The Ex Trials (Falling for Autumn #3) (18 page)

C
hapter 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.

I rolled my eyes despite Autumn not being able to see me. I typed out a quick reply.

Don’t be ridiculous. I can drive myself. The restaurant is only twenty minutes away.

She got back to me in seconds.
Blake insists and so do I. You can have a few drinks without worrying about driving home. Safety first!

I laughed to myself before responding to her.
You are such a nerd. But sounds good. See you soon.

Despite the car service, the rehearsal dinner and wedding was a low-key affair. Autumn’s parents insisted on paying for their daughter’s wedding and wanted to keep the event small with only close friends and family. Autumn and Blake were happy to oblige. After everything they’d been through, the spotlight wasn’t something either of them craved.

Thankfully, Thomas’s fifteen minutes of fame were up. By the time we were back in the States, the media attention surrounding his interview had blown over. A well-liked feminist news anchor had blasted the station for giving a platform to a “convicted sex offender.” Although the gossip mags were still interested in the couple, most of the articles now focused on what Autumn’s dress would look like and where they would go on their honeymoon.

My shoes were in my hands ready to be slipped on when I heard the buzzer for my apartment. I grabbed my purse and keys while doing a quick scan to make sure I didn’t forget anything. Another downfall of not living with Lexi: Her control-freak tendencies usually ensured I never forgot anything when leaving for the night.

I put on my heels and balanced down the steps from my second-level apartment to the street. A uniformed chauffeur was waiting on the sidewalk next to a very posh-looking town car. I gave the driver a short awkward wave as he opened the rear door. I held the back of my dress down as I slid into the backseat.

I leaned back into the leather headrest and closed my eyes as the driver who had introduced himself as Max navigated back out into traffic. The old me wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the luxury of being chauffeured around. Shows of money always made me awkward and I was learning through therapy that I didn’t have to assume a person wanted something in return for his generosity. My mom’s relationship with men had been ingrained in my subconscious and I was accepting that I wasn’t an extension of her.

I had called her a couple of days back at the urging of my therapist. I needed to tell her about the rape—especially if I went ahead and pressed charges against Justin. It seemed cruel to let her find out about the assault from a tabloid magazine.

My mother had been supportive in her own way after I told her everything. She had warned of a fresh hell—a hell much worse than living with the fact I had sex with a football player.

“Darling, he’s a pig. There’s no disputing that. But are you ready to take Autumn’s place as the media’s punching bag? You know what they’ll say about you,” she said with a tired sigh. The noise annoyed me as if my life was inconveniencing her.

“No, Mom. What will they say?” I asked curtly.

“They’ll say you liked to party and flirt. I wouldn’t be surprised if photos of you hanging on Justin at the bar will resurface,” she said. My hand tightened around the phone and I felt a vein start to pulse in my forehead. “They’ll report that if the trauma was so awful, you would have come forward sooner.” My mother paused for a loaded second. “They will tear you apart.”

“I don’t care,” I said forcefully. “I’ve been reading about rape culture and a picture from an article really stood out to me. It was a woman with her mouth duct taped. And that’s how I feel. Like the world would want me to stay quiet because it’s easier—because I should just accept that boys will be boys. But I won’t do that anymore. My silence is the biggest lie of all.” She was only repeating something I already knew: date rape was supposed to be cloaked in secrecy, not announced to the world.

She didn’t have a counter and when the conversation faltered she asked me to meet her for lunch the following week. I agreed. I’d never have the mother and daughter relationship I craved and I was becoming okay with that. Reality wasn’t always pretty and I wouldn’t pretend to be perfect for her benefit. My mom wanted a best friend, not a daughter who had her own needs and wants. And that need for perfection was part of my undoing. I couldn’t pretend that one of the reasons I remained silent about the rape was because of my fear of disappointing her.

But after weeks of indecision, I was resolved to file a police report. Months had gone by and prosecution might be unlikely, but the act was more for my benefit. A way to finally say “no.” Justin was rich, famous and had portrayed himself as untouchable. There was a chance I wasn’t the first girl he had taken advantage of. Maybe I didn’t have proof of what he had done to me, but I had connected the dots in my own head. He had drugged me before we had gone outside on the deck. I may never find out exactly what he put in my drink, but I had little doubt he had slipped me something with the clear intent of raping me.