Page 94 of Easy Reunion
Chapter 37
Rierson
I’m trying to finish reviewing a new contract that landed on my desk this morning so I can head home early. All I want to do is spend time with Kelsey. Something’s been off, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. She’s been there but has been so distant I feel like we’ve been two strangers sleeping in the same bed.
I know I started it by pulling away after my nightmare, but ever since that day I wasn’t able to have lunch with her, she’s been growing more and more detached. Pounding my fist on the desk, I’m startled out of my frustration by the phone ringing. Hoping that’s her, I snatch it up quickly. “Perrault.” I can’t keep the hope out of my voice.
“Son? Are you working on something important?” My father’s voice comes through the line warmly, but there’s an undercurrent of something that has me hitting Save.
“There’s nothing you can’t interrupt, Dad. What’s up? Don’t tell me you threw out your back again,” I joke despite the mixed feelings of disappointment and foreboding that wash over me. My father never calls me at the office to chat; that’s more my mother’s style. But even then, she usually waits until after typical business hours. Not—I glance at my watch—at a quarter of eleven in the morning.
“I was at the golf club…”
“I thought your doctor said no golf until your back healed from trying to change the tire,” I interrupt.
“I wasn’t trying to play, Ry.” A note of exasperation enters his voice before it’s quickly subdued. “I was just having breakfast when the police came in.”
Jumping to my feet, I yell, “What the fuck, Dad? What happened? Do you need me to come home to represent you? Tell me I’m not your only phone call.” I’m infuriated at the thought of my father being accused of something there’s no chance he did. I think frantically. Maybe he was just caught up in a raid.
My wild thoughts are wondering who I know who can get my dad out on bail until he says, “Ry, tell me you’re sitting.”
Heart pounding, I reach for my chair that I shoved away. Pulling it up behind me, I fall back into it. “Lay it on me, Dad. What. Happened?” I ask the question again, succinctly.
“The police came in to arrest Tom Balboni on charges of reckless conduct, hazing, and—” There’s a pause while he takes a deep breath. “—sexual assault.”
Immediately, the room begins to spin faster than an out-of-control carousel. “What did you say?” I manage. Tom Balboni graduated a few years before me. Now, he’s the assistant coach of one of the local high schools in the area, but back then, he participated in my hazing when I was a sophomore on the boys’ varsity swim team. He, two other seniors, and a flock of juniors decided physical abuse was the way to prove fidelity and loyalty. And once their girlfriends saw the way their power afforded them the status of kings, they used the same cruelty to rule as queens.
Forsyth wasn’t as much a prep school as it was a sentence in purgatory, no matter who attended.
Feeling nauseous, I reach for my trash can. My father would never bring this up unless there were a reason. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because.” He swallows so hard I can hear it across the lines. Beads of sweat break out across my forehead. “It was John’s grandson.” John has been my father’s lifelong best friend. They met when they attended Forsyth over fifty years earlier.
“How old is he, Dad?” I wipe them with the back of my sleeve.
“Fifteen.”
“Goddamnit!” I roar.
My office door inches open. Vince pokes his head in. “Is everything…”
“Get the fuck out!” I lash out. His eyes widen enormously before he quickly snaps the door shut behind him. I grip the phone in my hand so tightly I’m afraid it’s going to crack. Hell, it might shatter when I throw it against the wall when I’m done anyway. “What do you need me to do?”
“No one knows who violated you, son,” my father says softly. My body lurches hearing those words said aloud. He’s never said that to me. It’s never the way I’ve ever associated myself. Hurt, yes. God, was I in so much pain, but it was Kelsey who was violated day after day. Lisa was the one who was threatened. And then the world comes crashing down on me while I’m thirty-three years old, sitting in an office that overlooks the city it dominates.
I’m a victim. Just like the kids in the stories Kelsey tells, just like the kids my sister wants to help.
As an adult, I can admit the truth. I never wanted anyone—especially Kelsey—to know what happened to me because of the shame. I’m no hero standing up for what’s right; I’m the broken boy hiding from his fears. I never wanted to face the sympathy, the odd looks, or the worst thing—the woman I love walking away after she realizes I’m not the man she should fall in love with because there’s no one else I’ll ever love.
The collision of my thoughts leave me sick at heart, but one terrifying thing keeps surging to the forefront over and over even as my father continues talking.
I’m going to have to tell her who I really am.
I should have known better than to have believed a reunion between us would be so smooth, so easy. But I thought it was a gift, a recompense for both of our lives being so fouled by Forsyth. How did I know reunions were only meant to be temporary?
“Ry? Damnit, Ry, are you listening to me?” my father bellows.
“Not really,” I admit.
