I sniff. “I don’t understand. What happened between you two? After… after she kissed you?” My stomach knots.
Kip blows out a breath. “Well, I grabbed her arms and pushed her back to stop her. She basically said I was fighting it and she knew I wanted her to, which I immediately informed her was a gross misinterpretation.”
My chest kicks in my chest, and I can’t help but feel a small twinge of petty victory.
“I told her she’d been drinking and needed to sleep it off, then the next day, I sat her down and told her it was out of line. She was pissed,” he adds. “But I was disappointed more than anything. Disappointed that I didn’t see it, that I’d hurt you, that she was the star of my first show, that she plays the most amazing woman in the world, the woman I love, and I can’t go back and change that now.”
I swallow. “You can’t go back and change it,” I finally say. “And maybe it happened for a reason. You said it’s good, right?”
“It is,” he admits. “But now, it all just feels… tainted.”
I nod, even though he can’t see me, because I can only imagine how contrary those feelings must be — pride and shame all at once.
“I don’t ever want to work with her again,” he says after a while. “And I don’t plan on it. I just wish I would have seen it sooner. I wish…” He curses. “God, I wish so many things. Most of all that I was with you, right now, holding you in my arms and looking into your eyes when I tell you that I love you, that I’m truly, truly, sorry, and that I’m begging you to give me another chance.”
His words release another wave of tears, but they’re silent, slipping down my tears like assassins in the night.
“Will you ever forgive me?”
I swallow down a sob, and it takes me a long while before I can answer.
“I want to,” I admit, my voice raspy and strained. My heart is already breaking before I say the words. “But I don’t know how.”
My face warps with the admission, with the truth that Kip has hurt me so much — possibly past the point of fixing. But it’s the truth.
And if there are no more secrets between us, then I won’t keep one, either.
“You know more than anyone how hard it is for me to trust,” I say. “How hard it was for me to trust you again, specifically, after what happened with your dad and Vegas and… just… everything.”
“I know. I know,” he says, and I wait for more, but he doesn’t say anything else.
“I love you,” I whisper. “But I’ve forgiven you once. I… I don’t know if I can do it again.”
I hear something on the other end, something that sounds like a restrained cry, like a grunt of a grown man trying to hold it together when he’s on the verge of breaking down.
For a long while, we sit on the phone together. Sometimes it’s just breathing, sometimes one of us is crying, sometimes it’s more silent than a desert in the middle of the night.
After what feels like an eternity, Kip speaks.
“Hold onto us, Skyler,” he pleads, his voice rough. “You know me. You know my love for you. Hold onto that. Hold on.”
I close my eyes, sending one last set of hot tears rolling down my cheeks.
And though my heart surges in my chest with the urge to do what he’s asking, and I can already feel ever molecule of my being latching onto him, onto our memories, onto everything I know and love and trust in him, I end the call and force myself to make peace with the truth.
It’s over.
THERE’S SOMETHING UNIQUELY HORRIFYING about reliving sexual abuse.
For years, I’ve blocked out that night — the shock of it, the pain, the embarrassment. I’ve blocked it out so hard, so fiercely, that it almost feels as if it never happened at all.
Did I imagine it, the way I’d felt more drunk than usual, the way the chandelier light spun and spun above me as we danced at semi-formal? Did I imagine the way Landon’s warm eyes turned cold, the way he gripped my wrist when he pulled me back to that room, his brothers following us? Was it all a dream that I sensed something was off, that I got uncomfortable when his friends started touching me, kissing me… that I tried to fight… tried to leave?
Sometimes, it feels like it. It feels like it happened to someone else, or never happened at all.
But reliving it with a room full of lawyers and detectives, it was more real than it ever had been.
The questions they asked, the notes they took, the looks they gave me… it was the perfect combination to split open the carefully constructed cast I’d worn all this time. I relived it all — the feeling of being unknowingly drugged, the confusion of being dragged away from the ballroom, the fear when I felt them all moving in on me, their laughter and soft words of assurance that everything was fine like the most vivid nightmare.