Before #2
But then I met eyes with him. Standing alone. Leaning back against the wall, chin slightly lifted. Staring at me like he’d just spied a miracle.
Immediately I felt special, precious. Singled out. He was hot, too, sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes. A halo of certainty that felt like magic even from all the way across the room.
“You look lost,” he said in my ear sometime later. I was standing at the bar fearful someone—like maybe Noah’s parents—would boot underage me for ordering a drink.
When I turned and our eyes met, I had to grip the edge of the bar to keep upright. I’d been cursing myself for the past hour for losing sight of him.
“Oh, no.” I laughed nervously. “Just trying to…” And then I gestured at the bar as if I’d never ordered a drink for myself. At my age, this wasn’t far from the truth.
He smiled with half his mouth. And I felt for a perfect, endless moment like I was the only person at the party. The only person in the world.
“The lady will have a glass of white wine,” he said to the bartender—which seemed wildly sophisticated at the time rather than cheesy—then turned back to me. “And I’ll have a whiskey.”
Back at the police station, a pretty, petite brunette in a well-fitting uniform finally walks into the waiting room. She brushes her short hair out of her huge dark eyes. Looking at her, I feel confident she will understand what it is like to be stalked. “Ms. Callahan!” she calls, looking around.
“Yes, hi, thanks, um, that’s me,” I stutter, waving weakly.
—
She leads the way to her desk, motioning brusquely for me to sit in the chair alongside it. She doesn’t seem like a woman who likes her time wasted.
“What can I help you with?” She reaches for a pen and flips open a pad. “The one-two-four room said this is some kind of harassment?”
I nod as my cheeks flush. Shame. I still feel that, don’t I? Ashamed about being here or for what happened all those years ago, I’m not sure. “Someone is harassing me.”
“Uh-huh.” She takes notes but seems unimpressed. Fair enough. People are getting stabbed and shot and assaulted in New York City even as we speak. “How?”
“How?”
“They showing up at your place of work, your home? They threatening physical violence?”
“Oh, well, no. He, um, sent a text. The threat is implied.” I pause. This sounds silly now, ridiculous, even. I dig out my phone. “You can look at the messages if you want.”
She takes my phone, frowning as she scrolls through the messages. Taps on the photo.
“This picture?”
“He’s married. We haven’t— Anyway, it seems like this person is threatening to say that we’re having an affair.”
“Uh-huh.” She looks unmoved.
“Harassment is a crime, right? Stalking? He’s following me. Sending texts.”
“Listen, I hear you, I do. If it continues and he escalates, it could even be blackmail.” Her tone is sympathetic, if tired.
“With just this…I’ll write up the report and tell you I’ll look into it.
But—” She gestures to the packed station.
“You can see what we’re dealing with here.
I’m just being real with you. Without imminent danger, could be a while before you hear anything. And by a while, I mean maybe never.”
The one thing I know from all those years ago is that the Senator will stop at nothing to protect his career.
I was scared back then—that was why I signed the agreement, took the money.
I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it.
To avoid facing it. But, God, I’m going to have to tell Richard about the photo.
About the fact that someone is threatening to tell his wife.
That I’ve dragged him and his family into this unseemly mess. It’s just so humiliating.
I look around at the bedraggled crowd—it’s hard to tell the victims from the criminals.
“But what if there is imminent danger?” I ask. And it isn’t until I say it out loud that I realize I’m afraid that there is much more at stake than Richard’s wife seeing the photo.
“What do you mean?”
“I think I know who’s doing it. We have a history.”
I can almost feel his breath hot and wet against my ear like it was that night, the smell of peppermint mingled with cigarettes.
Later I learned he sneaked them only when he was with me, or at least when he was away from her.
And I felt special that he shared this vice with me.
That had, of course, been part of his appeal to begin with—rich, worldly, sophisticated, with a dark side.
He wasn’t actually a senator then. He was just an associate working with Noah’s dad, but he would be one within five years.
It had, for a brief moment, felt like he could be my ticket to a whole new life.
We weren’t even together that many more times—maybe a half dozen after that first night, over as many months—before she found out. She’d probably been on the lookout. Surely I hadn’t been the only one. I understood that now. But back then? I’d been so young.
“Okay, who is this person?” The brusque policewoman raises her pen over her pad. She is taking this seriously now.
When I look down, I see that my hands have started to tremble.
“He’s…”
But with the NDA I signed, the $450,000 check I cashed, can I even say his name in this context? I was never to utter it to anyone in connection with myself. Or at least that’s what the NYU student lawyer at the free clinic told me was the implication of the agreement.
“Don’t sign this” had been her unequivocal advice. She wasn’t that much older than me, but I got the sense they were meaningful years. “I know he’s offering you a lot of money, but it seems to me from reading this and looking at you and seeing how upset you are that he committed a crime.”
“It’s more complicated than that.” I’d stared down at my lap and away from her searching gaze.
Was it really rape when you went on a date with the guy afterward? Could it ever be dating if he raped you first? I could go around in circles forever. One thing I knew for sure, though: Part of continuing to have sex with him enthusiastically had been about erasing how that first night had felt.
“You were saying?” the officer presses when I don’t pick up where I left off. “He’s…?”
She’s discerned the general contours—it’s the same shape that lies at the bottom of most dark situations between men and women.
Theft and denial. The malleable nature of consent.
A fresh wave of shame warms my cheeks. Not only might I have already violated the agreement by even coming here, but I could easily make things worse.
If he wants me quiet, coming after me so aggressively seems like a weird tactic, but then the Senator did always have an anger problem.
He is resourceful and persistent, too. If he decides I’m a mess that needs to be cleaned up to ensure his election—he’ll see to it that I am.
I stand. “I don’t think I can…”
The officer nods, looks down, considering. I am obviously not the first woman to change her mind. She is quiet for a long moment before flipping her notepad closed. Her face has softened. “Listen, you want my advice?”
“Yes.”
“Hire a lawyer. Have them write a strongly worded letter to this guy. Tell him to back off or you’ll pursue legal action—a restraining order, file a civil complaint, that kind of thing. A lot of people care way more about the idea of public embarrassment than they do about cops anyway.”