“I—I’m sorry. I just—I take all this seriously, I really value working with you. And—you have a wife, right?”
I knew none of these reasons mattered. All that held value was my no—my body language, which told a man to stop, no questions asked. I wanted to say, “Don’t fucking touch me, ever again—NO.” Women have to mollify broken, cruel men with outside excuses and apologies as to why taking pieces of our soul isn’t a smart move, for them. We are wired, even in moments of screaming terror, to deescalate a situation that could kill us. I knew this to be true. I also knew another truth: monsters don’t care about consequences. I wasn’t sure if there was a monster sitting in front of me. I was praying there was reasoning inside Cole’s brain.
He stared at me blankly, a face I worried lacked reason.
“We have an open relationship,” Cole said flatly, referring to his wife.
The wheels of his stool creaked slowly on the carpet fibers, rolling toward me. Sweat prickled on my forehead as I tightened.
“I want you to respect me as an artist, and I don’t want to cross this line with you, okay?”
Cole’s eyes darkened. The red light over the door lit up half his face. In that moment, a man I had once felt comfortable with suddenly looked like a horror movie come to life: a monster.
“Oh, so you’re that kind of girl? You think you can just lead me on, take what you want from me, and I’ll sit back and be satisfied?”
I shook my head effusively as my heart raced faster. I blinked back a dizziness behind my eyes. I couldn’t quite understand how in the span of two minutes, my world seemed to turn upside down.
My voice was as shaky as my insides. “No. No, I thought we were going to work together—that you saw something in my music, and that was that. I didn’t know you had feelings for me. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way, I didn’t know.”
The sick part was, that in this moment, I was sorry—sorry for something I had never done. Sorry for a man’s inability to understand the very simple meaning of a very simple word: no.
He squinted at me, turning his head to study both sides of my cheeks, as if trying to read me. It made me want to run, but I was still hopeful that there was no reason to run.
“Is this a hard to get thing? Like, you’re trying to pretend you don’t want me so I’ll think you’re not like the other fangirls? ’Cause I get it, you’re special. Congratulations.”
I shook my head, no longer able to hide my shock. My jaw was open and my eyes were wide. “I would like to keep this strictly professional, Cole.”
“Kiddo, I’m going to give you a few seconds to really think what you’re saying through.”
It was a threat. A powerful man was threatening me, alone, behind closed doors. I looked down to my leg as I felt his hand back on my kneecap. He leaned his face in to mine, staring directly into my eyes. I could feel his fingers circling below me as he raised his eyebrows. I could feel the tips of his fingers moving from my knee, all the way up my skirt. I had said no, and nothing I had done up to this point gave this man the right to know that the inside of my thigh was soft and warm.
There is an oval-shaped gray mass inside our brains, directly responsible for how we process fear: the amygdala. Mine was sending a signal to my brain stem, asking it to paralyze my body. My body didn’t want to be present, but there was a fighter in me that did. I could feel the struggle as my hands went numb. I could hear his heavy breathing grow louder, as if it were inside my skull. My cross-wired senses had multiplied, and nothing worked the way I needed it to. I closed my eyes tightly and found the rhythm of my own breath. I opened my eyes on his lips coming for mine, with his finger inside me.
Boiling rage itched through my bones, and all at once, I lifted my body with the force of two women, edging my elbow into his nose. He shot backward off the stool, hitting the floor as blood gushed out of his flaring nostrils.
“FUCK,” he yelled, seeing the blood all over his white crew neck.
My entire body sat shaking on the couch. I had undoubtedly broken his nose.
“You cunt,” he growled. “You can fucking say goodbye to your career,” he hissed, holding his body in a circle on the floor.
I was terrified that he was right. I was nearly thirty, and thirty-year-olds in the music industry didn’t get first chances to succeed, let alone second ones. I watched as Cole started to unfurl his body. He was about to stand, and I didn’t know what would happen when he regained use of his limbs. Would he use them to pin me down and take even more than my career from me? This was the flight part—the part where my self-defense instructor had told me to “fucking run.” Fight and flight. Both were prominent factors in survival.
I scuffled off the couch, away from his standing frame. My shoulder slammed past the door, sending a seething pain through my upper body. I held my arm across my pounding shoulder as I flew out of the studio and into the empty, dimly lit hallway, inhaling industrial carpet cleaner—a smell so pungent that it punched the back of my throat. I could taste the bile against my tongue—nausea rushing out of me like a volcano. Tears in my eyes, I stumbled past the shiny platinum records that lit the walls. When I had walked into the studio hours earlier, I had beamed with a giddy hope, seeing these records as aspirational: this’ll be me one day. They had lifted me up and floated me into the sound booth with heart-fluttering, glittery promise. Now, one after the other, they seemed to taunt me, illustrating how a mountain of possibilities had died inside a shitty man’s hands. The impossibly long hallway started to swirl slowly around me—the air thickening like molasses. My vision was hot and blurry, and I wasn’t sure if I was on a moving sidewalk, or if my legs were doing the moving. I looked back, seeing Cole open the studio door. Heart pounding in my ears, I flew toward a neon-green sign atop a door, just yards ahead of me. EXIT. Somehow, my feet tugged my entire weight outside.
I blinked back the harsh afternoon sun, gasping for air. The sounds of cars honking and teenagers laughing and mothers yelling and babies crying. The smell of burning rubber and cement and sewer and body odor and perfume. The pressure of a strange woman’s fingers against my bare shoulder. The words “are you okay?” echoing over and over as white flurries filled my vision and hot pavement scraped my knees.
He had turned my dream into a nightmare.
44
THIRTY-FIVE
I COULD TASTE THE MEMORY—ACID rising up from my throat inside Carbone. There was a terror roaring through my body—a dizzying, red-hot alarm swirling inside my veins, warning me that I was in danger. I held my breath and clenched my stomach inward—desperate to keep from emptying my insides out on the crisp white tablecloth in front of me.
The room moved in slow motion. I was a deer in headlights, watching the man I loved converse joyfully with the man who’d tried to rape me. I couldn’t hear a word they were saying—all I could hear was the loud beating of my own heart pounding in my eardrums. Asher nodded and grinned toward me. I guessed he was lavishing praise on me. I did my best to force my lips into an upward curl—a tiny hint at a smile. But then, Cole’s smile beamed in my direction, like tiny knives under my skin.