“Of course,” Naomi says, sitting up. “You have my word.”
Appeased, Meghan speaks. “I have to say I wouldn’t be completely surprised if your theory is true.” She pauses and glances around the room as she lowers her voice. “Colton wasn’t the true gentleman—hero—everyone wants to believe.”
Naomi’s heart starts pounding. She leans forward, waiting for Meghan to continue.
“So in the beginning everything was so great. Then after about a year and a half, he started to get a little controlling, didn’t like me doing sex scenes with other men, hence why I moved into more PG roles for a time.”
Naomi thinks of her film list, not having noticed the shift before from raunchy romcoms to children’s movies and cheesy action films.
“Things became rocky, and we temporarily broke up for the first time last year, when I insisted I wanted to sign on toI’m Sure She’s Fine. I think I have, like, one sex scene, so he got over it.” She clears her throat. “Anyway, earlier this year… and I’ve never told anyone except my sister about this before,” she says, eyes darting around the room once again. “But I found messages.” Her voice is no more than a whisper now, but her eyes are wide and telling.
“What kind of messages?” Naomi asks.
Meghan shakes her head, a look of disgust on her face.
“Disgusting, perverted messages. To multiple women.” She blushes. “We had a great sex life, especially in the beginning. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. And I enjoy it a little rough. Hair-pulling, all that. But, apparently, that wasn’t enough for him. And when I turned down his more… hardcore… requests, he searched for it elsewhere...”
Meghan’s hands tremble as she clasps her mug of tea, bringing it to her red lips.
“Would you mind sharing what sort of requests? And you’re sure they couldn’t have been taken out of context? Just kinky stuff?”
Meghan scoffs. “Call me a prude, but saying things like you want to slice little pieces of flesh off someone to cook and eat, or that you want to slit someone’s throat just enough so they bleed but don’t die so you can fuck them while they teeter on the line of life and death is more than ‘just kinky.’”
Naomi’s eyes widen, sure she misheard her. But then she recalls the words from the model at the club.My friend slept with him, said he was vile. To stay away. She swallows her growing nausea, thinking of the blind item and Jade’s bruising, Faye’s injury.
“Like rape fantasies…”
Meghan nods, face paling.
Naomi can’t imagine how anyone could be into something so depraved, let alone put it in writing, but she knows how fucked-up people can be. It tends to be the ones you least expect too. Cold and calculating behind the scenes, meticulously careful until they get cocky, confident they’ll never get caught, and finally they make a mistake. Goosebumps prickle her arms as she thinks of all the horrible people still out there, getting away with whatever they want.
She breathes out a shaky exhale, forcing herself not to think of what her sister possibly went through.
“Do you know if he was into choking specifically?” she asks.
Meghan tenses and then nods.
Naomi’s heart rate spikes at the confirmation. “And how did you find the DMs? Were you looking through his phone because you had suspicions or did someone tip you off?”
Meghan purses her lips, then sighs. “I rarely did things like that. I prefer an ignorance-is-bliss approach. Don’t go looking for things you don’t want to find. But he’d been acting… off. And my intuition just told me to look.”
Naomi opens her mouth to speak but Meghan continues. “Oh, and there is one thing I forgot to mention. Before all this—we’re talking 2022—literally just months after we got engaged, I got a message. Something like ‘He’s not the perfect man you think he is. He’s a monster.’ But I’d received so many messages over social, especially from so many Harlow fans who hated me, so I just ignored it. After that point I almost never checked my socials, handed them off to my PR team. But yeah, when I found the DMs later, I remembered that message. Assumed it was one of the women he… you know.”
“When in 2022?”
“January… February maybe?”
Naomi bites the inside of her lip, nodding as nausea roils through the pit in her stomach. Less than five months after Jade. Only one month before Faye.
“Do you have the username?”
“It was just ‘user’ something followed by random numbers. I checked afterward because I wanted to go back and ask questions but they never responded. Account deleted.”
“So you say you found these messages on his phone. Did you confront him?”
“I did. I threw his phone at him, one of the messages open on the screen. Asked him what the fuck they were.” She laughs angrily as she turns away from Naomi. “I was desperate for them not to be true. He begged me to stay, told me they were from when I was filming away for months and he was weak… and, goddamn him, I wanted to believe it so badly. I tried to work through it. But I just couldn’t get those messages out of my head. His words. Like he was Jekyll and Hyde, you know? And I couldn’t continue sleeping next to a monster. So the next day, when he left for work, I called my dad, packed my bags, and got the hell out of there. Went back to Indiana for a bit.”
“How did he take it?”
