Scandalized

Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

Yael is already waiting for me when I lug my suitcase out to the loading dock, and for once, I don’t even try to make nice.

With my bag thrown haphazardly in the back, I climb into the passenger seat, click into the seat belt, and wordlessly hunch over my phone to figure out what Eden saw on Twitter, what might have Alec panicking.

Immediately, in Top Trends, I find it and I feel the blood drain from my face.

A shitty British tabloid has posted seven pictures of Alec escorting a woman through the back door of a club, and the post already has thousands of retweets.

In each photo, he has his arm around the woman, but it is clear she can barely walk.

The angle makes it look like he’s dragging her, unwilling and unconscious, into a car parked in the back alley.

A coat has been tossed over her head. She could be anyone.

Fox, CNN, and BBC are all reporting the photos leaked of Alexander Kim escorting an unconscious woman from Jupiter.

And because the location is so obvious—because the club name JUPITER is visible in stark black paint on the service entry just behind him, and because my enormously damning story went up only an hour ago—it was inevitable that internet sleuths would quickly discover Alec and Josef’s history.

The connection is made by Twitter user @AlanJ140389, who dug up and photographed an old King’s College commencement program with a picture of Alec and Josef with their arms jovially hooked around each other’s necks.

Whoever the hooded woman is, Twitter has decided, she’s a victim. Specifically, Alec’s victim.

@rosestachio I am devastated. I loved AK in West Midlands but I am never watching that show again. Look at this pic and read this story. I’m gonna be sick. #AlexanderKim #JosefAnders #JupiterScandal Link to: LA Times, Jupiter Owners Caught on Video in VIP Sex Scandal

@tacomyburrito This is why we can’t have nice things. Literally every man is a predator. Read the LA Times story, too, it’s insane. #AlexanderKim #JupiterScandal.

@4KJules2000 These men are SCUM. #AlexanderKim #JosefAnders #TheTilts #JupiterScandal

My words are being used to bury Alec.

“He was helping Sunny, though,” I say through gritted teeth.

Yael says a simple, “Yes.”

“I don’t understand. Can’t he come forward and say that yes, he was there, but he was helping someone get out of the club?” I scroll through the hashtags #JupiterScandal and #AlexanderKim.

“No one will believe him now unless he gives a name. Of course anyone caught like that would say they had a good reason to be there.”

“Then he could explain that he’s helping his sister out of the club on a night she was drugged.

” I look over at Yael. “It would take two seconds to fix this. We have it all written up; we could just give names. In ten minutes, he could come clean about what happened, explain what this is. He’s the hero, not the villain. ”

I pull out my Batphone and text him, Alec you have to get out in front of this!!

I wait ten seconds while it slowly sends, burning a hole in my phone with my focus. Finally, I hit send on another: Let me help you!

Neither message sends. They turn green, hovering in the void. He’s shut off his Gigi Phone.

Even so, I call, and then call again. I call our room—his room, now, I guess. With a blister forming on my lungs every time I inhale, I wonder if he’ll even sleep there tonight or if he’s already on a plane back to London.

I call his phone again. Each time, it goes straight to voicemail.

I don’t care that Yael is listening to every word, I am frantic; panic eats my oxygen. “Alec,” I say in a final plea to his voicemail. “Call me. Let me help you get in front of this.”

Hanging up, I drop my phone onto the seat and lean my head back, exhaling a quiet “Shit.” Desperate now, I look over at her, willing to grovel. “Can you call him on his regular phone for me?”

Yael finally takes her attention off the road again to glance at me.

Her eyes are beautiful; they’re the same reddish brown as her hair.

“Georgia, he could have controlled the message had you included his account in the piece. In that case, he would have simply come out as the anonymous source and said he was helping a good friend, that of course he wouldn’t be cooperating with the story if he were one of the people committing the crimes.

But we’re behind the momentum now; now it’s about damage control. ”

This speech includes more words than I’ve ever heard Yael use at once, and all I can think to say in response is, “We can still fix this.”

“Perhaps, but Alec wouldn’t possibly give Sunny’s name if in the end no one believes him anyway and it tarnishes them both.”

“Why wouldn’t anyone believe him?”

“Revealing that Sunny was assaulted may be no big deal to the American press but it isn’t like that in the UK.

And I am not sure how the news would be handled elsewhere.

More often than not, the victim is blamed.

Given these circumstances, given how this looks, he won’t force her into that position. ”

“But—”

“He won’t force her into that position,” she repeats, adamant.

“So he would rather be seen as a criminal?”

“Where Sunny is concerned, yes.”

“Can you drop me at the Times? I need to go into the office.”

She nods, changing lanes.

Two fists come around my organs, twisting. “What now?”

“For you? Hope that no one associates you with Alec.”

I clench my jaw, angry and hurt. “I mean what’s next for Alec, but okay.”

Yael glances over, and I sense the slightest softening of her posture next to me.

“For what it’s worth, he’s trying to protect you, too.

You work for the Times. It will look very bad for you if anyone discovers you were staying at the hotel with him.

You’re beautiful and friendly. One makes you noticeable, both make you memorable.

For everyone’s sake, I truly hope no one remembers you. ”

“We cannot use his account,” I say to Billy as soon as I burst into his fourth-floor office.

I feel a hundred pairs of eyes on me and close the door even though everything is glass and there is no such thing as privacy here.

My suitcase falls heavily over where I’ve left it, but I ignore it. “Do not add it.”

My editor lets out a booming “Fuck!” into the air and stands, rounding his desk to stare out his office door in frustrated silence for several aggravated moments. “You can’t talk him out of it? It would clear his name.”

