I have plenty of green leaves to back up my skills.
Maybe it’s time I trade them for fiveredones.
ONE
CRANBERRY
NOELLE
A YEAR LATER
Ican’t taste anything that has cranberry in it without wanting to throw my guts up on the floor.
Makes sense. It was the holidays, after all. Our annual Christmas party. Of all the drinks they served, Dean kept shoving little shots of straight cranberry Schnapps into my hand.
“Just one more,” he’d said, smiling like it was a joke we were in on together. Like it meant something that he remembered what I’d already had. Like I owed him something for his attention.
I remember thinking I didn’t even like cranberry. Not really.
I remember thinking I should stop.
I remember thinking I didn’t want to be the girl who made a scene, especially since I was the only woman on the team with three other guys. We were all brand strategy coordinators, a mid-level, non-executive position at Evergreen & Co. Our job was to take our client’s business—their brand—and execute their visions. I was the latest hire, having signed on the February before. This was my first holiday party, with all the big shots there. I wanted to make a good impression.
That’s why, when the VP of Marketing himself cornered me in the den of the expensive house that the CEO rented for the party, I didn’t make an excuse and escape. I took the drink he offered me… the one Dean handed him to pass to me… and gagged on another cranberry-flavored cocktail. It was so damn sweet, but it also makes sense why. They needed to hide the mickey that they slipped me.
The rest of the night comes in flashes after that. The cheery holiday music that was too loud. The lights shining overhead, showing off the wealth of the homeowners, way too bright. Someone was laughing behind me. A hand on my lower back that didn’t belong there, another under my dress. Someone else telling me to relax, that I was such a pretty girl, that I should have some fun. That it was a party. That I only felt woozybecause I’d been drinking, but not so much that I couldn’t consent.
I couldn’t consent. Ididn’tconsent. Not when Charles Dutton shoved my skirt up and my panties down after we ended up in an empty bedroom together. Not when Dean Rourke—one of the guys on my team—grabbed Grant Ellison, the senior brand director, and followed Dutton and me into the room. When Dutton was done, they had their turn, propping me up between them as the three of them used every part of me they could.
Evan Pike was there, too. A junior manager who’d seemed so sweet whenever we met, he walked in during the worst of it. He stayed, damn it. I remember the look of horror mixed with lust on his face as he stood in the corner, watching as they made me their plaything. He never touched me, but he was witness to my assault, and he didn’t do a fucking thing to stop them.
I can’t forget Marcus Willis, a client relations manager, either. After the other men finished with me, hurrying back to the party while I clung to consciousness, Marcus was the one who found me as I did everything I could to stumble to the bathroom. All I wanted was to get clean. Barely able to speak, my clothes rumpled, my head pounding, I just wanted to scrub them off of me.
Marcus offered to help. He didn’t. Instead, hefollowed me into the bathroom, locked the door, and whipped out his cock. Laughing… and, oh, do I remember his laughter… he told me that he’d help me if I did something for him first. A fair exchange, he said. I’d give him a blow job, and he wouldn’t tell the rest of the office that I allowed myself to be passed around by two managers and a member of my team.
I didn’t refuse. Icouldn’t. It made sense somehow in the haze of the roofie and the way too many drinks I had, and the next thing I knew, I was grabbing his dick, putting it between my lips, and sucking.
I remember the taste of his skin mingled with the cranberry had me retching, and he thought I was gagging because he was so big. It didn’t matter. Shoving him away from me, I threw up the contents of my stomach, the puke getting all over his fancy, shiny shoes.
Dutton’s secretary found me curled up around the toilet hours later. Marcus had told the party that the bathroom was out of commission, and the entire office—as drunk as I was, on holiday cheer and thousand-dollar bottles of booze courtesy of the big bosses—believed him until Sandra needed to pee and the other bathroom reallywasoccupied.
She found me, and she brought me around, helping me as the drug they gave me finally started to make its way through my system. Everything was fuzzy, even more directly after the assault, and I didn’t evenknowI’d been assaulted at that point. The realization that they’d raped me, that they’d taken advantage when I didn’t want it… that came later.
So did all of the lies—and the consequences.
I never went to the police. It would’ve been pointless. I know exactly how that story would’ve gone. How many questions I’d be asked about what I was wearing, how much I’d had to drink, whether I’d said no clearly enough, or if I even said it at all. Too many witnesses claimed I’d been a sloppy drunk that was making eyes at Charles Dutton, flirting with Dean Rourke, and noting that I’d been willingly accompanying Marcus Willis to the bathroom.
They blamed me for what happened. The five men closed ranks, protecting each other. Dutton admitted that I’d tried to kiss him before he—a married father of four—had to turn me down; it was the liquor that caused it, he said, the benevolent VP who was willing to let me keep my job. My colleague never went into that bedroom, and neither did the managers. Dutton left me there to sleep off his rejection, and if I made a pass at Marcus because I couldn’t, I should be lucky that he didn’t make me pay to clean his shoes after he was so kind as to bring me to the bathroom to splash some water on my face.
Sandra tried. She gave a report on the state that she found me in, but when Evergreen & Co. has only one female employee for every five male employees, theboy’s club shut us both down. I should’ve known better than to drink so much at a company party, and Sandra was kind to help me, but no one needed to blame any of the higher-ups for what happened.
I tried. The more memories that returned to me, the more I went to HR, hoping they could help me since I knew damn well that the police wouldn’t.
It didn’t do shit. In the end, they called me emotional. Unprofessional.
A fuckingliability.
That was December, two years ago. The five men involved all kept their jobs. Me? I was relieved of my duties by the following April in a single email from HR:
