Chapter 9
Lucy
Oddly enough, Drake’s concoction did help. Once my stomach stopped protesting, emptying my system of all the tequila I’d drunk the night before, I felt almost human again. My headache had become tolerable and my stomach even felt better.
The rest of my body, however, was still aching.
Pushing all thoughts of why it was aching to the back of my brain to analyze later, I walked back to the kitchen. Drake was gone, but my mom and Aunt Emmie remained. They’d been joined by Lana and Dallas, though. I could hear them talking, all of them keeping their voices low as if they didn’t want to be overheard.
“You need to tell her,” Lana said passionately, and I stopped, curious as to what was going on. Who was her? “If you don’t, then I will.”
“Did you not see her, Lana?” Mom demanded. “At graduation yesterday she was destroyed all over again when she saw him.”
Well, that explained that. I was the her.
What the hell?
“Exactly! If she knew the truth maybe she wouldn’t be. Maybe they could work this shit out and we can have our old Lucy back.” Lana blew out a frustrated breath. “Look, I know she’s yours. I get that. But she was mine first. I’m the one who took care of her when she was born. I taught her how to walk and tie her shoes. She’s as much my firstborn as she is your daughter now. And I won’t sit back and let you keep this from her when it could help her.”
“That’s not fair,” Mom cried out in a low voice. “Do you think it’s easy for me knowing this and not telling her? He should have been the one to tell her, Lana. Harris should have been the one to—”
I couldn’t stay back any longer. I moved into the kitchen and all four females turned their heads. The looks on both Lana’s and my mom’s faces were those of two kids getting caught doing something they both knew they shouldn’t. It might have been comical if I hadn’t heard what I’d just heard. I saw the guilt in Mom’s eyes, saw the determination mixed with concern in Lana’s.
“What should Harris have told me?” It came out through gritted teeth, but I was beyond caring if I hurt anyone’s feelings right then. It was obvious my mom had been keeping something from me.
No. Not just Mom. They had all been keeping it from me.
“Lucy…” Lana stepped forward, but I lifted my hands to stop her. Her mouth closed and I watched her swallow hard before trying again. “This is harder than I thought it would be,” she muttered.
“See?” Mom snapped at her. “Do you see now, Lana?”
“Yes.” She bit her lip and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Layla.”
“Okay. Let’s all take a deep breath,” Aunt Emmie suggested.
She wiped her hands on a dish towel and stepped forward, but I didn’t want her to touch me either. It wasn’t just my mom and sister who had kept whatever this was from me. Aunt Emmie had to have known what was going on. She fucking knew everything that went on in our family. She was like the fucking Godfather when it came to dealing with all our shit and making problems disappear. Seeing the betrayal that was shining out of my eyes, she paused and blew out a long breath. “It’s complicated, Lucy. Your mom didn’t want to bring up something that had already hurt you once unless she thought she absolutely had to.”
I couldn’t stop the humorless laugh that left me. “You know nothing about how hurt I’ve been,” I snarled at her. “Not one of you could possibly understand what I’ve been going through. So either tell me what the fuck I need to know or get out of my way so I can find someone who will.”
“Baby—”
“I’m not a baby,” I cried, turning my glare on my mom, “so stop treating me like one. Right now, for five minutes, pretend I’m not your daughter and be my sister. Tell me what Harris should have told me. Right. Now.”
Mom’s mouth opened, then closed, only to open again, but no words left her. Frustration started to boil over and I wanted to rage at her, but Dallas stepped forward, completely catching me off guard when she wrapped her arms around me and pulled my face against her chest.
“Let’s go into the living room,” she murmured, but I didn’t respond. My frustration was turning into hurt and I could barely see through my tears. With her arms still around me, Dallas guided me into the living room and urged me to sit on the couch.
She took the spot right beside me and kept one arm around my shoulders. I sensed Mom and Lana had followed, as well as Aunt Emmie, but no one spoke but Dallas. “Lucy, when everything happened with Jenna and Tessa…” She stopped when I flinched at the mention of both those names.
No one spoke about Jenna around me and I’d been thankful for the lack of insight into what had happened to Jenna after Tessa had screwed us all over. Maybe it made me a bad person, but I couldn’t help blaming her for what had happened. I hadn’t at first, but as time had passed, all my anger at Tessa had transferred over to include Jenna as well.
