21. Ivy
Everything seemed fine as we stumbled through the dorm halls to our room. Sure, people gave us sideways glances, but we were covered in mud and caked with sex, so I understood. We did the walk of shame up to the showers. After we washed away the grime and made ourselves presentable, we headed to the auditorium, ready to face the music. We were a few hours late, but nothing we couldn’t explain or make up.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Davis shouted.
Someone else laughed. “Oh, you four are in deep shit.”
“Yeah, what the hell?” Piper said. “You can’t disappear for a whole day and show up like nothing’s wrong.”
“Stephens is pissed.” Davis sang that last word.
“What the fuck do you mean?” Lex asked, his eyebrows furrowing.
A whole day?
I grabbed for my phone, and sure enough, it was June 23. We had spent the entirety of June 22 in the woods, in those ruins. It didn’t feel like a day. It didn’t feel like more than a few hours. My heart beat so hard that I expected it to leap out of my body and flop around on the ground like a fish.
“How is that possible?” I whispered to Carter as we walked in between the curtains to the stage.
“It’s not,” Carter said.
“Fuck, we’re so screwed,” Miri said.
As soon as we stood center stage, Stephens froze and stared at us. Anger poured off him like a sickness, and he held his arms out to the side, shaking his head.
“You’re fired,” he said. “All of you. Pack your shit. I’m hiring a cab to take you to the airport tomorrow.”
“Stephens,” Caroline said, holding up her hands to try to calm him down.
“No, I’m done. I’m fucking done with all of them. I give them the lead and they fucking squander it.”
“Wait,” I cut in. “Wait, Stephens. Please. Can I talk to you in private?”
“Weeds, what’re you doing?” Carter murmured.
I had an idea. I hated to use this card, but I didn’t see any other way out of this, and we didn’t deserve what happened to us. We didn’t ask for it. We were still struggling to figure it out ourselves.
“We were lost in the woods for twenty-four hours,” I told him once we were a few rows away from everyone else. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared him in the eye, determined to make him understand. “You’re upset, I get it, but imagine how we feel? We didn’t show up for breakfast, and we didn’t show up for rehearsal or for dinner. No one here batted an eye, much less looked for us.”
Stephens straightened, his hands on his hips and his shoulders flexing as he considered it from this new perspective.
“You showed up late to the camping trip,” he said. “You’ve been so miserable you can’t remember your lines. Tell me why I should give you another chance.”
God, I was exhausted. The heat and this thing with Lex and the orgy and being drugged had stressed me right the fuck out, and I’d had enough.
“What do you suppose my mother would do to you if she knew you lost her eldest daughter somewhere in Ireland? That no one even looked for her? Or Alexei Fairfax? I mean, c’mon, Stephens.”
Low blow.
We hadn’t told anyone where we were going, and I hated using the Mommy-get-out-of-jail free card. But Stephens needed us. He knew he did. I watched him come to this realization himself.
“Fine,” he said, “but you’ll make up your time. Every morning. Until showtime.”
I’d like to thank the Academy…
“Fine,” I said, walking away even more certain that law school was a bright beacon in my future. My mother would have been proud, disappointed in my behavior, absolutely, but I worked Stephens like goddamned putty, and even she’d admit he folded like a cheap suit.
After rehearsal, we ate dinner with the rest of the group and told stories about wandering around the woods, trying to find the creek so we could follow it back. Some of them probably believed it, but we knew what really happened. To us, we’d been out in those woods overnight, maybe twelve hours max. Not twenty-nine. Not enough to lose an entire day. But it wasn’t until we got back to our dorm room that night that we could talk about it freely.
“Okay, what the fuck is going on?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice down.
Carter shook his head and grabbed our double bed, scooting it along the floor so it was in the center of the room. Then he helped Lex do the same to theirs.
“We had to have been drugged,” Miri said. “That’s the only thing I can think of.”
“You think it was the townies?” I said. “The locals at the bonfire?”
“Maybe,” Lex said. “Or maybe just some bad actors. Who knows?”
“Who knows?” I balked at him. “You’re not concerned about this?”
“We’re fine,” Lex said, gesturing around to us, his hazel eyes exhausted and shimmering with apathy. “It’s out of our system by now, so even if we went to the doctor and they ran tests, they wouldn’t find anything.”
“Lex is right,” Miri said. “We were irresponsible that night, but there’s not much we can do two days later.”
