Chapter 6 Truth
SIX
Truth
LOGAN
Someone pounded on my door.
That was the first thing that registered as I came fully awake for the first time since I started taking the pain meds Friday night.
“Babe, can you get that?” I managed to get out, though it sounded a bit garbled even to my own ears.
“Babe?” I asked again when the pounding continued.
I rolled away from the wall and realized Grace wasn’t there.
She wasn’t just absent from my bed, she was nowhere in my room.
At first, I thought maybe she’d stepped out to go get us some food and the pounding was her, but then I heard my friend Miles shout through the door.
“Dammit, Logan, open the fuck up, you asshole.”
I climbed off the bed and yanked the door open. “Asshole?” I questioned.
“What the fuck happened to your face?” Miles made his way inside, looked around, and then shut and locked my door.
“We need to talk and then you can fill me in on the rest of your weekend.” His nose wrinkled in disgust. “It smells like stale ass and nasty pussy in here. Crack a fucking window before you get a staph infection.”
“Fuck you,” I called out. Still, I turned my back on him and went to open my windows.
He wasn’t wrong about the air being stale and wreaking of sex.
That didn’t mean I would let him insult Grace.
I’d made that mistake once with Aoife and I wasn’t about to let shit slide from anyone else, least of all my other best friend.
“Please, tell me it wasn’t Grace who you fucked all weekend.”
“What the fuck do you have against Grace, now?” I sneered at him and bit my tongue to keep from wincing as the action tugged hard on my stitches.
“Besides the fact that she’s a manipulative bitch who cost you the woman you were supposed to marry?” he asked.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Aoife threatened her, and physically attacked her at the party.”
“Wrong, motherfucker!” Miles yelled at me. “Take a fucking seat. I recorded everything that happened from the moment I escorted Aoife to that party to when she asked me to take her home.”
“I was there. I saw what happened,” I argued and regretted it immediately as a warm wetness oozed down my chin from the corner of my mouth.
“Fuck,” I hissed and got up to head to my private bathroom.
As I cleaned myself and re-bandaged my wound, Miles sat quietly and waited for me to return.
I glanced into the mirror and two haunted eyes stared back at me.
My gut twisted in the same way it had been doing for months, since Grace came into my life and I started to feel conflicted between wanting her and keeping myself pure for Aoife.
It wasn’t something I’d bothered with in high school because we hadn’t had the second talk back then, the one where we reiterated the fact that we would one day belong to one another.
When I’d come home from boarding school and we had that talk before heading off to college, I’d sworn to myself that I would remain faithful to her - even if we weren’t technically together yet.
I didn’t expect the same thing from her, but she’d alluded to the fact that she wasn’t seeing anyone else numerous times since then.
I figured that was why she gave Grace such a hard time lately.
Aoife was jealous that there was another woman vying for my attention - and winning.
Still, that didn’t give her the right to do what she’d done at the party.
It never gave her the right to threaten someone’s life with the likes of her father and his men.
“All better now?” Miles asked me as I came back into my room. I rolled my eyes at him but gave a nod of my head. He patted the bed beside where he sat. “Good, then come sit down because you’re not going to want to be on your feet for this.”
“What is this?”
Miles offered me his phone and hit play on a video that was already queued up on screen.
I watched in fascinated horror as the incident between Aoife and Grace played out in a very different way than I’d assumed.
Miles was close enough to have gotten most of what was said between them on the recording.
There were bits and pieces that were too overshadowed by music and other conversations to hear, but I could get the gist of it.
When Grace threw herself to the floor as Aoife’s hands remained at her sides, there was no doubt that I’d heard enough of the conversation to understand what was happening.
As Grace threw herself to the floor, she bumped into a woman behind her who accidentally dropped her drink all over Grace.
I paused the video and looked into the eyes of the woman who I had pushed out of the way at the party.
The reason I had the scar on my face. I remembered she was trying to tell me what really happened.
I closed my eyes and my hands shook as they held tight to Miles’s phone.
“She made it all up,” I whispered.
“Yep,” Miles agreed with an emphasized pop of the last letter. “She made up the other bullshit, too.”
“How do you know?”
Miles gave me a look that said I was a dumbass for even asking after witnessing Grace’s lies in full color.
“I was the one who took Aoife home. She didn’t even speak the whole five-hour drive to her school.
It wasn’t until we were parked outside of her dorm that she told me about the phone call from a couple weeks ago.
Her roommate tried to talk her out of coming to see you Friday because of that phone call.
You didn’t even ask for her side of things.
You didn’t even know that Grace told her you were in the shower when she answered your phone. ”
“I was in the shower when she came into my room,” I spoke softly, and attempted to keep from damaging my face further while trying to wrap my head around what really happened.
“When I got out of the shower, Grace was in my room and on my phone. She muted it and told me that Aoife had just cussed her out and said some really awful things to her.”
Miles rolled his eyes. “And you never questioned the fact that Grace just let herself into your room that was probably locked? It didn’t seem strange that she was there when you were showering or that she answered your fucking cell phone?
It’s not like she couldn’t see exactly who was calling.
” My friend shook his head and scoffed at me so hard that I could taste his bitter disappointment in the air.
“It never occurred to you to wonder why she thought it would be okay to invade your space without your permission or answer your phone?”
“I didn’t even think. I was so angry about what Aoife said to her-”
“You were angry about Grace’s lies, you mean.
” I got ready to tell him that I didn’t know if she lied, but he stopped me.
“Nope. Don’t want to hear it. If you’re still willing to believe that bitch after what I showed you, then I’ll leave right now.
