4. Noa
four
Three Months Later
The pool house is too cheerful.
Fresh flowers on the coffee table. Lemon cleaner in the air. Sunlight bouncing off pale walls. Polished floors. White bedding, Everything bright enough to make my skin itch.
I drop my duffel by the couch and stand in the doorway, key still in hand.
Home.
Technically.
Last time I moved in, my parents warned if I didn’t get my shit together, there would be consequences. The Calder name carries weight, after all.
Shamefully, a few months later they caught me high as a kite, wearing an unzipped red dress and no underwear, climbing out of an Uber at six in the morning with mascara smeared down both cheeks.
I didn’t know about the driveway camera.
By sundown, I was in Yakima, checked into Sundown Recovery Center, my body still buzzing from every bad decision I’d made the night before.
Today, I’m three months sober. I should feel hopeful.
Instead, I’m terrified.
I unzip my duffel and pull out the notebook from the side pocket. Blue cover. Bent spiral. Coffee stain near the top from the morning I threw it across the room during week two of rehab because Roberta, my counselor, kept telling me to write instead of deflect.
An entire lifetime of ugly sits between these covers.
The first few entries are hard to read. Detox handwriting. Slanted. Angry. Half sentences breaking off in places where my brain quit cooperating.
Lake Lyon is all over those pages.
His green eyes. How his guitar spoke to my soul.
The way he smelled. His tongue on my pussy.
His big, beautiful cock. He gave me the kind of transcendent fucking I remember in flashes sharp enough to cut through the drug-induced fog.
The ride home with dried come all over my body.
Sobbing in the shower when I realized how badly I’d fucked up.
Beyond those pieces, most of the night is gone. A cloud of MDMA swallowed the details.
Story of my life.
I flip past Lake because I can’t deal. Not today. My mind already has enough to carry.
The next section begins with boarding school and where everything went wrong.
Fifteen-year-old me and Asher Whittaker.
I almost laugh when I see his name in my handwriting. Not because it’s funny. Mostly, because I dedicated many pages to the bastard and he probably hasn’t thought about me in years.
It was my freshman year. Asher was a senior. Good-looking, rich, athletic, polite in front of adults. The exact boy mothers hope their daughters bring home. When he asked me out, I thought I’d been chosen.
Instead of dinner or a movie, he took me to the rowing boathouse with a flask of his father’s bourbon.
I can still smell the dust. Old wood. Lake water. Liquor on his breath when he gave me my first kiss and told me how special I was. Moonlight seeped through the high windows in pale stripes when he shoved himself inside me. It hurt, but I made myself focus on what I thought would happen after.
He’d be my boyfriend. We’d hold hands in the hallway. I’d be popular. The shy girl would have friends by proxy. A little pain was worth it.
Instead, on Monday, the entire school received a video via text. Asher fucking me. Our heads were cropped out but we were naked and you could see and hear everything. Including him grunting my name.
Noa.
Noa.
Noa.
By lunch, I was a punchline. Understood no one was coming to help me.
Reporting him would mean saying the words out loud. Telling my parents was too humiliating. Asher’s family had too much clout to be punished. Besides, it was my fault for being so stupid.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I turned the knife around.
If they wanted a slut, fine. I’d give them one.
The next weekend, I drank half a bottle of vodka and let a cute sophomore from the swim team fuck me in the bathroom at the school dance and made sure people heard us. I walked out first and told anyone who’d listen he was a terrible lay before he could spread more rumors.
Control the narrative. My new religion.
I’m a Calder, after all.
The next weekend, I hooked up with someone new. The weekend after, a different boy. I became a hot commodity. Every boy in school wanted to fuck me and get a seal of approval. Somewhere in the wreckage, I discovered something inconvenient.
I loved sex.
Everything about it, especially the power and attention. I could turn a boy stupid with my mouth on his cock or letting him finger my pussy. I used those boys to learn what I liked. By the end of the year, orgasms came easy, hard, and often. All the boys wanted me. Every girl despised me.
Didn’t matter.
Junior year brought college boys and a fake ID. Adderall kept me thin and convinced me I could outrun sleep forever. Xanax handled the crash. Pot, mushrooms or whatever edible somebody had on hand became the norm. Senior year I added coke, psychedelics, and one of my teachers.
My parents saw a 4.3 GPA and a USC acceptance.
They didn’t know any of the rest. I made sure of it.
When I moved to Los Angeles for college, the city opened its mouth and swallowed any remaining self-respect I had left.
Bree and Clarissa found me in a bathroom at a classmate’s Hollywood Hills party where I was reapplying lipstick after sucking off a guy for a bump. We became friends before my mouth stopped tasting like him.
They introduced me to the celebrity circuit. My other identity was born there.
Noa Calder took art history exams in sunlit lecture halls.
Neeley Caldwell spent nights and weekends as a high-priced whore.
Clean health paperwork. Cash upfront. No exceptions.
Older men living in the most expensive zip codes with drivers and security gates coveted young, beautiful arm candy.