Dallas went on. “When everything happened I was in Tennessee. Emmie kept everything so hushed up that I had no idea what happened until weeks later.”
“And?” I got out in a croaky voice.
“The doctor didn’t know what had happened, no one told him what happened after Tessa drugged him. So the doctor didn’t think it was important to explain to anyone that with the mixture of drugs in Harris’s system, it was impossible for him to do the things that Tessa made it look like he’d done in those videos.” She was speaking in a gentle tone, but she might as well have screamed it at me. The force of each word was like a bullet that hit me right between the eyes.
All the air was suddenly trapped in my lungs.
“He didn’t…? He couldn’t…?” I couldn’t bring myself to finish either sentence. Couldn’t stand to hear the words out loud, let alone think them. I’d made peace with the fact that Harris had done something I knew he wouldn’t normally have if he hadn’t been under the influence of the mixture of drugs Tessa had put into Harris’s tea the night of my birthday party. I’d moved on and had wanted to put it behind us when I realized it meant having to give him up forever.
I had loved him too much to let that mistake ruin us.
I still loved him.
“No, sweets, he didn’t. The drugs would have made things in that—er, department—useless.” She grimaced and shrugged. “I’m not saying he didn’t kiss Tessa and other things, but there was no sex involved. Tessa was able to make it look like it happened by placing the cameras at certain angles and then manipulating the footage.”
“How do you know?” I demanded, jumping to my feet. “How could you possibly know that it didn’t happen?”
The look on Dallas’s face would have been amusing if I’d been in the mood to laugh. I wasn’t. I wanted to scream and throw things. I wanted to yell at my mom and Lana and anyone else who had known this and hadn’t told me. I wanted to beat the shit out of Harris who hadn’t said one word about any of this when we’d…
Yeah.
“I’m a nurse, Lucy,” Dallas said as if I needed reminding. “After Emmie told me what happened, I went to see Natalie. Harris was still staying at his parents’ house and I told them that there was no way Harris’d had sex with Tessa. He didn’t believe me at first but when I convinced him, things got a little crazy. The boy went off the rails. He started screaming about letting you go when he didn’t need to and ran off. Nat and Dev didn’t hear from him for almost a week. I thought for sure he would go see you, or at the least, call you.”
“Well, he didn’t.” And that made it all that much worse. All the hurt, all the pain, felt like it was pushing down on my chest with ten times the weight of what it had been just minutes before.
“We figured that out when you didn’t say anything,” Mom murmured for the first time. “I wanted to give him time, in case he was just trying to wrap his head around everything. What happened to Harris was a nightmare, Lucy, but I know it hurt you just as bad.”
I couldn’t respond, couldn’t even look at her. At any of them. This entire day felt surreal. I was sure I would wake up any minute with a headache a million times worse than I’d experienced earlier. Everything that had happened from the moment I’d opened my eyes that morning hadn’t really happened. This was just a dream.
A really bad dream.
“I have to go,” I muttered, already turning for the door.
“Where are you going?” Mom called after me. “Lucy?”
I stopped before I could reach the door, but didn’t turn back to face her. “I have to see Harris.” I needed to know why he hadn’t told me, because Mom had been right. He should have been the one to tell me. No one else but him.
“Lucy, give yourself some time to think about this,” Lana suggested
I turned around then. “I’ve done nothing but think about this for five months. Five months of driving myself crazy thinking that my boyfriend slept with someone else. Five months of replaying those damn videos over and over again in my head.” A sob surprised me by bursting free, making it impossible to catch my breath for a moment. “And I didn’t have to because it didn’t really happen.”
“Marcus will take you,” Aunt Emmie said, sounding like her usual calm self. I envied her the ability to stay calm when things went to hell.
“No. I’m tired of taking Marcus with me everywhere. I don’t need him. He’s your security blanket, not mine.” It was a lie, but I was too angry at them all to admit it to myself. “I’m done being treated like I’m still nine years old. You’re all suffocating me.”
Mom was crying just as hard as I was now. “Lucy, please. Baby, just calm down and we will fix this.”
Fix this.
Fix this?
That was what Harris had said that morning. Everyone wanted to fix it. Wanted to fix me.
But I was unfixable.