Hooked Up: Book 2 (38 page)

“Pearl, are you sure you’re okay?”

“It would be nice to live by the ocean, wouldn’t it?”

Ignoring me.
“Just say the word and we can buy a house in Malibu. Whatever you want. I could surf and you could walk along the beach with Rex, unless you’re brave enough to brace the icy water. Would you like that?”

“Maybe.” She smiled weakly. Nothing I said seemed to warm her.

“You don’t have to keep working, you know. You can throw in the towel with HookedUp Enterprises any time. Be my kept woman. Read novels and laze about in the sun.”

“I’ve worked all my life; I’d get bored. Anyway, what about you? You said you’d break things up with Sophie and HookedUp yet you still carry on, even though it’s obvious she wants to see our relationship come to an end.”

The Sophie issue again.
Whatever I said, Pearl was convinced that Sophie was out to get her. I kept my mouth shut. I got the feeling that
whatever
I told her, it wouldn’t work out in my favor.

Then she came out with something worryingly philosophical “Alexandre, if you and your life met right now, right here, what would you say to it?”

“What?”

“If you and your life could have a conversation, what would you tell it?”

“
Je ne regrette rien
,” I said with a laugh, quoting the Edith Piaf song.

“Seriously.”

“I
am
serious. The only thing I might regret is not having kissed you sooner.”

“If you could re-live your life, is there anything you’d do differently?”

I tried to gauge her expression, but she wasn’t giving anything away. I answered, “I am who I am because of all my choices; the good and the bad. Even the mediocre.” I thought of Laura and a shiver of shame crept up the back of my neck. “I mean, thank God things happened the way they did, or I might have ended up with Laura and I wouldn’t have met you.” The second I said those words I wished I hadn’t bloody mentioned Laura.

“Do you still think about her?”

Yes. That she’s a fucking fruitcake!
And I just escaped a bloody close shave.
“She’s a friend, I guess. We shared a past, that’s all.” I felt my face heat up.

“So you don’t agonize over choices you made and wish that there were things you hadn’t done?”

Pearl was onto me. Somehow,
she knew.
That’s why she’d cooled off.
Did she know about Laura trying to fuck me?
Or perhaps she’d guessed about my mother? The way she was staring into my eyes had my solar plexus feel as if someone had swung a baseball bat at my gut.

I tried to sound cool. Unfazed. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice, Pearl. External forces choose for you.”

“We always have a choice. A choice not to get ourselves into bad predicaments in the first place. At least when we’re adults, that is. Children don’t get a chance to choose.”

And was she now
choosing
to break up with me or something? Her glass-cold face wasn’t revealing a thing.

“Your mother, for instance? She had a choice,” Pearl went on.

Jesus! What does she know?
Does she know what my mother did?
“My father was a monster,” I said in retaliation, my teeth gritted.

“What happened to your father, anyway?” she asked, her eyebrows raised, as if she had guessed the real truth.

“He disappeared,” I said, as casually as I could.

“Oh really?” Her brows did their thing again.

“Yes, really, Pearl. That nasty douchebag just disappeared into thin air.”

“Aren’t you worried that he may come back and
haunt
you?”

I told her that he had disappeared, but she seemed to know that he was
dead
. She used the word “haunt.”
How
did she know? I said in a cold-fire voice. “He’s gone for good. He won’t come back. Ever.”

T
WO DAYS HAD PASSED. I worked with Alessandra at her house in Topanga Canyon. Her attitude had changed. She was less cocky than when we first met, as if she had something to prove then, as if she had felt competitive with Alexandre in some way. Since that first day she stopped coming on to me or flirting. Thank God. We’d made huge headway with the script. She had a sharp sense of humor and managed to slip in a lot of great one-liners. They still hadn’t chosen her leading man—everything was up in the air while Sam awaited decisions from tough cookie agents and managers. Whatever, whoever, the actor would be a star. If this film was successful, I’d get a nice percentage of the box-office. It was a win-win situation for all of us.

I’d been so busy that I didn’t have a chance to speak to anyone about my nightmares.

