Chapter Four
“Iris,” Jemma said, her voice sickly sweet as she approached where Iris was standing with Anya.
Every muscle in Iris’ body felt fixed in place. While her soul wanted to run, to be away from the mess of the situation, her body wasn’t having it. Stand your ground, don’t move, don’t let them see you cry.
She felt like who she was, her entire personality and being that she’d finally dug back out of the hole it had been buried in, was origami, folding back in on itself, hiding as deep inside of her as it could.
And she smiled.
Anya looked like she was about to boil over with rage.
Iris shook her head. “Give us a minute, Anya.”
Confused, Anya’s head whipped in her direction. “What?”
“It’s okay.”
“It is not.”
The smile pasted on Iris’ face came a little easier. “It’s your birthday. Relax, have fun.”
She looked like she had a million things she wanted to say, a million ways she wanted to call out what Jemma had done to her birthday—and the collapsing part of Iris couldn’t blame her, couldn’t argue—but this wasn’t the moment or the place. This was about survival.
Jemma’s smug little shrug aggravated Iris. Intended as a dismissal of Anya—or perhaps not. Maybe Jemma really was just happy and failing to see the shitstorm she was bringing down on them all. Iris wasn’t giving her too much grace.
“Natasha is the person you’re dating,” Iris said, the words harder than they should have been to get out.
Jemma’s smile became impossibly wide, the barest hint of apology lingering around the edges. “You know what they say about lesbians.”
“You’re not a lesbian,” Iris said flatly. It wasn’t even close to being the point. She knew exactly what Jemma was getting at.
“Okay, fine, sapphics. You know what they say about us all—dating your ex’s ex and they’re still besties and will be the officiant at your wedding…”
“If this is you telling me you’re engaged—”
She laughed. “Not yet.”
Breathing was so sharp, so painfully cutting. “Jemma.”
She sighed heavily. “Look, Iris, I get it.”
“Clearly, you don’t.”
“I fell in love with your ex. It’s hard for you, you’re still single, she’s back as part of our group. But it doesn’t need to be a big deal.”
If Anya’s anger was red hot, Iris’ was ice cold. She narrowed her eyes, seeing nothing in the room but Jemma—someone she’d thought was a friend. “I’m not jealous she’s dating and I’m not. For fuck’s sake. You were there. You know what happened, what she did to me—”
“Oh, that,” Jemma said, raising her hands in Natasha’s defense.
“She knows she was wrong. She’s done a lot of work on herself.
Yes, it might have been a bad thing, but she’s not the same person.
Everyone makes mistakes, right? That doesn’t mean we should hold it against them forever. And she’s really nice to me.”
There it was. Resurfacing along with Natasha. The thing that had plagued Iris every day of their relationship.
Natasha was so nice to everyone else, so popular, so loved, so gentle. Nobody was ever going to believe Iris. They’d tell her she’d misunderstood, brought it on herself, been equally at fault.
Even when she’d finally gotten away, she’d struggled to explain it to people. She’d felt the need to agree that Natasha was a good person.
She was hit with the fact that she thought she’d told her friends enough, thought she’d made it clear what had happened, but she’d never…
shown them, she’d never gone into every dark detail.
Because why did she need to? How would she even do that?
They’d never have truly believed Natasha could do that.
Jemma knew she’d hurt Iris, even if she didn’t know all the intimate details, and that wasn’t enough. Because Natasha was a good person, respected, she was owning her mistakes and improving herself.
As if that was enough after she’d carved out everything Iris had ever been, after what she’d done—but did Iris even get to be so upset if she could barely name what happened to herself?
When she let it in, everything hurt, everything ached, and she felt like she was drowning, losing herself again.
And Natasha didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
She probably didn’t even remember half of the stuff she’d done, not if she’d date Jemma and tell her she’d done a bad thing and was healing from it.
A. Bad. Thing. As in one?
Did they all think it was one time? One thing? Did Natasha?
Had Iris really done such a good job trying to protect Natasha that she’d allowed it to sound like one time, one thing? And she’d walked away after the first time?
She’d always wanted to be someone who walked after the first time. That was who you were supposed to be. Everyone said it. The first time they hit you, you walk.
