I’m too pissed to acknowledge her attempt at humor. “I’m sitting in a literal parking lot, lost and… Shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I should have told him.”
“Should have told him what?”
“That he’s a jerk. That I hate how badly he’s fucked me over, while he comes out of the whole thing scot-free.”
“Amen.”
“That he’s not the only one who needs to get his rocks off occasionally. That if he was going to run around getting filmed having dirty sex he damn well shouldn’t have dragged me into it.” I think back to the cab of the pickup truck and how I sat there, quiet, my mind racing, too uncomfortable in the silence between him and his friend to have it out with him.
“It’s not okay, dammit.”
“Sure isn’t.”
“And he was so…cold. Emotionless about the whole thing. Like, how could he stand there like some…some…icicle, while he literally blew up my career, my entire life.” I swallow back the hurt working its way through me. This isn’t about hurt. It’s about the rest of it. The lack of consequences or acknowledgement or any recognition at all. “He asked for the marriage, Gigi. It was him.”
“Yes it was.”
“So why am I the one losing a career? Why am I the one taking a hit on social and in the tabloids? Huh?”
She inhales, watching me with sad eyes. “We both know why.”
I nod. Yeah. We do. Because it’s a shitty system, rigged against women from the start. Because I fell into the trap of thinking that I could use the system to my advantage. What fucking hubris, right? Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I have. I just wish it wasn’t so one-sided. “He’s come out of this looking like a god.” Gigi doesn’t say a word. “He gets to just slam the door, say goodbye, and go whistling off to this sex camp, like the whole thing was just a minor inconvenience.”
“A bump in the road.”
“Not even! Not even a blip.” The pain’s back in full force, but it’s intertwined with something else now, something sharp-edged and strong. “Was this the plan all along? Did he always intend to take me down? Is that the kind of toxic person he is? I mean, he’s at a sex camp this very minute. Like he couldn’t wait a single second, couldn’t take a moment out of his day to help deal with the aftermath. He was always going to go ahead and just live the life he wanted, wasn’t he? God, he’s made such a fool of me.”
And to top it off, he’ll face absolutely no consequences. That doesn’t seem fair at all, given the nightmare my life’s bound to become.
Gigi’s silence speaks volumes.
In the next instant, everything goes hard. Solid. Cold. “I’m going.”
“Where?”
“To the kink camp. To Camp Haven.”
“Uh, no. Not a good idea, TeeTee, you’ve still got a career, you’ve got to—”
“I’ve got to nothing. Nothing, okay? What I’m supposed to be doing is auditioning and working. But that’s not happening right now, is it?”
“Probably not,” she concedes. “I’m dealing mostly with media.”
All that anger’s hardening inside me into this dead certainty. The fizzle of hurt’s disappeared. I can’t explain it, but it feels good. It’s something to hold on to. I’ve gone from being the weak victim here to powerful, unbreakable. “I’m doing this. I’m going.”
“Why’s that, again?”
I scroll through the pages, scanning confidentiality agreements and registration forms and consent rules and all kinds of legal stuff.
The hard thing inside me is growing, getting stronger. “I’m confronting him.”
“Didn’t you do that today?”
“Not really. Not the way I should have. This is different.”
