I watched for any sign of insincerity. I had spent the last eleven years questioning everything I knew about everyone. This was no exception.
“What was I supposed to think?” I asked, my eyebrows raised.
He got out of his chair then, moving toward me. He wasn’t exceptionally tall—he had only a few inches on me—but his being so much older had always made him feel gigantic. He stopped a few feet away.
“I’m not a predator, Rose,” he insisted. A wrinkle formed between his eyebrows, the same way it always had in the past. “You meant something to me.”
“The Lolita of Loxahatchee?” I offered as a joke. This lightened the tension in the room a bit, but he was still considering me carefully, like I might reach forward and slap him.
“What happened with you was an isolated incident. I have been entirely professional with every student I’ve had since.”
Did I believe that? I wanted to. Every inch of my body was begging me to lean into his words.
“I had to ask,” I said softly. I tucked my hair behind my ear. I was losing my resolve with every second that I looked at him. He was too familiar. Toomuch a part of my life back then. The idea of him being involved in any way still made me feel ill.
He looked down at me, seeming to be a little in pain. “I feel guilty about it to this day. I don’t want to say I regret it necessarily, because I really did care about you. I was probably in love with you, though I suppose that doesn’t make it any better, does it?” He sighed. “And I was young, which I’m sure sounds like a bullshit excuse to you, but I wasn’t so far out of school myself.”
It was weird to see him like this. Almost begging. The years following my and Bradley’s “relationship” were the years when sexual predators were called out. Men were exposed for the things they’d done. People talked about the power dynamics in relationships now. Bradley was afraid of me, I realized.
“I didn’t come here to lecture you about what we did,” I said, waving him off.
“You didn’t come here to accuse me of being a serial predator?” Bradley asked, a slight edge to his voice.
I threw my hands up in frustration. “I had to cover every base. I need to find my sister.”
He rubbed at his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, and what this is all bringing up. It’s not unreasonable to ask.” He paused. “Although, I would hope you know me well enough to know that it’s ridiculous.”
We stood in silence for a few minutes and then Bradley cleared his throat. “You really do look great, you know,” he said. “I mean, I saw you promoting your book online, but it’s surreal to see you in person again.”
I wanted to ignore his comment about how I looked, but hearing it come out of his mouth after all this time sent an automatic thrill down my spine.
“Did you read the book?” I asked, interested in the answer. I had always wondered if he’d kept tabs on me. Bradley looked at me like I was being foolish.
“Of course I did,” he said. “Even if it hadn’t blown up the way it did, I would have read it. You wrote it. That’s reason enough.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And? What did you think?”
“It was phenomenal, but you already know that.” He gave me a cocky grin. “You’ve always known you were smarter than everyone else.”
“It’s still nice to hear. Even if it’s old news.”
“There’s my girl.”
His words were like liquid nostalgia, immediately washing away the last seven years and leaving my eighteen-year-old self standing before him.
“I appreciated my characterization,” he added, his expression softer. “Although I got off a little easy.”
“I couldn’t put in what really happened, now could I?” I’d omitted quite a bit. Outright lied in a few places. All to protect him. And myself.
“You could have,” he countered. “But I appreciated the discretion, nonetheless.”
“I didn’t see the point in getting you in any trouble,” I said honestly. “It was over by then. That time of my life was difficult enough.” I didn’t need to explain for us to both know what I meant.
Six months after Will was convicted of murder, I had become obsessed with revenge. I hated the community for what they had done to him, hated the Hopelys for how they’d supported the lies. I didn’t entirely realize it at the time, but I was on the brink of a breakdown. My parents had separated, Tommy was away at college, Hazel was in Tampa with Mom, and of course, we know whereWill was. None of my friends spoke to me. My entire life had fallen apart, and I’d become uncontrollable.
I’d stopped eating, developing what was probably anorexia though I flirted with bulimia too. I found it therapeutic. I liked watching the fat and muscle disappear from my body in chunks: stomach, thighs, hips, ass. My breasts were somehow left unaffected, life’s cruel joke. The same year, I grew two inches, turning me into some grotesque, angular caricature of myself. I had become unreasonably attractive at a time when I wanted to shrink into the background.
It was mostly the boys who paid attention. No one wanted to be friends with a murderer’s sister, but they could still want to fuck her.
