Chapter Eight #2
He thinks on this for a few quiet moments, and the water laps up over his chin, touching his lips.
He slips beneath the surface of the water, emerging after a moment and swiping the glimmering droplets out of his eyes.
“Honestly, I think I was more worried than mad. I’d known him to be a mostly decent person, but he’d had a lot of girlfriends over the years, and he knew that I wouldn’t want for my sister to get wrapped up in someone who might not be careful with his lovers’ feelings. ”
“I get that.”
“But whatever, she was an adult,” he says.
“Wasn’t really up to me, yeah?” Alec squints behind me, to the waves crashing on the beach.
“You probably know that Josef was in a band, the Tilts, that had a hit song before they dissolved.” He trails his fingers in the water and we float in tight silence for a minute, bobbing gently in the ocean.
Alec continues to draw shapes in the water, and I wonder if he’s spelling something out.
Somehow, even being an actor, he seems like the kind of person who first writes longhand what he wants to say in difficult moments like this.
“But he was the primary songwriter, and ‘Turn It Up’ is still played at nearly every major sporting event in the UK. It’s made him a good deal of money, and Josef invested very well. He channeled some of this income into Jupiter.”
It’s information I already have, but it still feels like a gut punch. “Right.”
He looks at me and reaches forward to absently stroke a hand along the goose bumps erupting on my arm. “When it really grew in popularity, he was there all the time.”
My stomach has burned away by now. I want to hear this—morbid curiosity and professional investment keep me riveted—but I also want Alec to rush through it just to be done, just to wipe the expression of bleak dread from his face.
“He and Sunny were together maybe a year and a bit before she ended things, and most of it was during the building and launch of Jupiter. There’s a lot Sunny won’t tell me, especially now.
But I think the split had to do with how much time he was devoting to the club.
That said, I got the sense that he didn’t want things to end with her. We all noticed that he was distraught.”
He adjusts his position on the float and angles his face up to the sky. I stare at his profile, at the carved hollow of his cheekbones contrasted with the plush fullness of his mouth. I feel his face imprinting in my brain.
“Around four months ago, Sunny got her first real blockbuster modeling contract—with Dior,” he says.
“It seemed like she went from scraping to book every runway she could to being an absolute supermodel. She was in tube stations and billboards and in magazines. It’s been a huge deal.
” For a moment his expression softens, and he looks over at me, grinning. “It’s really cool.”
“I bet,” I say. “That’s huge.”
“Yeah.” Alec moves again, restlessly slinging his arms over the floating pool noodle, leaning his chin on it.
“Even though she’d broken things off, she still considered him a family friend, you know.
” He swallows and then swallows again, clenching his jaw.
Turning his eyes up to me, he says quietly, “This is really off the record?”
“Entirely.” I force my voice past the lump in my throat. “I promise.”
He looks back down at the water. “A couple months ago, another one of my mates from this group, Lukas, was staying with me. He’d moved to Berlin, but while he was in town, he wanted to check out Jupiter to see what Josef was up to.
I didn’t much feel like going, but he and a couple of our friends went.
A couple hours later, Lukas calls and tells me that Sunny had come in, but he hadn’t seen her in a couple hours, and when he had seen her, she looked already pretty drunk.
He thought I might want to come get her. ”
I feel like I’ve been punched. “No.”
“Sunny doesn’t drink much because she can’t handle liquor very well.” He goes quiet for a long minute, and I reach over, setting my hand on his back and rubbing lightly.
“We can do this later.”
“No. This is good. I need to do it.” He wipes a hand over his mouth, and the rest comes out robotically.
“At first, I wasn’t worried. Like I said, it would be strange for her to drink a lot, but again—she was doing really well professionally.
Maybe she just wanted to celebrate with Josef—they were still friends, after all.
I went down there anyway, to check on her.
Called Josef. No answer. Called Sunny. Her phone was turned off, so I couldn’t even locate her.
” He rubs his face again. “I called Lukas, who came to find me, and together we started searching all of the VIP rooms.”
I exhale a quiet “Oh shit.”
“Yeah. We found her. It was a huge party, but it was like my eyes just immediately zeroed in on Sunny passed out on a couch. She was—” He cuts off, shaking his head.
“Everyone scattered like roaches when I walked in. I picked her up, found her clothes. Took her to the restroom. She was completely unconscious. I put her…” He swallows, squinting unseeing into the surf, unable to finish the sentence, but I understand that he’s telling me he had to help get her clothes back on.
“And I splashed water on her face. We sat there for a long time. I don’t know how long, but people knocked on the door.
I turned off my phone. I just talked to her.
Told her she was safe and had to wake up.
Finally, she woke up enough to walk, but barely.
I put my coat over her, walked her out a back entrance, and took her to hospital. ”
Again he goes quiet, jaw working.
“She didn’t remember anything about the night. I’m thankful for that, but unless there is video footage, we may never know exactly what happened. Do I even wish for that?” He passes a shaking hand down his face. “She had an exam, of course,” he says. He pauses for a pained beat, and then nods.
This feels like another punch to my solar plexus. “Alec, oh my God.”
I understand why he wanted to do this out here, where he can say it out loud and let it be swallowed by the ocean.
“She was really sick the whole next day,” he says.
“They found a cocktail of things in her system—certainly nothing she could have ordered at the bar. Josef called in the morning.” Alec looks at me, and the hollow pain in his eyes is gutting.
