“Excuse—excuse me,” I said, the words trembling.
I stood up too fast, and white-hot flurries flew behind my eyes. I pushed through, edging my way past Asher, then I picked up my pace, as if running for my life. I needed air. I needed the exit. I didn’t stop to consider who was outside—I couldn’t wrap my head around my own reality. I pushed my way out of Carbone’s front door, and the white flurries in my eyes were replaced with flashing cameras—more than I could ever count. Fuck. I could feel the bile rising, and suddenly, an arm linked in mine and pulled me back into the restaurant. My vision was blinded, but I felt my legs moving, I felt someone leading me a few steps away, past a door, and into bright fluorescent lighting. I slung my body into the open bathroom stall, emptying my stomach into the toilet in one swift move.
I leaned my back against the cold door, inhaling and exhaling deep breaths. My hands were shaking. For five years, I had worked tirelessly in therapy to alleviate the unfounded guilt that mounted in regard to Cole. He was the guilty party, but it was hard for my brain to conceptualize how a man who had my best interests at heart one moment was a man refusing to take no for an answer the next. And so, I filled in the blanks, blaming my ebullient energy for the reason why Cole heard yes when I said no. I was racked with specifically horrifying guilt for breaking his nose—even though I should have been patting myself on the back for defending my body. I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t fought back. It was a thought that crept into my brain every now and then, and it took two edibles and a Friends marathon to make the nightmare leave my mind.
“Maggie?” a voice said.
I suddenly remembered that I wasn’t alone. That someone had tugged me into the women’s restroom. I peered down at the penny-tile floor, seeing Raini’s suede pumps.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I looked up at her face—her eyes were wide, and her hands were open, as if she was ready to catch me if I fell to the floor.
“Yeah,” I lied.
I moved slowly, uneasy as I found the sink. Raini watched me in the mirror, studying my ashen face for a long moment. I wasn’t sure how long it was, maybe a minute or two, before Raini put her hands on mine. I looked down, realizing that I was scrubbing my hands under scalding water—hands which were now raw and bright red. Raini grabbed a towel and dried my hands as I stared wide-eyed at her.
“Did he do something to you?” she asked, her voice small.
“Who?” I cracked, looking away from her Disney princess eyes—doing a bang-up job of playing dumb while my insides ran a traumatic marathon. My pulse was racing. I knew very well who Raini was referring to, but I did not want to acknowledge it aloud—especially not to someone who I didn’t know like the back of my hand. In five whole years I had told only three people about the day my career started and died—and one of them was my therapist.
“I’ve heard things about Cole. From my older sister’s best friend.”
I looked up, seeing Raini raise her thick brows at me, as if telling me it was okay to speak freely. Instead of taking horrified solace in knowing that I wasn’t the only human Cole Wyan had ever attacked, instead of letting Raini in, I felt armor move around my body. In this moment, I didn’t know how to relive it aloud without being carried out of here on a stretcher.
“I’m okay. I just got a little dizzy—I drank too much before the appetizers got there.”
“You’ve had like one glass of wine.”
Who was this kid? Fucking Sherlock Holmes?
“Just wait until you get to be thirty-five. One glass is enough to trigger a three-Advil-and-Gatorade morning.”
“What did he do to you?” Raini asked, wide eyes on me, voice small.
It was the way she held herself in front of me that made me grip her hand tight as tears fell down my face. She shuffled in her beautiful pumps with a fragile brokenness, as if her road hadn’t been all rainbows and sunshine. I let my shoulders fall, a dropping of my guard. Instinctively, I hugged her. She hugged me back. We both held on to each other, acknowledging some sort of different but shared nightmare.
“Can you look out there, and tell me if he’s gone?” I whispered.
She pulled back and nodded, and then poked her head out the bathroom door.
“He’s gone,” she said, coming back to me.
Somehow, I made it back to the table and forced a smile on my face all night. Every few minutes, Raini’s warm eyes studied mine with a tilt of the head and an arch of the eyebrows, as if to acknowledge that I didn’t have to pretend to be okay. I held my own, but the knowledge that I could break down and have someone catch me? Especially a woman? It was a comfort I could not put into words.
A few hours later, Asher tossed his wallet on the console as we entered his apartment, and his eyes narrowed on me as I held the side of my stomach. Just a couple hours ago, Raini and I had laughed off how I walked out to the paparazzi—how I mistook the darkened front door for the bathroom door—clearly the glasses of wine went to my head. I thought Asher had bought it, but his gaze told me he was calling bullshit. Historically, I was the person you wanted to bring to a dinner party. I could talk to a snail, I had amusing stories, I was a feisty ball of energy. This night, I had kept my mouth occupied with a plate of heavy pasta, a decision that I was starting to pay for, physically. I felt the red sauce burning in the back of my throat.
“What’s going on?” he finally asked.
“Nothing. I’m good,” I said enthusiastically. “I mean, I could use an IV of Pepto, but seriously: all good.”
Asher could see right through me. He always could. I knew it by the way his eyes had searched mine all night. I was rigid in places I was usually soft. I had been trying to stay engaged in each of the conversations tonight, but with Asher, I never had to try. Fortunately （and in this moment, unfortunately）， Asher wasn’t like the average straight man: he picked up on a woman’s subtle hints.
“This is too much for you, isn’t it?”
He spun his Rolex around his wrist, pain softening his strong jawline. I stepped out of my heels, shaking my head at Asher.
“What are you talking about?”
“The paparazzi, the fame—it’s chaos. You accidentally opened the wrong door and a thousand flashes hit your eyes. I have a life where I can’t go to a restaurant without a circus meeting me. It’s a life you didn’t choose.”
He looked at me like I was pouring salt into his open wound. I walked over to Asher and clasped my fingers inside his hand, standing upright in front of him.
“Hey. Look at me,” I said as I gently nudged his face into my view. His eyes drifted from his fingers up to my face. “Ash, it had nothing to do with you.”
“Then what was it?”
I opened my mouth, with the truth sitting on the tip of my tongue. There was a wall up between one of the scariest moments of my life and the person I could picture spending the rest of my life with. In some ways, being around Asher made me feel like the girl I had been before—that girl with her palms outstretched to the world at summer camp. Before the trying was met with wall after wall. Before loving someone was bursting bright red and left me bleeding out. Before a man who promised to lift me up tore me apart with a wave of his hand. I didn’t know how Asher would look at me after I told him about Cole, but deep down, I knew it wouldn’t change how he saw me. That wasn’t why my feet were shifting—why my mouth was pressed shut. I was keeping this from him because I didn’t know how I would look at Asher after I told him. We weren’t teenagers anymore. We didn’t only exist inside the trappings of young love, but he brought me back to a place that was warm and safe and unspoiled. In Asher’s hold I felt innocent, and this truth would bring me into reality—into my complicated adulthood right in front of his eyes. It would be an admission that our lives had shifted when we fell apart, an admission that we weren’t the same people who’d held each other naked on that dock.