But how many people actually managed that? And what if it looked a little… different? What if, the first time, it wasn’t a clear-cut hit? What if they’d already carved out who you were and you knew nobody would believe you? That you had nowhere to go?
Iris didn’t want to deal with any of that—any of being in the same room with Natasha again, or of her dating Jemma.
Could she leave? But it was Anya’s birthday.
If she left, it would cause drama and strife, and other people would write a narrative she had no control over.
One led by Natasha. And she’d told Iris more than enough times just how much people would believe her, not Iris.
She was charismatic, charming, skilled at… deception, probably.
No. Iris had to stay. She had to make nice. She’d kept it all inside before. She could do the same thing now, and she’d figure out what to do when it wasn’t her best friend’s birthday and she wasn’t panicking.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Natasha said, wrapping her arms around Jemma’s waist.
Iris’ entire body was covered in unpleasant goosebumps, as if she hadn’t stepped in from the cold at all. That voice made her feel small, scared. It could be so honeyed, even when she was doing terrible things.
Jemma giggled and melted back into Natasha, and there was genuinely not an ounce of jealousy in Iris. She was terrified for her friend, even through her betrayal.
“How are we doing over here?” Natasha asked, finally looking up at Iris. She laughed. “Iris, fancy running into you here.”
At my best friend’s birthday party? That wasn’t unexpected at all.
Neither was the fact that Iris couldn’t say that out loud.
She’d tried so hard, done so much therapy, but, at the end of the day, she was right back here.
On instinct, she smiled again. She hated smiling. Her shoulders pulled in, her hands clasped in front of her body and she tried not to think about how it put her wrists closer to Natasha. The woman wasn’t going to do anything to her. Not in public. That had always been her line.
“Good to see you.” The words were out without Iris being able to process them. When she did, her eyes and her throat burned. It wasn’t good to see her. She’d wanted to spend every minute of the rest of her life never seeing Natasha Wrigley again.
Natasha smiled like she could see straight through Iris, and Iris’ eyes snapped back to Jemma. She didn’t feel safe right now either, but she was safer than Natasha.
Jemma took the look as a conversational cue, shimmying a little with Natasha. “Isn’t it so great for all of us to be together again? It’s been too long.”
Not nearly long enough.
Natasha laughed. “It really has. How’s life, Iris? How’s work? I saw your company did some work over in Battery Park City recently. It was gorgeous.”
Iris thought she might throw up. Why was Natasha keeping tabs on what she was doing?
“Isn’t it so sweet that you two broke up but Tash’s still out here cheering you on?” Jemma gushed, looking back at Natasha in awe.
Was there something wrong with Iris that it didn’t feel sweet? It felt suffocating.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
What else was there to say? She didn’t want to have a conversation with Natasha. She didn’t want to tell her things about her life or her work. She wanted Natasha to know nothing about her or what she was doing.
That seemed impossible when she was dating one of Iris’ friends.
Was this how she did it? Was Natasha finally going to cost Iris her friends after all? The alternative was hanging around the two of them, and that was not an option.
Em called to them, but Iris couldn’t even take in what was being said. The room was spinning, her legs giving out. She’d never passed out before, and she refused to do so in front of Natasha, but she was pretty sure the beginning of it must feel like this.
A warm hand pressed into her back as a wave of black stepped into her line of vision, and Iris looked up into familiar amber eyes right as Barrett said, “Hello, princess.”
It didn’t make sense. There was no way Barrett was there, but why would she be the person Iris magicked up? There was not one single way Barrett Campbell could make the current situation better. If anything, she’d only make things worse.
“Princess?” Natasha’s voice asked, and that was the final straw.
“I can’t do this,” Iris muttered, only loud enough for Barrett, and she yanked herself away, desperate for an exit.
As she tried to remember which direction it was in—ridiculous, really, given that the bar wasn’t big enough to get lost in—she heard Anya call her name and Barrett insist, without any space for argument, that she had it.
And maybe Barrett following her was the best case scenario. She could feign sickness or something. Barrett didn’t know what was going on. She hadn’t heard the details, known the story. She hadn’t taken up with Iris’ ex, and she probably couldn’t have cared less to hear the story of the whole thing.
So, Iris let her follow, not looking back, thinking only of escape. And she didn’t stop until she hit the freezing night and her breathing had a reason to feel so painful.