“He was so worried. Said he didn’t know where Sunny had disappeared to.
Naively, I told him what I’d seen in that room, and he was shocked. He was really quite convincing.”
I feel sick.
“To be honest, I wasn’t able to process anything or anyone else once I saw Sunny on that couch. It never occurred to me that he’d seen her in that state. Because if he had, of course he would have helped her, right? His ex? My sister?”
“Alec…”
Alec shakes his head and blinks past me.
“Later that day Lukas called me to check in. Needed to talk it out—he was traumatized by it all, too. When I told him about my conversation with Josef, he was furious. He said, ‘Alec, mate, Josef was right there. He bolted the second you walked in.’ He’d been there, Gigi. ”
I knew it was coming. I knew it. But it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. “So, when Josef called you, he was trying to find out what you’d seen? What Sunny knew?”
“That’s my assumption, yes.”
We let this horrible truth dissolve between us. “Does Sunny want them to bring charges?”
Alec shakes his head. “It’s been two months. But because she doesn’t remember, because she doesn’t want to be dragged through the tabloids, because she’s justifiably worried about how this would affect her public reputation, and because she went there willingly—she’s very hesitant.”
“I bet you want to kick his ass.”
He laughs once, a sharp sound. “You have no idea.” There is violence in those words; the sounds scrape out from between his teeth.
He turns his face away and pulls in a deep, steadying breath.
“What kind of a monster can do this—at the minimum witness what happened to Sunny and very likely be the one behind it—and call me the next day playing innocent like that? I felt so incredibly stupid.”
“You gave your friend the benefit of the doubt. That’s not stupid. That’s what good people do.”
“I suppose.”
“No one from the club has said anything to authorities about him?”
He shakes his head. “Gigi, there are probably a hundred people who’ve seen women come in and leave drugged every week who don’t say anything.”
It’s the one thing I haven’t been able to figure out—how this could be happening at the club on such a scale without someone getting caught.
“I’ve felt hopeless. Not wanting to push Sunny to come forward but worrying that this story will continually get buried if she doesn’t.
I felt rather cynical about it all until I heard the fire in your voice at the hotel the other night.
” Alec catches my gaze and holds it. “I assume you know where I’m going with this: the only thing I need you to do on the record is to keep pushing, keep looking into Josef Anders’s activity. ”
My heart breaks for him. “I promise I will.”
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, he tries to smile. “That’s all I know.”
“That’s a lot.” I reach forward, carefully sweeping his hair off his forehead. “You okay?”
Alec leans into my hand. “I won’t pretend that this hasn’t been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“Worrying about her, knowing what happened to her that night—all I want is to support her the way she needs. Are there videos out there? Who else was in the room? I’m glad she doesn’t remember what happened, but I also wonder if eventually she will.”
I gnaw my lip while I decide whether or not to tell him this next bit. Not because it’s a secret—it’ll be out in my story tomorrow anyway—but because I know it will hit him hard.
Alec reads it in my face. “Just say it.”
“Okay, well, one of the women who apparently was captured on video was approached with a financial offer to settle, and before that, she didn’t even know she’d been assaulted.
” I wait while he processes this, eyes squeezed closed.
“So even though the police confiscated all of the video footage from the club, someone on the inside is feeding information to these guys. Even if charges are eventually brought, the perpetrators are getting their hands on all the evidence first.”
“Shit.” He blows out a breath into the water. “So there probably is video out there with Sunny in it?”
“I honestly don’t know. But it’s possible.”
“These past several weeks I’ve worried about everything,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons I left a few days later on the trip than the rest of the cast. I wasn’t even sure I could leave her right now.”
“Is someone with her?” I ask.
“She’s with our parents, yes.”
“How is she doing?”
He tilts his head from side to side. “She’s okay. Obviously, she knows that I’m talking about it, off the record. That’s a huge step for her, letting me do this.”
Watching him struggle with all of this, I dog-paddle closer so that I can come right up against him. “I’m so sorry.”
He nods, adjusting the noodles so that he can pull me into his arms. Alec presses his face to my neck, and even when my legs wrap around his waist, it isn’t sexual. We hug, floating aimlessly in silence.
But then his lips move against my neck as he speaks. “Thank you for listening to all of that. I’m so glad we haven’t been eaten by sharks.”
I laugh. “Thank you for planting that thought in my head, but really, thank you for sharing this story with me. I hurt for you and Sunny.”
“I haven’t talked to anyone about it yet.”
I pull back to look at him. “No one?”
He shakes his head.
“Honey,” I say, cupping his face, “you can’t take this on by yourself.”
Alec pauses, and then a grin slowly breaks over his expression.
“What?” I ask.
“You called me ‘honey.’ ”
“I call everyone ‘honey,’ ” I lie.
He frowns, skeptical. “You absolutely don’t strike me as the kind of person to call everyone ‘honey.’ ”
I kiss his chin. “Well, don’t read too much into it. Remember, two weeks only.”
Lifting his hand, he presses it to my neck, threading his fingers into my hair. Against the sun-warmed skin of my cheek, his palm is cool. He leans forward, salty and wet, and brings his mouth to mine.
Minutes later—many, many minutes later—when we are wrinkled from water and tight with need, we swim back to shore and fall asleep on our towels under the umbrella, beneath the bright, clear blue sky, scores of miles away from stress or responsibility or the eyes of anybody who might want to find us.