“I can’t even get ahold of him anymore.” I don’t bother hiding the sob, and my knees buckle so that I sit gracelessly onto the couch against one wall. Out of the car, away from Yael, I feel my composure slipping. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve been completely cut off.”

Across the room, Billy goes silent. Long enough for me to count to ten, and I know now he’s noticed my suitcase. “Shit, Georgia. You two?”

“I tried to tell you last night and chickened out.” I cover my face. I’m too devastated to be ashamed. “I’ve known him since I was seven, Billy. We ran into each other in Seattle, and I didn’t know he was involved until after we…”

“Shit. Shit.”

“Billy, it was my call to pull his account—he didn’t know,” I admit, keeping my voice as steady as possible.

“I was trying to protect him and also not rely on information I obtained from someone I was sleeping with. And now that he’s being ripped to shreds online, his team worries that if he comes forward, it looks like he’s just covering his ass unless he gives a name, and he doesn’t want to come out and say that Sunny was drugged and assaulted. ”

Billy’s seething anger ripples across the distance separating us. “You’re telling me you decided to cut this? Without my input, and without asking your source?”

God, this is such a mess. I swallow a sob because Billy doesn’t want to see me cry right now. “Yes, I did.”

“This story is too big, and you are too green to make that call.” The disappointment in Billy’s voice is gutting. “Your relationship to a primary source in a story like this is the kind of stuff you disclose to me, George. I can help you if you tell me—I can’t help you if you don’t.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Billy moves back around his desk, falling into his chair and gripping his forehead.

“He’s not a creep,” I say. I feel sick. My insides swim.

“Doesn’t matter if you and I are the only ones who know it. It doesn’t look good.”

“He went in there to get his sister out.” Urgency, panic, heartache: they all swarm like angry bees in my chest. “You know this.”

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t have it on the record!” Billy slaps a flattened palm to his desk. “His association with Anders is bad. It’s all bad, George. He’s really gonna take the hit?”

I nod, staring down at my hands. “Looks like it.”

“This is fucking wild, man. Eventually he’ll be cleared, but who knows what it does to his career in the meantime?”

“I know. I feel helpless.” More than helpless, I feel like I want to climb out of my own skin.

I want to go back to last night and talk this through with Billy.

I want to go back to early this morning at the Waldorf Astoria and yank Alec into my arms. I can’t imagine what he’s going through right now, and I can’t be with him while he goes through it.

I can’t even apologize, because he’s not taking my calls.

You’re going to make me love you, aren’t you?

I’m sure going to try.

Oh my God. A sob tears up my throat as I struggle to hold it down. I want to eat my own fist and punch down the pain.

“It looks bad,” he says again. It’s sinking in for Billy. I can hear his conviction gathering steam. “You’re going to have to stay the hell away from him.”

“I know.” I bite my lips until I’m sure I can get the next words out without crying. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

It’s mayhem at the office; everyone wants to congratulate me.

No one understands the gravity of what’s happening with Alec; for all they know—and because he won’t come forward—he’s just another trash-can human being rightfully dragged for his sins.

It’s painful battling my way from Billy’s office, through the sea of cubicles, and back out to the street to catch a Lyft.

Nearly everyone who comes up to me to say something nice, to congratulate me, to pass along their praise is my senior in some way.

I’m still considered the scrappy new kid.

Some of these people are writers I’ve admired for years.

I can only hope that every single one reads my watery eyes and warbling voice as the good kind of overwhelmed exhaustion.

For the first twenty minutes after I get home, I have no idea what to do with myself.

I want to leave my body through sleep but am not tired.

I want to eat away this hollow ache in my gut but even the thought of food makes me nauseated.

I want to distract myself with work, but I have nothing to write.

Alec still hasn’t read my texts. The pictures have now spread past social media and are on the news—shared with my headline.

I barely move. I stare up at my ceiling, at the fan that goes around and around and around, wishing for nothing more than the distance of time.

I remember this feeling after Spence—the helpless, skin-clawing crawl of time passing after heartbreak.

Wanting to skip all the pain and anguish.

And on top of it, there is guilt this time, knowing that a choice I made without asking has complicated things for Alec.

I snatched an easy explanation right out of his hands.

And all I can do is sit in the pain, breathing through it.

Remembering the sound of his voice and the weight of his hands, the heat of him in the bath last night and his lazy, slippery kisses.

I can only let this hurt and anger and sadness pass through me.

I know I didn’t imagine what happened between us, and I’m worried this is it for us. I’m worried about him.

I wonder whether he’ll get written out of the show, whether the network will back him up, whether there is some other way to clear his name that doesn’t involve Sunny.

I wonder all of these things for him in a flurry, hoping that he can make it out the other side all the while knowing that if the media is unkind, the internet is a mass of bloodthirsty savages.

Every minute that passes without Alec fixing this is a year off his life as an actor.

I’m in the middle of a mental tornado when Eden walks into my room. “I thought you were at work.”

“I was,” she says. “I came home.” Dark circles carve shadows beneath her eyes; she looks like she is about to fall over. She looks worse than I feel. “Have you seen Twitter?”

“I saw his pics, yeah. It’s not what it looks like.”

She shakes her head and hands me her phone, and I don’t even feel satisfied to have been right that we were not anonymous on the beach.

That the stupid-hat-and-sunglasses trick did not hide our identities when we went out for doughnuts.

And that no matter how many times Alec looked over my shoulder at the bar in Seattle, he still missed the cell phone pointed right at us.