Held A New Adult Romance(44)

"No!"

"Why?" she said. "Someone's gonna. May as well be me."

I could hear raised voices above his - "Some of us have to work tomorrow, asshole!" - and knew she was right, but deep down I knew this was my fault. I should never have let him think he had a second chance.

He did a whole bunch of stupid shit after that. He called me constantly, sent me flowers, wrote me long love letters whose tone turned threatening when I didn't answer them. "What's your problem, Amber? You think yours is the only cunt in the world?"

"Call the cops," Everglade said, time and time again. "If you don't, I will."

"And then what?" I said. "They'll know it was my fault. I slept with him, didn't I? That night after he got out of the hospital."

"They're not gonna blame you for that," she said. "Seriously - fucking lawyer up already. This is starting to give me the creeps. He reminds me of that stalker who used to send me letters talking about how he fucked my mom and was really my Dad."

Justin's next act was a dozen white roses dipped in stage-blood, followed by a sketch of me as Venus, only this time the cherubs were real devils - dripping fangs and cruel claws - and he'd drawn me with my eyes gouged out, my lips sewn shut and my breasts cut off, the skin crudely stapled over the bleeding gashes. Everglade took one look at it and called the police.

Two of them showed up - a man and a woman, him short and white and her tall and black. I was babbling and half out of my mind with fear, but then the male cop said the thing I'd dreaded - "And did you give Mr. Theroux any kind of encouragement?" His partner gave him a look that could strip paint and she later came back to tell me that it wasn't my fault, but the damage had already been done. They'd seen through me. She gave me the number for a rape crisis line and asked me if I had a gun. To this day I don't know if she should have done that or not, but I guess she wasn't talking to me as a cop - this was just woman-to-woman.

They told me to get a restraining order, but the thought of the thing getting bigger and official scared the shit out of me. I didn't want my Dad to find out. He was mad enough at me for Vegas - how mad would he be if he knew I'd slept with Justin again?

And then there was Justin. Even when I terrorized me I felt sorry for him. I knew he was hurt. I imagined he was buckling under the weight of his own talent. "You don't understand," I'd say. "His mother rejected him. He has abandonment issues."

"Babycakes, I don't care if his father was Darth fucking Vader," said Everglade. "Or if his mother sucked every dick in the Delta while cramming live hedgehogs up her snatch - nobody gets to behave like that. Nobody."

I went out less frequently. I knew from Everglade that Justin was sleeping around again, and I guessed he'd be pouring poison into various ears about what a bitch I was. One of the last times I went out in San Diego was to a bar a few doors down from where I met him. It was crowded and I felt everyone was whispering about me, and I wound up on my knees on the sidewalk, gasping for breath. Everyone thought I was fucked up and someone called an ambulance, so that I had to fend off a bunch of paramedics who wanted to know how much I'd drank and what I'd taken. I was actually stone cold sober and it was only after this one girl paramedic (she looked about fourteen) correctly diagnosed me with a panic attack that they agreed not to take me to the hospital.

My grades were in the toilet. Justin kept calling me day and night - sometimes tender, other times vicious. I was starting to get scared of my own shadow, and even Everglade was beginning to lose patience with me. When my Dad came down to see me he was convinced I had an eating disorder and wanted to take me back to L.A., but I was in too much of a mess. I was in this tangle of worry and fear and self-blame and there was no yanking me out of it.

"I don't get it," said Everglade. "Why can't you go back? All you're doing here is sitting around flunking anyway. One more semester like the last and they'll kick you out."

I shook my head. All I knew is I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to go back to being John Gillespie's daughter. People would look at me, take pictures of me, gossip about me.

"Amber, this is fucking stupid," she said. "What do you think is going to happen?"

"What if he kills himself?" I said.

"Um...like, I dunno?" said Everglade, doing the Valley Girl voice she often did when she was being sarcastic. "If he kills himself he'll be, like, dead? I guess?" She sighed. "You are not responsible for his fucking damage," she said, in her normal voice. "How many times do I have to explain this to you? It's not your fault when he punches a wall and breaks his knuckles - you didn't do that to him. He did that to him. Just like it's not your fault that he sends you serial killer doodles from the twisted depths of his asshole mind."