Page 39 of Truth Be Told
“You know exactly what’s wrong. Please leave me alone.” Immediately, I want to kick myself for sayingpleaseto him after what I just saw him do.
“Stella…” He tries to come closer, but I step back.
“I’m not letting you get near me, Cohen. Actually, that right there was probably the last time I’ll ever say your name again.”
“Stella,” he booms again, verging on anger now, “I have no idea what’s going on. You’ve got to fill me in here.”
I block him out, trying to concentrate on the numbers above the elevator doors, willing them to continue to climb. They don’t. They stop on number twelve.
“Did you hear what I said?” he says.
“I said leave me alone.”
“No, stop. I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me what’s going on.”
I break my eyes away from the elevator’s numbers, my mind registering the last of his words. “What do you mean you don’t know what’s going on?” I keep my distance. “Are you lying to me?”
He shakes his head. “I would never.”
The alternative possibility is almost unthinkable. That can’t be it though. He has to know what I’m talking about. He doesn’t know I saw him, but he has to at least have a feeling that I did. I peer around him, looking for any sign of the woman he was with. There’s no one there.
Cohen looks behind himself too.
Slowly, I say to him, “You aren’t in office six?”
“Office six?”
“The sixth office from the end, I mean.”
He thinks quickly, no doubt picturing the hallway in his head. It’s probably not often that someone refers to his office by number. “No, I’m not. I’m the fourth from the end.”
“The fourth?” My voice shakes in response to the realization of the mistake I’ve just made.
“Yes, the fourth.” His impatience is growing; not at me, but at the fact that I’m accusing him of something terrible and leaving him no way to defend himself. “You’re not making any sense, Stella. Were you trying to find me up here?”
“Yes. And I thought…”
“You thought what?”
Feeling bolder now, my eyes dare to meet his. The emotions those eyes bring back only amplify the hurt. I fight through it to examine him; he’s solid as a rock, his eyes unwavering in their connection to mine. He hasn’t been hesitating with his words, or otherwise giving me the impression that he has anything to hide. He’s either telling the truth, or he’s a closet psychopath.
He’s telling the truth. Shit.
“Oh no,” I say. If any of this had been my fault, I’d go on about how ashamed I was, how much of an ass I’d been to Cohen just now. But, I think as I start to connect the dots, that is not the case.
“So this is why she brought me up here,” I continue, thinking out loud. “She had this whole thing planned as soon as she saw me.”
“What? As soon as who saw you?”
“Scarlet. She offered to show me to your office when she saw me waiting downstairs. She pretended to be nice to me…” I shake my head. “I can’t believe I fell for it.”
“Scarlet? Wait a minute. How did Scarlet know who you were?”
“She heard my name,” I say, impatient with having to go into such tiny intricacies of the story. I’m uncomfortable too, now that I know the truth of what just happened here, but with each passing second I’m wanting more and more to fall into the comfort of Cohen’s strong arms.
“And you’re saying she brought you up here…why?”
“Because,” I point behind him, toward where we just came from, “I just saw something…inappropriate going on over there, in the office she sent me to. The office she told me was yours.”
