Ainsley #3
“I tried to have the story retracted. I begged my editor to pull it even though it had been out for over six months by then. I said I’d own the fuckup.
But he had substantiated the story and it was true at the time, so there was nothing we could do.
The company I wrote the exposé about had quickly collapsed after it ran and Donner Investments bought them out at bottom dollar, which was the whole point in Archer giving me the information to begin with.
I cost a lot of good people their livelihoods because my ambition blinded me.
Everything happened so fast after that. I outed myself to NYU for using falsified information in a story, which cost me my scholarship.
I had to drop out of my grad program without a way to pay for my classes.
I needed to break up with Archer, but I had nowhere to go and felt so alone, and honestly, I was afraid of what he’d do.
I begged an old friend to let me stay with her for a while just so I could leave him.
Archer didn’t take it well when I told him my reasons.
It was nasty. He punched holes in the walls next to my face as I packed my stuff up, pushed me onto the bed when I tried to move past him, broke glasses as I was trying to leave, so I had to walk through the shards, and he probably would have done worse because he had his hands on me, shaking me when my friend arrived to help me leave and buzzed the intercom.
That finally made him stop. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to see him as less than perfectly in control and the greatest.”
I stop and take a quick, trembling breath as I sink through the deepest, darkest memories of my adult life.
I feel like a wreck, the same mess of a woman I was when Archer was raging at me as I tried to leave.
I hear his taunts, his screams, feel the terror, not knowing if I’d make it out alive. All because I’d made the wrong choices.
“Was that the end of things, or is there more?”
Payton is rubbing comforting circles on my back, his voice soft as his caress, but I know he’s angry.
I can tell by the set of his shoulders and the way his jaw ticks while I talk.
He’s being so calm, for me, knowing I need this more than him raging against the treatment I received.
It softens my heart even more toward this stupid man who just wants to comfort me and make me smile for some reason.
He’s been so good to me when he’s had absolutely no reason to, and now he’s proving once again that he knows exactly what I need without me even asking.
It gives me the strength to continue the story.
“He was pissed at me and embarrassed that he’d ever be the one dumped, especially by a nobody like me.
He hacked into the NYU newspaper server and ran a story that was supposedly by me about the false information incident that wasn’t very flattering.
Of course my editor retracted it the next day when he realized what had happened, but once something’s on the internet, you can’t pull it back completely and Archer ensured there are still sites where it lives on, so it’s haunted me ever since.
I can’t exactly get a job at a big-name paper with an unfinished master's degree and unflattering stories that pop up when you do a deep dive while researching my name. Archer made sure of it.”
I roll my lip between my teeth and the sting of tears pricks the backs of my eyes and chokes me again. I had everything I wanted right in front of me. It was so close. Then it was snatched away because I made the wrong choice. I blink and a tear tracks down my cheek.
Payton swipes it away with his thumb and tilts my face up, making me meet his eyes.
“You’re right about one thing. Archer and his father used you.
They manipulated you. You wrote the story you did on the information provided.
You did your duty vetting the information.
It was substantiated, so you ran with it.
There’s nothing you could have done differently at the time. ”
I shake my head at him, having gone down this route so many times in the last two and a half years.
“I could’ve refused to take the information from my boyfriend at the time because he was a bad source.
I could’ve stood on the principle that I was too close to the story, knowing the company was one Donner Investments had an interest in had I only looked a little deeper.
Instead, I saw an easy story handed to me and I ran with it.
Not only that, I fucking thrived under the attention and success it brought me after.
I was so stupid to think I could have a win like that and not have to sell my soul for it.
Now I know life doesn't work like that. There are no such things as handouts, favors, or free rides. Life will always expect its fair share for every scrap of luck I receive, and I know I’ll have to pay for every bit of good that comes my way. ”