“I can drive you back to your hotel.”
“Missy—” It’s too late to be asking this. It almost certainly doesn’t matter. But I have to. “That first day, when I saw you in the hallway…”
“Yeah?” She brings her eyes back to mine, and her mouth turns down in a little frown.
“You asked me if Calley had come on to me.” There’s no delicate way around this. I don’t have time to be delicate. “Did he—has he hit on you? Has he hit on other women? What made you ask that?”
Her eyes narrow, and a fire lights up in the sea of green, not so different from Beck’s. “Were you just in a meeting with him?” She steps a little closer, lowering her voice. “What happened, Sam?”
I swallow hard. “I need to know.”
Missy takes a deep breath. “We’re never alone when he visits the office.” Her voice is level, determined. “It’s a—it’s a thing that gets passed down to every new girl at Cerberus. When he’s in town, visiting the plant, you never go anywhere alone.”