I met Carter’s gaze across the room, his soulful eyes indicating he felt the same way. Whatever happened was more than being roofied at some festival in the woods. It felt bigger than that, like I needed an exorcism or…a blood transfusion. I wasn’t the same person anymore.
Molecularly.
After Lex and Carter pushed the two beds next to each other, Miri and I climbed in and the boys bookended us. My worry over the fact that something terrible had happened sat in my stomach like stale coffee, but my exhaustion won out and sleep took me quickly.
In my dreams, I ran through the forest barefoot on the balls of my feet, tree branches hitting me in the face as the wind whipped through my hair. I was running from something.
No.
I was running to something, the pull to it growing heavier and more tangible with each pulsing step.
The ruins.
I was close, so close.
“Ivy,” someone said. “Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”
I opened my eyes with a dying sob in my throat, my hands clamped around Miri’s and her brown eyes inches from mine. It took me a moment to remember where I was—in my dorm with my friends. My spouses.
Miri leaned in and kissed my cheek.
“You’re okay.” She yanked me closer and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, holding me as tears spilled over my cheeks. “You’re here with us. It wasn’t real.”
It wasn’t real.
Jesus, it felt like I’d never get out of that forest again, like I had to reach the ruins or something evil was going to devour me. Kill me. Take my soul and never give it back.
A flash brightened the room, a loud boom following it and making me jump.
A thunderstorm.
The unusual summer humidity had finally given way to rain, and the room already seemed less stifling than it had the entire time we were here.
I listened to her breathe and the sounds of our husbands’ deep sleep echoed from either side of us, creating a hypnotizing rhythm that lulled me back to a hesitant peace.
“Do you regret what we did?” she whispered. “The four of us? Together?”
“No,” I said. Despite the blank spots in my memory, the tension between us had eased considerably. Like it was always supposed to be this way, and we’d been fighting it for too long. Like Lex and I had always been waiting for Carter and Miri to even us out and give us that rubber buffer around our live-wire relationship. “I just wish I remembered how it happened.”
“Me too,” she said. “This is our last week together. I don’t want to spend it fretting over something I can’t change.”
I understood, even as the reality of it hit me like a battering ram straight through the heart. This was it—the last days we would ever be like this.
That pit in my stomach lurched when I remembered everything that had been on our plate before we went into the woods, everything we’d have to deal with again once the intensive was over. Carter and Miri would go to California. Lex and I would stay in DC. The charade would begin, and my parents would be watching; the whole world would be watching. I’d fight to find a way out of this engagement, even if it took everything I had left. This wouldn’t be the last time I spent with them, it couldn’t. I’d rather die first.
“Miri, what if someone was there last night? What if someone did drug us and record the whole thing?” Terror shot through my chest, slicing me in two, making my muscles tremble. “What if our orgy makes front page news?”
It was silent for a minute, and then she giggled to herself, soft and low. “I hope it does. I suppose then we’ll know what happened.”
I balked at the horror, the sheer chaos, that would cause. My mother might never speak to me again, and the public would decry our debauchery. If I thought I they were bad before, I could only imagine the lengths the paparazzi would go to in order to get the exclusive scoop on that headline.
“What?” Miri said at my expression. “It’s not like anyone would believe it was us.”
“People have believed a lot worse,” I said.
“Let them think what they want,” Miri murmured, shaking her head. “I’m not ashamed of loving you. Any of you.”
“It sounds so easy when you say it like that.” In reality, a public relationship like the one we’d formed in those woods would destroy everything we’d ever taken for granted about our lives.
“Love is easy, darling,” she said. “It’s them who make it difficult.”
It reminded me of boarding school, when she’d told me sex didn’t have to be a big deal and that the public made it more than it ought to be. I’d gone out and hooked up with random strangers as a result, but I’d found that none of those emotionless encounters did anything for me.
She’s wrong.
A love like ours would never be easy. It would break my heart to let Carter go, to send Miri with him, to live with Lex and know we both pined for two people neither of us could have. I didn’t want to think about it. We still had a week, a whole week, left together. I vowed to make the best of it, so I tucked myself tighter against her chest and fell asleep cuddled in her safe embrace.
That draw to the ruins stuck with me. Even if I didn’t dream about it again that night or the night after, the stinking, blinding fear of it pulsed in the back of my mind every time I looked down at those words on my hand. It raged inside of me anytime I caught a glimpse of the forest beyond the campus. It burned in my blood on a constant unending simmer, refusing to let me forget what we’d done.
I knew, even then, the forest wasn’t through with us.
Maybe it never would be.