Page 71 of Nathan
Found
Serena
I could see it on Nathan’s face the moment he walked into the cabin. Something was wrong!
“What happened?” I asked and got up from the chair I’d been sitting in.
“They found us.”
My face stiffened.
“I snapped pictures so you can see for yourself.” Nathan set down the bag of groceries that he’d gone to town to buy and handed me his phone.
I only got a glimpse of newspapers before he snatched it back again. “Sorry, I forgot you shouldn’t watch screens. Let me tell you instead. They had a picture of you on the front page of two different newspapers, black eye and all. I can’t read Swedish, but the first word looks eerily like kidnapped.”
“What!?”
Nathan’s hands were trembling when he emphasized the wordkidnapped.
“No, it has to mean something else,” I said and backed to the chair, my legs suddenly feeling weak.
“Let me translate the headline, and we’ll see.” Nathan was quiet as he typed on his phone while going back to the picture to see the right spelling. “Oh, geez!”
“Tell me.”
“The headline translates: Kidnapped? Serena Star checks in to Swedish hospital, bruised and beaten.”
My hand covered my mouth, and my eyes closed for a second before I began apologizing. “Nathan, I’m sorry. We’ll make this right. You don’t deserve this.”
“They think Ikidnappedyou?”
“No… I mean, yes, but we’ll correct the misunderstanding.”
Nathan circled himself like he didn’t know what to do with his body. “This is complete bollocks!”
“Yes.” There was nothing I could say, and it pained me deeply to see this magnificent man slandered in the media because of me.
“You know it will take bloody five seconds before it spreads to the rest of the world. Gomez already told everyone that I’m dangerous, and now people will assume I gave you those bruises.” Nathan’s voice rose in frustration. “They think I fucking kidnapped you.”
“You didn’t!”
“Who’s going to believe that? What if they start digging in my childhood, and my whole family has to go through that pain again? I can’t hurt them like that.”
“You mean that your parents died?”
“Yes… and other things. Look, there are things you don’t know about my childhood, and it’s not pretty, but I didn’t want any of that to taint our relationship.”
“You can tell me everything,” I said, but Nathan wasn’t listening.
“And what about your family? They’re going to be worried out of their mind! Do they even know that the thing with Storm was a scam? Did you tell them that you went to Sweden with me?”
“They know about Storm, but I didn’t tell them about Sweden. I just said I was going to a meditation retreat and that I wouldn’t have access to my phone for a while.”
“Great! Now they think I forced you to write that before I hauled you to a remote forest, raped you, and beat you black and blue.”
“Okay, okay, easy. Now you’re just imagining worst-case scenarios.”
“Call your parents right now.”