When I get back to the hotel after a full day’s work, I called Daisy. I needed her sound advice. Getting older meant I had become more and more picky about whom I spent time with and in whom I confided. In my twenties I wore my heart on my sleeve, but had never associated the change in my attitude—bottling up my feelings—with that dreaded night. But when I thought about it, it was after that that everything changed . . . when I lost my trust in people. I had never put two and two together. Because I had not been aware of how it had affected me psychologically.

I now lay back on my deliciously comfortable hotel bed, leaning against the padded headrest, stretching out my legs. Daisy took a long time to pick up.

“Amy stop that,” she finally shouted into the receiver.

“Daisy?”

“Oh, hi, Pearl. Sorry, Amy’s being all needy right now. One sec. Amy, if you want my attention then you need to sit quietly with your coloring book for ten minutes and then we’ll choose your Halloween outfit together. Is that a deal? Ten minutes only, I promise, then I’m all yours.”

I could hear Amy’s willful voice soften and she said, “Okay Mommy, but just ten minutes. I’m watching the clock, you know.”

“Sorry about that, Pearl. Johnny’s away on a business trip so she’s being really demanding. He’s been away a lot lately.”

“I’ll try to squeeze everything I have to say in ten minutes,” I said jokingly.

“I know. Foolishly I taught her how to tell the time and now she’s got me on a tight leash. She doesn’t miss a trick.”

I lay bare to Daisy the details about my nightmares and how I’d been keeping their content a secret from Alexandre—bearing in mind, I let her know, about what she’d said about him being a “Latin man at heart.”

“Okay, Pearl, first off, since we had that conversation in my office? Things are not the same as I had previously imagined.”

I plumped another cushion behind my head. “What do you mean?” I asked, sure that whatever advice she gave me would be sound.

“Well, how you are describing the situation now colors things very differently. You’d always led me to believe that you had been totally up for that threesome with the two footballers, but you were so out of it, that later, you couldn’t remember what happened.”

“Yeah, well that’s still true. I mean, it’s only since these flashbacks . . . these nighmares, that I realize there was more to the whole story.”

“This is what you have to figure out—were these actual
flashbacks
or are they just dreams, figments of your imagination?”

“They’re so detailed, so in depth that I think it’s what went down that night.”

“When you confided in me years ago about this, I remember you saying that Brad found you alone in the boys’ room drunk as a skunk, naked in a stranger’s bed with used condoms strewn about and vomit all over the bedclothes. And he freaked out but took you home and then basically never spoke to you again and that was the end of your relationship.”

“That’s what I thought. I mean, yes, that’s what happened afterward, when he found me, but before that I can’t be sure what took place. At the time it was just a blank. I’d blacked-out.”

“So now it’s all coming back to you? What triggered the memory?”

“I don’t know . . . my upcoming marriage, all that talk we had about being honest with Alexandre and . . . this color . . . electric-blue. Rex was given an electric-blue collar and it must have just made something click. I remembered this skirt I had that was also electric-blue. I wore it that night. Something about remembering that color must have activated a part of my brain that had been shut off all that time.”

“So then what happened after the third guy came through the door?”

“That’s what I can’t remember.”

“You said your body was practically numb? Like a rag doll with no strength in your muscles?”

“Yes. I remember that clearly. I had no strength to move—I must have been really inebriated.”

“Sounds like a lot more than just tequila to me.”

“But I didn’t smoke any weed or anything. I wasn’t stoned.”

“Sounds to me as if you’d been slipped some Ecstasy or something, maybe even Rohypnol or Valium.”

“Ecstasy?”

“I took it once, twenty years ago. Big mistake. Well, a lot of people were doing it then, it was all the rage—I thought it would be a laugh. I remember being exactly like that, like a flopsy marionette. I couldn’t move a muscle. Everybody else was dancing all night, but with me it had the opposite effect. I spent the night with this guy who I thought was God’s gift to the human race, but when I woke up the next morning I was horrified. HORR. IF. IED.”

The way Daisy told me this, with her exaggerated British accent, made me chuckle. Comic relief from a serious subject.

