The Ex Trials (Falling for Autumn #3) Page 17

  “Cole—”

  “Let me go, Casey. Because I’m about to say some fucked up shit right now that can’t be taken back,” he said, yanking his arm away.

  “I’m sorry. I thought he wasn’t coming. But Justin does whatever the hell he wants and showed up at the bar. I had no idea he would be there,” I said quickly.

  Cole’s arms curled into fists at the sides. “Him? Really? You couldn’t give me a heads up that I knew the guy you fucked in AC. And out of all Blake’s friends, you pick a total dick who treats women like they’re his own personal fuck toys? Maybe you’re more like your mom than you think.”

  I stumbled back and placed a hand over my heart. In a tear-choked whisper, I said, “Don’t say that.”

  Cole’s resentments were inexhaustible. They made him into someone I didn’t recognize. He wasn’t the same man who had told me just the day before he would fight for us all day long.

  A brief look of contrition passed over his face. “I told you to walk away.”

  “Why would you even say something like that?”

  “Because I overheard the talks with your mom when we were together. She practically told you to wrap yourself in a pretty little bow for one of Blake’s teammates. Do you think she was happy to see you dating a bass player without a record deal? And isn’t your mom a professional trophy wife? What number husband is she on these days?”

  “Go to hell,” I breathed out.

  His eyes looked over my head, focused on the Caribbean Sea. “This was a mistake. I saw you and when you’re around, you’re all I see. I thought I could be fine with what happened. I could put the whole incident in a locked box inside my head and never open it again. But that’s never going to happen. I’ll always wonder what’s wrong with me. How did I not measure up? Why did you have to sleep with another man?”

  “Please talk to me. Please let me explain. I know that I should have told you that it was Justin sooner. But I was so afraid of losing you again,” I said, feeling the tears start to slide down my cheeks.

  “I’ve known all along that this couldn’t be real. That something so good couldn’t last long.” As he shot his arm up to signal a cab, I saw him give me a sidelong glance. “I can’t do this anymore, Casey. I’m sorry. It’s too much.”

  My heart shattered as a taxi stopped at the curb and he started to walk away from me. I tried to think of what to say to stop him, but all my explanations stayed trapped inside of me. I couldn’t make sense of the night. The r-word felt wrong. If I told him I was raped, it might sound like a ploy to get him to forgive me. Until I could accept the wrongness of what was done to me, I was stuck with him assuming I willingly went to bed with Justin.

  He didn’t look back as he climbed inside the taxi and slammed the door shut. I stood immobile, trying to not fall to the ground and collapse from heartbreak and grief. The back windows of the cab were tinted, but I saw his silhouette as he turned to face me. I couldn’t make out his expression, but I wondered if he could see the broken shell he was leaving behind. His words had stolen away the second chance I had found in his arms again.

  He stayed unmoving, looking out at me as the cab pulled out into traffic. The moment felt final, like our story was ending right that second on a curb in Barbados. There would be no more heated kisses and whispered promises. No more to our story. And although the heartbreak and sadness threatened to tear me to pieces, the rage was there.

  The fury was not solely reserved for Justin. I also raged against Cole. So angry over his ability to walk away and not fight for what we could have. Wasn’t what we had worth it? How could he so carelessly compare me to my mother? He had reached right down into my psyche and pulled out my biggest fear. My mother switched husbands almost as often as she switched handbags. I would never be her. Couldn’t Cole see he had my love all along?

  They never seemed to end—the ways I was forced to say goodbye to Cole over and over again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My heart had hardened as I stomped back to the beach bar. I had no clue of the rage that lived within me. There was the familiar desire to return to being catatonic. Because that’s what I’d been like since the morning I left Justin’s hotel room. But that nothingness was much worse than anything else. My eyes were dry and my head clear as I came close enough to see a bloodied Justin sitting on the sand outside the bar with two of his Warriors teammates acting as sentries. Justin spat out blood as I neared him.

  Blake’s friend Cupcake spoke first. “Everyone is inside waiting for you. A car is coming to take Justin back to the airport.”

  “I need to talk to him… alone,” I said.

  Cupcake gave me a careful look. “I don’t think that’s smart. Preston asked us to make sure his ass gets on a plane so he doesn’t stir up any more shit.”

  “I’m fine,” I said and gestured to a bench a few yards away. “Sit tight over there for a few minutes. This won’t take long.”

  Cupcake nodded, but he didn’t leave until he shot Justin a warning look. His friend followed suit and their eyes stayed level on Justin as they crossed the sand. Their bodies stayed tense as they took a seat on the nearby bench.

  “What do you want?” Justin asked. His voice was thick, since his swelling nose and all the blood had taken a toll. There was something wrong in his eyes—a soullessness more scary than any sign of rage.

  I remained standing as he glared at me. I was tempted to give him a swift kick in the balls. I knew the guys were close by and I’d get away without any retaliation from Justin. Instead, I snapped, “You owe me an explanation about that night. I’ve been miserable for the past six months and I’m starting to realize that maybe it was never my fault.”

  Justin’s voice was derisive. “I don’t owe you shit. You got what you wanted that night. A story. The ability to tell everyone about that one time you fucked an NFL player.”

  “You’re delusional. And I’m going to figure out what happened between us. My eyes have been closed for too long. They are wide open right now and I’ll find out the truth.”

  “What truth? The truth is that you’re fucking poison.”

  “I think that whole bit about not remembering we hooked up was a ploy,” I hissed. I think you know exactly what happened. And I have this horrible feeling you had something to do with me blacking out. My gut is also telling me I said no,”

  Justin looked over at his teammates before smirking in my direction. “Prove it, bitch.”

  “You’re a goddamn sociopath,” I snapped back. His words felt like verbal blows, but I allowed them to bounce off of me. “It’s about power with you. That’s how you get off, reducing girls into meaningless objects. I didn’t want you and you couldn’t handle it.”

  “I can get any girl I want. Do you really think I need to force anyone into my bed?” he demanded, his cheeks turning crimson. “Now, get your dumb slutty blonde ass out of here.”

  I gave him a withering stare before motioning the guys to return. He was trying to make me crumble, make me doubt myself. He wanted to break me down and I would never again let him do that to me.

  The truth was ugly. But I wouldn’t run from it for a second longer. All the lies, the half-truths, the false assumptions—they were what drove Cole away. How could I expect him to have unshakeable faith in me when I couldn’t even look at myself in the morning?

  And I took back the rage and pointed it back at me. What kind of girl was I? I had prided myself on being the strong one in our inner circle: the outspoken feminist and comfortable with my sexuality.

  Why hadn’t I woken up sooner? Months had gone by and I never once questioned why the idea of sex suddenly felt repellent to me. Or ask myself how after years of having a high tolerance for alcohol, I found myself blacking out after a handful of drinks?

  I had seen right and wrong so easily before. And if a friend had told me that she had blacked out and woken up naked in some man’s bed, I wouldn’t have asked her the questions I had posed to myself. Had I asked for it
? Did I dress too sexily or act a certain way that led him on?

  My toxic logic was ending right that second. If I hated myself, how could I expect a relationship with Cole to work? Until I tackled the trauma surrounding that night with Justin, there was no moving forward. And as much as I wanted to die inside to even have the thought, I was grateful to Cole for walking away. When it came to Cole, I had no willpower. I’d stay in his arms and allow him to shield me from all the darkness. But Cole wasn’t a bandage I could bleed through. We would never last. And I wanted us to last. I wanted it so bad that I’d willingly go through the hell that was surely to come on my path to healing.

  As much as I craved Cole with every piece of my soul, I would leave him alone. For all intents and purposes, the vacation was over. We had one more day at sea and then we were back on a flight to Fairfort. Back to our lives. And although I had the desire to fix things with Cole first, I couldn’t. There were monsters residing in my soul. And all that time I had pretended they weren’t there, only made them stronger, more determined to destroy me.

  Cole needed the truth, but so did I. And as soon as I worked through what had happened six months ago, I would try everything in my power to fix us. My biggest fear, however, was that I would be too late.

  Chapter Twenty

  Six Weeks Later…

  August wouldn’t be the month I’d choose to wed, but I also wasn’t madly in love with a pro football player. I believed Autumn would have preferred to have a fall wedding as a nod to her name, but she wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. She was crazy for Blake and ready to make it official.

  As I slipped into a dark blue dress, the humidity caused my hair to spring out of the clips I thought I'd wear. I'd had high hopes of wearing my hair straight for the wedding festivities, but my hair had other ideas. It stayed curly. The best I could do was secure the ringlets in a large barrette and let them tumble down my back, and hope for the best.

  The apartment felt too quiet as I continued to dress. Lexi had moved out after our return from the Caribbean and the loss hurt more than I thought it would. I never lived alone and I had a hard time getting used to it. After years of living with my best friends, it felt weird to not have someone to borrow shoes from or have impromptu reality TV marathons.

  Lexi was happy in Philadelphia and I was glad for her. She had been with Finn long enough to know what to expect before cohabitating. I had visited their apartment in the city and everything felt very grown up. She served wine instead of beer and we got into in-depth discussions about our future careers. I even made a point of using coasters to avoid ruining their posh new coffee table.

  Finn had given us some time alone to catch up and I appreciated that time to vent. Only Autumn and Lexi knew about my weekly therapy sessions and how I’d been trying to regain my confidence. Therapy was a lot rougher than I expected. Autumn had gone through counseling and told me what it was like, but I hadn’t anticipated how raw I would feel. Talking about Cole, Justin and even my parents left me physically ill afterwards. I’d grown accustomed to keeping all my feelings bottled up and it was unnerving to suddenly open up about everything.

  The last session had been particularly hard.

  My therapist was a brassy woman named Constance with a gravelly voice I assumed came from years of chain smoking. Her clothes reeked of cigarette smoke and her teeth had a yellowish sheen. The first session I had almost taken one look at her and sashayed my butt right out of there.

  I was glad I stayed because I ending up liking her. She didn’t pretend life was all sunshine and roses. She made it clear she wouldn’t feed me what I wanted to hear. I appreciated her candor.

  We had been discussing the night with Justin. We talked about him often since pretending he didn’t exist had done nothing for my mental health. “I keep going back to that night and asking myself what I could have done different. I’ve heard the spiel before. Don’t take drinks from men at bars. Have a sober friend watching out for you. Don’t go off alone with strange men—"

  She held up her hand to silence me. “Stop right there.”

  I sat back in the office chair and stared at her in wonder. Constance usually let me prattle on and on until I sputtered out. “Why?”

  “Because what you’re saying is part of a bigger problem in our society. Do you know they have developed a special type of underwear for women to wear, much like a chastity belt, in order to prevent rape? Get out of the mindset that you could have prevented what happened. You were unconscious. Justin should not have had sex with you. Simple at that,” she said, leaning forward in her chair.

  I bit on my thumbnail as I stared at her wide-eyed. “I was raped,” I said softly. A sob I’d been holding in forever broke free. “Justin raped me.”

  At the time, I couldn’t scream for help. That hadn’t been an option. The helplessness facilitated my ignorance. For ages, I had been loathed to admit that I was completely vulnerable. After that night, the rotting in my brain commenced and prevented me from seeing the truth.

  Constance reached across her desk and took my hand. “I know, sweetie.”

  “I didn’t want to have sex with him. I never did. And he knew that and forced himself on me anyway,” I cried and reached across her for a box of tissues. I patted at my nose. “I’ve been blaming myself for so long… Taking all the fault away from him.”

  Justin was physically flawless and rich to boot. A chorus of my own making had taunted me in my head, “Why would he need to rape you for sex?” The truth was sometimes the monsters were the ones we least expected.

  “Your best friend was violently sexually assaulted. You’ve been using her experience as the standard. Rape doesn’t have to involve physical force. In the simplest of terms, sex without clear consent is rape,” she said and sat back in her chair as I digested her words.

  “I guess I never pictured myself with that label: rape victim. I felt like to put myself with that group of women would belittle what everyone else had gone through. Like who was I to claim my trauma was as bad as Autumn’s?”

  Therapy was freeing. I told Constance stuff I had never spoken aloud to anyone else. I’d been more the type of friend to dispense advice than to ask for it. I was learning that fun-loving Casey didn’t have to always be on in order to get people to like me. The party girls couldn’t party forever.

  “Well, to start off with you’re not a rape victim,” she said. “You’re a rape survivor.”

  My therapist’s assertion pierced through my consciousness. I went still as I stared at myself in my bathroom mirror. I marveled at my reflection: same curly blonde hair and bright blue eyes, same pouty smile, same beauty mark on my chin. How could I look the same when I felt like a new person on the inside? I felt like there had always been a better version of me sleeping inside and she had just risen from an endless slumber. I was finally able to start feeling comfortable once again in my own skin.

  As I covered my lips in a scarlet color, I welcomed the confidence. I was taking back every bit of me that Justin had stolen away. I only wished Cole was around to see the changes. Cole was everywhere and nowhere. He had become a ghost—never being physically present, but haunting every minute of my waking life.

  Cole had immediately gone back to the cruise ship after our fight and packed his stuff. Instead of returning to Puerto Rico, he had changed his flight and flown home directly from Barbados. I never had a chance to talk him out of it since he was gone by the time our group returned from the island to the cruise ship.

  I gave him his space at first, but broke down and called him after a couple of weeks had passed. But after several unreturned voicemails and texts, I realized that I had avoided the ugly for too long. I had hid the trauma of the night with Justin not only from him, but from myself as well. Cole had been holding onto the wrong impression of the night and the wounds had become infected.

  I had made elaborate plans to work things out with Cole. We would have to see each other at Autumn’s wedding and I planned
to corner him and unburden all my secrets. I was going all in with the hopes he would be able to sense the change in me. I wanted him to love the Casey I had become and understand that the only single regret I was holding onto was not telling him the truth from the minute I woke up disoriented in Justin’s hotel room.

  But two days earlier, Autumn had delivered a crushing blow. The dramatic and romantic reunion at her wedding I had planned wasn’t going to happen. Cole wasn’t attending the wedding. Trojan Jedi had gotten booked as openers on a limited ten-city tour with The Rage Boys, an alternative band who had a dozen or so hits in the 1990s. The tour was starting the same weekend as Autumn’s wedding. After the wedding, Levi was flying out to meet his brothers in Charlotte for their first show, but the twins had already left.

  Cole was gone for a month and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had stayed up hours night after night imagining showing up at one of his shows. We would look out at each other from across the room like we had the night of our first kiss and it would be like an explosion. He would toss his bass aside and push his way through the crowd. I’d jump into his arms and the world would disappear.

  But then there was the alternative scenario. The devastating visual of me showing up and Cole refusing to talk to me. Or finding that he had moved on with another girl. Delia was a constant presence in the Caldwell household and I would expect she’d tell me if Cole were dating anyone. But there was always the chance she would keep Cole’s dating life a secret to spare my feelings.

  My phone beeped and I felt my hopes go up once again. Every time my phone made a sound I stupidly thought it could finally be the time Cole was calling and wanted to see me. Instead, I had received a text from Autumn.

  Sending a car. Picking you up in fifteen minutes.