At first, they paid enough to make the arrangement feel lucrative rather than dirty.
I didn’t need the money coming from such a privileged upbringing. My parents covered school and gave me a generous monthly allowance for designer outfits and spa treatments. Mainly, I used the earnings for my drug habit, an IUD, and weekly STD panels so I could fuck guys raw.
It paid more.
My double life was a middle finger to everyone who judged me. Especially to the boy who stole my innocence and every classmate who called me a whore. The way I saw it, why not get paid a fortune to fuck? Every time a man handed me money for making me come, it felt like I’d won.
For a while, I believed the lie. Even when things began to escalate.
Bree and I were high on molly the first time a director paid to watch us together.
She rolled onto her back, spread her legs, and put her hand at the back of my neck.
She tasted like coconut sunscreen and salt.
I worked her with my mouth for twenty minutes while rubbing my own clit, both of us shaking when we came.
At some point, the director lifted me by the hips and slammed into me without asking, and laughed when I squirted on his thighs.
Called me a fucking gift.
Under the high, I realized I liked it. Wanted more.
So I found more.
My reputation for being an orgasmic freak who gave mind-blowing head grew, the men got richer and soon I was being flown all over the world. Saint-Barths. Swiss Alps. Tulum. Cannes. A yacht off Mykonos the summer I turned twenty-one.
Six music executives. Me. A bowl of coke on the table and a candy dish full of Viagra.
I didn’t know exactly what I was walking into, but the expectation clarified fast. All six of them.
Mouth. Pussy. Ass. Any combination they wanted.
I’m pretty sure at one point all of them were inside me at once in one way or another.
The weekend became a blur of sweat, come, cameras, chanting, hands gripping me into shapes I didn’t know my body could make.
By Sunday, I was bruised, raw and could barely walk.
On the other hand, I made half a million dollars, and couldn’t stop thinking about how much high-quality coke it would buy me.
Addiction doesn’t always announce itself with misery.
Sometimes it arrives dressed as pleasure.
Ari Greenfeld ended the fantasy. He was forty-eight. Twice divorced. A film producer with a house in Bel-Air and a yacht in Monaco. AKA, Bree’s sugar daddy. He put her up in a penthouse in Beverly Hills and gave her fifty grand a month.
He asked her to bring me to Cannes for the film festival. At first, it was pretty vanilla. He liked to fuck us side by side. Bree on her knees, then me. Bree bent over, then me. I rode his face while he fucked her in the ass. Every combination he could arrange and name, we did.
I didn’t notice the shift of his affection until a few days in. Bree was behind me, cupping my tits while I was riding Ari’s cock, and I pulled out my party trick and squirted all over his chest when I came.
He reached up, cupped my chin, and whispered, “You’re fucking magic. Where have you been all my life?”
The next morning, I woke up handcuffed to the hotel bed. Bree was gone. Ari told me he’d sent her home on his private jet. He was keeping me for the rest of the festival.
I won’t write everything he did to me. The short version is, it wasn’t vanilla.
I survived because I knew how to make him believe I liked it. My body helped. It responded even when it hurt. Especially then. Powerful, humiliating orgasms. The kind evil men call consent if they know the difference.
He flew me home first class when he was done.
Not even a PJ for my misery.
I healed. Mostly. Two weeks later sat for finals and graduated cum laude with my parents in the audience. Moved back to Seattle because the truth of whom I’d become horrified me.
Sadly, my parents actually did know some of it. Not everything.
Enough.
They knew about the drugs and the rich men I hooked up with. Not about Neeley and the fact my “hook ups” were actually sex work.
Stay clean, they told me. Be respectable. You’re a Calder.
I really tried. Lasted a little over a year until I fell off the wagon and into Lake Lyon’s bed.
Was it fate? Bad luck? A relapse?
I don’t know.
What I do believe is the universe is giving me a few more months to figure out whether I have a chance of changing my ways for myself before someone else depends on me to do it for them.
I set the notebook on the bed and place both hands low on my stomach, where the change in my body is barely noticeable.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” My voice sounds small in the bright room. “I’m trying to figure it out, little one. Be patient with me.”
The math points to one man. Telling him isn’t the first step.
Neither is the OB appointment I haven’t scheduled or the meetings I need to keep attending.
First, I have to stop hiding in the wreckage.
There’s no time to waste. I need help.
I stand and leave the pool house through the French doors. Cross the stone path in my socks.
The kitchen door is unlocked. My mother sits at the island in workout clothes, hair twisted up in a clip, peeling a tangerine with careful fingers. She looks up when I open the door, and her face does the thing it has been doing since I returned from college.
Softening. Bracing. Trying not to want too much from me and failing.
I sit on the stool across from her. Place my hands down on the counter. The marble is cold under my palms.
For the past eight years, I’ve given her versions of me. None of them the whole truth.
“Mom.”
She sets the tangerine down.
Waits.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
Here goes nothing.