I’ve seen enough to know that you treated your oldest, best friend like absolute shit and didn’t believe her. I guess I’m next in line.”
“No!” I growled the word at him. “What happened with Aoife?”
“I took her home. We had a long talk about how Grace had been setting her up and you’d been falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
She brought up the fact that you hadn’t even bothered to visit her since Grace came into your life.
You didn’t call or text unless she initiated it.
She said you never even questioned why she hadn’t shown up for the past two months to see you.
Aoife knew it was a long shot when she came to tell you she graduated early and could move to Cambridge to be closer to you until you graduated.
She took the leap of faith, though, and got her heart broken in the process. ”
“She what?” I shouted.
“You might have known that if Grace hadn’t stepped in and lied about a scene she caused. If you hadn’t immediately believed her bullshit instead of trusting your gut and your oldest friend outside of your brothers, Aoife might have been able to fill you in herself.”
“Fuck!” I hissed the word out and then grabbed the phone and watched as tears streamed down Aoife’s face while I berated her for the bullshit lies Grace fed me.
My stomach felt like a cannon had just been fired off inside it.
I could almost feel as an Aoife-sized hole tore itself through me. What had I done?
“I need to get to her, but I don’t think I can drive with the pain meds I’m on. I’ve been loopy as hell and falling asleep at the drop of a hat.”
“You mean between rounds of sex with the she-beast who ruined your life-long friendship with the girl you were supposed to protect?”
I cringed at that, hating that I’d gone there. “Yeah.” It hit me then that the sun was blazing into my room. “What the fuck time is it?” I glanced down at Miles’s phone. It was quarter after one. “Shit! Is it Monday?”
“Yeah, it’s Monday.”
“Fuck! I was supposed to meet with my advisor to turn in my code for the project we’re working on.”
“You didn’t set an alarm?”
“I’ve had an alarm set in my phone since last week. Several, in fact.”
I grabbed my phone up and turned it on. Not only had it been turned off, despite being at full charge, but my calendar events for the meeting were deleted and all of my alarms were turned off.
A sinking feeling of dread flowed through me as I turned to the desk where I kept my laptop locked up.
“Check the drawer. Is my laptop still there?”
Miles reached over and tried to tug on the drawer. It didn’t budge because it was locked. “Thank fuck for small favors,” I said. My friend didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm. “I need to reschedule my appointment with Professor Archer, but after that, I need you to take me to Aoife.”
“We can try,” he said. I didn’t like the defeated tone he used, though.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that she already graduated from college, Logan. If her dad hasn’t sold her off yet, then maybe she was quick enough to get lost before he realized she was done with her education.”
“Fuck!” I yelled that time. “Come on,” I reached over and unlocked my desk, grabbed my laptop, and pocketed my pain meds. “You need to come with me, so we can leave as soon as I’m done presenting.”
“Fine, but I don’t think it will matter.”
“It has to,” I told him as we rushed out of my room.
“I had hoped that Grace Humphries’ fears were unfounded, but after reviewing your code, I have no choice but to take this to the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards.”
“Take what? What the hell has Grace done?” I asked.
“It’s not what Grace has done. It’s what you’re trying to do, Logan.
She came to me this morning with concerns and wanted to present her code early because she was worried you might have gotten close to her in an effort to gain access to her work.
She told me she was paranoid enough to have a dummy version of the code on her laptop and even supplied the portions of the code that were purposely incorrect, in case you tried to present her work as your own. ”
“I’ve been working on MY code for months now. I have no need to steal anyone else’s work,” I assured Professor Archer.
“And yet, you gave me the exact files Ms. Humphries reported might be stolen.”
“Son of a…” I started to say. “She was in my dorm room all weekend and I was out of it because of the pain meds,” I said as I pointed to my face.
“Even if that was the case, Ms. Humphries presented me with her code this morning and it worked flawlessly while yours is the one that matches her dummy code. I’m afraid, unless you have proof that she tampered with your laptop, that I have to take her word since she is the one with the complete, working code and she came to me first while you missed our appointment. ”
“I missed it because she turned my alarms off and she was the one who gave me my pain meds.” I thought back to the night before when I could have sworn I’d already taken them and she insisted that I hadn’t and gave me a pill to swallow.
I took it, thinking that I’d forgotten or somehow mixed up when I took it last.
“She double-dosed me,” I whispered as I realized what happened. “That’s why it was so hard to wake up when Miles came pounding on my door this afternoon.”
“You can try to fight this with OSCCS, but they take these accusations seriously. If you’re found guilty of cheating and trying to steal another student’s work, you know what that means.”
My heart hammered against my chest. I’d be kicked out of school and labeled in such a way that I might never be able to complete my degree because no university worth its salt would take me as a student.
Fuck! I was going to kill the bitch.
When I left Professor Archer’s office, I didn’t even bother to go plead my case with the OSCCS. Instead, I had Miles drive me to New York. Besides going to find Aoife and grovel my ass off, I needed to talk to my brothers about what was about to happen.
New York was a shit show.
Aoife was gone.
Her father was furious and ready to put me in the ground until he realized I was panicked because I had no clue where she was.
My father thought it was hilarious and there wasn’t a fucking thing my brothers could do to help me with the mess I was in at school.
I ended up having to hire a digital forensic investigator, thanks to the loan my brothers gave me, to get proof that my code was tampered with.
By the time they proved what Grace had done, it was too late to salvage my reputation.
Enough harm had already been done. MIT was forced to take action against Grace, but I couldn’t stand to finish my degree with them.
Instead, the minute everything was settled, I marched my ass down to the Army recruiter’s office and signed eight years of my life away.