Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 82883 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82883 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
I can’t breathe. My hands are shaking so bad I can’t even reach for the phone. I swallow, then look up at her.
“That’s not me,” I say. “You know that, right?”
She nods, quick and desperate. “Of course. Anyone who actually knows you knows it’s fake. But—” She looks down, ashamed. “But a lot of people don’t care. They see the video, they believe it. Or they want to.”
A wind cuts through the alcove, sharp and bitter. It stings my eyes, but I’m not crying. Not yet.
“Who did this?” I whisper.
Stella shrugs. “No one knows for sure, but you know how people are. There are about a dozen guys claiming that it was them in the videos because the men’s faces are blurred, and you know guys don’t give a shit about their reputations. All they care about is being known as the dude with the big cock, and the dudes in those videos are sporting monsters.”
I close my eyes. I think hard. My mind is a mess as I try to fight down the panic in my chest, but I have to do better. I try to piece things together in order to figure out what’s going on. Suddenly, I know. It’s the spangly boots that clue me in because I saw them at the Sigma Epsilon Chi party long ago. The one where the boys hired two working girls, and were having group sex in the attic while filming the whole thing. Sure, the girls got paid. Sure, the girls didn’t care that they were being recorded. But why the fuck did someone put my face onto the women’s bodies?
Then, I see Clay Newell’s face, the way he looked at me at the party, the way he tried to force me into his bedroom, the way he acted like the world belonged to him and everyone else was just a prop.
I see Kent’s face, too—the flash of anger, the fist, the way he dragged me out of the party like I was breakable, precious, his, while Clay whined and cried like a baby calling for his mom. It has to be Clay Newell who created the deepfakes. He must be jealous and hurt and enraged by what happened at the party, and he’s doing this as some sick act of revenge.
I open my eyes. I look at Stella, really look at her, and see the fear and the pity in her eyes. I hate it. I want to scream at her, or maybe hug her until my ribs crack, or maybe both.
“Can you send me the videos?” I ask, my voice steady now. “I need to… I don’t know. I just need them.”
Stella nods, and does it. My phone buzzes in my hand a few seconds later, and the files show up in my texts. I open one, just to be sure, and watch my lips part as I’m fucked from two angles at once, my mouth stretched wide, my curves moving with impossible hunger.
I feel nothing. Not anger, not sadness, not even embarrassment. Just a cold clarity, like the moment before you pass out or throw up.
“I’ll be okay,” I say, and I almost believe it.
Stella hugs me then, so tight I can’t move, and for a second I let her. I let myself be held, let myself be small. But then I pull away.
“I have to go,” I say.
She doesn’t argue. She just stands there, arms wrapped around herself, watching as I walk away.
I stalk back toward the parking lot, past the boys at the bike rack, past the silent girls at the library, past the quad where the wind rattles the bare branches and the sun is already half gone. My phone is heavy in my pocket, and every step echoes with the words I heard and the ones I didn’t.
Slut.
Whore.
Fake.
I keep walking, boots scraping on the ice, and promise myself that next time, I won’t be the one on my knees.
Not ever again.
20
A SECRET REVEALED
KENT
The winter light drains out of the day fast at this latitude, like a wound that never stops bleeding. By four-thirty, the house is already hunkered into its own shadows, windows blacked out to the world, the only pulse of life the thin blue rectangle of my laptop screen. I sit in the study, all dark wood and silent books, trying to finish a report for the hospital board but failing, over and over, because my mind keeps unspooling to the same place: the girl, and the world outside, and the feeling that something’s about to go very wrong.
What’s causing this? Things have been going great with Mary Kate, so I shouldn’t be getting an ominous feeling. After all, my beautiful stepdaughter is gorgeous, sweet, insanely horny, and intelligent too. We do more than fuck non-stop. I also talk with the young woman, and we have meaningful conversations about my career, her future, her studies, and what we want from life. I’ve already expressed my desire to start a family someday, and Mary Kate immediately flushed and murmured something incoherent. But I could tell when we made love later that night that she was especially on-fire with the knowledge that maybe someday soon, I’ll be breeding her for real. Hell, we use birth control most times, but there are a few times when it was so hot that I slipped up, so my fertile girl could be pregnant already. Nothing could be better. So why is my sixth sense tingling right now, when everything’s going great?