“That’s why it’s called Ecstasy,” she went on. “People are convinced they’re madly in love. You see everything with rose-tinted glasses while you’re high. But actually, those bastards probably gave you Valium or something. These types of drugs affect everyone differently, but mixed with all those shots of tequila? You wouldn’t have stood a chance, Pearl.”

I twiddled my hair in thought, retracing my nightmare. “Maybe you’re right. In the dream one of them said something like . . . what was it? Like . . . ‘It’s really taking effect now.’ You think they spiked my drink?”

“Hey, it happens all the time at colleges and parties, that’s one of the reasons they call it ‘date rape.’ I
bet
they slipped something in your drink. It can cause retrograde amnesia, which is obviously what happened to you. I mean, it’s common for people to wake up the next morning without any memory of huge chunks of the night before. It’s really rife in Britain with all this binge drinking going on with young girls. There are so many cases of fake taxi drivers raping them . . . you know, they get into a car thinking they’re going home and end up being violated. Some even murdered. But I’m digressing—what happened to you was a classic case of date rape. Even if you had gone to the doctor for a test the next day, a lot of these date rape drugs don’t even show up in urine samples.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It was part of my training. Date rape is way more common than people think and it usually goes unreported, but often it’s revealed years later in therapy sessions. Like with incestual rape, people often don’t want to admit to themselves that they were abused, let alone confide in someone else—it can take years to resurface sometimes. Or like with you, the victim genuinely forgets about it, blocks it out, and something triggers the memory years later. It could be a smell, a word, a movie or book. In your case it was a color that was the trigger reminding you of that skirt and everything that followed.”

“The truth is, though, I asked for it, Daisy. I was dancing around in that little skirt, coming on to them, flirting like crazy. And I agreed to go back to their place—they didn’t force me. I was even looking forward to having a threesome. At first it seemed like a great idea.”

“Oh so you think you asked to be basically,
gang raped
? This was not your fault, Pearl. This was
not
your fault.
Do you hear me?
”

“I felt so ashamed at the time, and I still feel ashamed even speaking about it now.”

“You and every other person who ever gets raped. It’s classic—the victim feels like somehow it was their fault and they were asking for it. Their lipstick was too bright, the skirt too short, they shouldn’t have worn high heels that evening, they should never have got into that car. The list goes on.”

“The worst thing is that I suddenly feel repelled by sex . . . the repulsive details are all flooding back, and I feel grossed out.”

“That’s why you need to tell Alexandre about what happened.”

“But you said—”

“Pearl, that’s when I thought this was about a fun, wild night out during your university years—something he really didn’t need to know about. But this? This is affecting your
relationship.
This is a whole different kettle of fish. It was
rape
. Just because it happened ages ago doesn’t make it any less serious.”

“He might think it was my fault.”

“I doubt it very much. We all have a past—we’ve all done crazy things. This was eighteen years ago, for fuck’s sake.”

“Just yesterday he said how he couldn’t imagine me ever having been promiscuous or wild–he thinks I was perfect.”

“Well, wakey, wakey, Alexandre Chevalier, you are engaged to be married to a mere mortal! Pearl, if he can’t stomach what happened to you, and if he can’t deal with it in an adult way then you really shouldn’t be marrying him anyway. Listen, Amy says my time is up and I don’t like breaking promises. Call me tomorrow and we’ll finish this conversation. It’s good you’re letting it all out, anyway.”

“Bye. Thanks, Daisy, thanks for listening. Say thank you to Amy for being so generous with her mom’s time.”

“Please, stop making yourself sound like a bore. Of course I’m listening, This shit is serious and you need to sort through it. We’ll talk tomorrow. Love you, and thank you for trusting me with all this, I know it’s painful.”

I got out my iPad and looked up the words online that Daisy mentioned, “retrograde amnesia.” I had always thought it was a nifty trick they used in soap operas, but never could have imagined it would happen to anyone in real life—to totally blank something out. At least, not unless you’d had some sort of physical head trauma from a car accident or something. Although, I understood now that it
was
trauma . . . only mental.