Page 62 of Black Roses

But before I can lean down to retrieve it, biting words lash out at me, dampening my mood much more than the broken phone. “Well if it isn’t Piper Mitchell, the very same one I saw leaving Mason’s building early this morning.”

My eyes snap to Cassidy’s and an unwelcome pang of dread splinters through me like a warning beacon. “What were you doing there at seven o’clock this morning?” I ask, acutely aware of my silent gratitude to the many pedestrians bustling about us. “Are you stalking him?”

Hatred clouds her hazel eyes. “I have every right to be there. He’s the father of my child.” Her lips draw back in a silent snarl. “And whether or not he realizes it, I’m the most important woman in his life and I always will be. Especially if he knows what’s good for him.”

My mouth gapes open. “Is that a threat, Cassidy?” My body stiffens in automatic defense. “Are you telling me you’ll try to take Hailey? Because you’d be in for one hell of a fight.”

Her deranged laugh causes the hairs on my neck to rise. “You don’t even know him,” she says. “You’ve been around for ten fucking minutes.” Her nostrils flare and her face reddens in anger. “I’vebeen in his life for years. And I’m willing to bet he doesn’t know the slightest thing about you, does he?”

Unease washes over me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I told you I thought you looked familiar when we first met, but it took me a while to put it all together. This morning, when I snapped a picture of you coming out of his building, it all started to make sense. It’s then when I remembered the picture I showed Baylor last year,” she says. “I thought it was her, but she set me straight.”

Her apparent lunacy is starting to scare me, even beyond the whole she’s-taking-stalkery-photos-of-me feelings. But she has my full attention as she digs through her purse, pulling out what looks to be a weathered photo.

She grips the photo in her hand, not allowing my eyes to fall on it. “When I was in high school,” she says, “I would go into the city for parties. Wild parties. I first saw Mason at one of them. He may not have known me at the time, and we didn’t hookup until college—” she pauses to release a sigh that drips with school-girl infatuation, “—but, he’s the reason I went to Clemson.”

Oh, my God. Stalker is right. My unease is quickly turning into pure undiluted fear.

“I only knew it was a matter of time before he fell for me. I was very, um . . . persuading.”

Thoughts of herpersuadinghim sicken my insides.

“Anyway, back to the point.” She shakes her head as if pulling herself back from fantasy. “I know what went on at those parties.” She gives me a hard stare. A knowing stare.

My gut clenches as jagged pieces of my nightmares slice through my mind. My lungs burn, begging for the un-replenished air that’s left them. My foreboding body falls back against the building for support.

“Mason thinks you are some sort of prudish princess.” She rolls her eyes. “Snow White, was it? Well,Princess, I wonder what he would say if he knew you frequented those kinds of parties. If he knew you were the kind of girl who gets off when more than one boy touches you. If I told him that you like to suck some nameless guy’s dick while another one fucks you at the same time. Do you think he’d ever look at you the same way? Do you think he wouldn’t be repulsed by the very sight of you . . . ”

Gooseflesh ripples up my back as I try to keep the nightmares, the slivers of memories, at bay. Mason knows. I told him. So I shouldn’t let this get to me. But she pushes on, punishing my resolve by describing in detail what did or could have happened that night. Her repeated graphic verbal illustrations cause waves of nausea to roll through me. I feel the blood drain from my face. I fear I might faint, so I put my hands on my knees right before I horrifyingly lose my lunch on the sidewalk beneath me.

Still unable to stand straight, I can feel her eyes burn into me as I glance up at her. The sheer desperation in my naïve eyes must betray me and I can clearly see the moment her mind erupts with comprehension.

Evil distorts her face as she assesses me from head to toe. “Oh, my God,” she says, studying me, her eyes hard and cold like a freezing wind. “So Snow White isn’t a slut. She’s a victim.”

If the contents of my stomach weren’t already spectacularly displayed in front of me, they would be now. My body begins to shake uncontrollably. But as I watch the scheming wheels spin behind her bitter eyes, the terror of her knowing my secret pales in comparison to what she says next.

She shoves the tattered picture in front of me. My hesitant eyes take it in. It’s a picture of me. Onthatnight.

“So, Princess,” she says, malevolence dripping from her words. “Boys had sex with you without your consent? How can you be so surehewasn’t one of them?”

Tension closes like a fist around my heart as I look closely at the picture. There in the background, with his arm around the shoulders of another boy, is Mason.

He’s so young. His soft, light beard hasn’t yet made its way to his face, but it’s unmistakably him. But what makes me wretch up more nothingness from my empty stomach is that the boy he’s with—he’s one of the nameless faces in my dreams.

I clench the picture with shaky hands, crumpling it in my fist as I try to muster the energy to run. After all, running is what I do best. I take a deep breath. Then another. And as soon as my lungs fill with enough oxygen to give my body the will to move, I walk away. I walk away leaving my broken, shattered phone on the sidewalk in a pool of my vomit.

“Okay then,” I hear her call out after me. “I guess you can go ahead and keep the picture.” I attempt to block out her laughter as it bounces off the building behind me. My feet can’t get me where I need to be quickly enough.

~ ~ ~

The plane’s engines scream in my ear as we taxi down the runway. Announcements come over the speakers following the pre-recorded safety video. Flight crew walk down the aisle checking seat belts and closing overhead compartments. I’ve seen it all a hundred times before. It all becomes drivel in the background as my thoughts overcome me.

His face isn’t one of those in my nightmares. But there are so many. And he was there at the party. The proof is sitting back on my parents’ kitchen counter along with a letter to Skylar, explaining how I can’t stay for her wedding. Lame excuses of an emergency with Charlie. I hope she won’t hate me for missing her special day.

I can’t stay. I can’t walk up the aisle with him. I can’t stand across the altar from him knowing he could be one of them. It would explain how he was so quick to accept what happened to me. How he kept telling me nothing in my past could change the way he felt. How he was always protecting me. How he held me tightly last night, silently sobbing behind me. Maybe guilt was consuming him.

Could I really have fallen in love with a boy who raped me?

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