“Beck?” I heard shuffling. He and Mom were probably already in bed. I could picture him sitting up and putting on his glasses to read the time on his bedside clock. “What’s going on? It’s after midnight. Is everything okay?”
“Umm.” I shook my head before I could say the words. “Actually, no. I’m not okay. I’m kind of…” Shit, there was no easy way to say this. “I’m in jail.”
“What? Jesus, Beckett. What did you do? Drunk driving? Drunken disorderly conduct? I knew you had to be partying nonstop in that fraternity of yours.”
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the wall in front of me. My brain was still spinning from drinking and my bones hurt from Melody’s boyfriend. But all that was minor compared to the ping in my heart, too scared to tell my father the truth.
“Beck? Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “Trust me. I’m not going anywhere.” My laugh was dry and bitter and short lived. “But no. No, I wasn’t arrested for drunk driving.” I could only wish that had been the charge.
“Then…?”
I drew in a breath. This right here would be the test of all tests. After everything my family had been through lately, I’d definitely know where their loyalties lay.
“Beck? What were you arrested for?”
“Rape,” I whispered.
A pause followed before he said, “Excuse me?”
“Dad, you know I didn’t do it. I would never. You know me. I’m your son. This is just one big, fucked up misunderstanding. Her boyfriend showed up, so she freaked and started spouting out these lies, and…”
And holy shit, I’d just admitted to my dad I was a cheater. Fuck, I’d never cheated on a girl before or assisted in a cheating, but now I was in jail and telling my father all about my cheating ways. How was this happening?
I stopped blathering and panted for breath, worried about his response. When he didn’t have one, and ten seconds later he still hadn’t spoken, I winced. “Dad?”
He cleared his throat. “You will be held accountable for your actions, son. May God have mercy on your soul.” Then he had hung up on me.
I stared blankly at the wall as the dial tone echoed through my ear. My own father hadn’t believed me. I mean, he had reason to not believe any guy accused of rape. After what had happened to Britt, sure. But still. I was his fucking son. His flesh and blood. He knew better. He knew me.
Which made me wonder if this was about what he believed at all.
His complete lack of faith, or at least his lack of support, pulverized me. I was still reeling all the way to the courthouse thirty-three hours later. I didn’t know how a judge or anyone else would be able to support me me if my own father refused to.
When they led me before the bench and I looked into the condemning eyes of the lady in black robes, I knew…there would be no mercy for me today. Just from the way she narrowed her eyes, I knew she was a man-hater.
“Beckett Aaron Hilliard, you have been accused of multiple counts of forcible rape.”
“Multiple?” I croaked, not expecting that part. How the hell many times had Melody said I raped her?
Judge Gudrun stared down her nose at me with a stony expression. “In this case, each instance of penetration serves as a count of rape.”
I gulped, feeling doomed. “Oh.” In my mind, I tried to calculate how many times Melody had bounced on my lap. I’d been pretty drunk; it had felt as if it’d taken me forever to come. How many penetrations did that make? Hundreds? Thousands?
Holy shit, I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail.
“How do you plead?” Her honor’s booming voice startled me.
“I, uh, I didn’t rape her?” I asked more than answered.
Her nose wrinkled with distaste, “Your answer is either guilty, non-guilty, or no contest.”
“Oh, sorry. Not guilty then.” I ducked my head, feeling like a moron. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this right now. What kind of idiot bombed his own hearing?
“Then your trial is set to take place on…” She sent the lady sitting in a cubicle next to her a seeking glance, and that woman promptly handed her a sheet of paper, which she glanced at briefly before spitting out a date that left my head as soon as I heard it. “Do you have an attorney or do you need one assigned to you?”
The question came at me so fast I had no idea how to answer. “Uh.” How the hell did I answer? I didn’t have a lawyer, I had no idea how to find one, especially from jail, or how I could afford one. My family likely wasn’t going to help me out. But weren’t court-assigned lawyers the crappy ones? What choice did I have but to go that route?
“I…I… I guess I need one assigned,” I finally said.
Judge Gudrun nodded and made a note on her sheet. “Alright then. Your bail is set for fifty thousand, but I’m going to raise it to seventy-five.”
Seventy-five? Seventy-five thousand dollars? Holy fuck. That was a lot of money. I didn’t have that kind of money. And I already knew no one would be willing to front it for me.
My shoulders slumped low. I was going to be stuck in jail until the trial took place. Oh shit, when had she said that was again? I suddenly felt like hyperventilating.
Before I knew it, the officer who’d escorted me here was telling me to stand, and we were leaving the courthouse.
I sat in the back of the patrol car and stared out the window at freedom all the way back to the jail. Every car we passed, or person I saw walking down the sidewalks, the bicyclists who zipped by, I envied. They had no idea how precious just being able to stand at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, was. All it’d take was one spoiled college girl’s lie to take it all away.
Once we returned to the police station, I wasn’t taken back to my old cell, where I’d been stewing all night and through another day by myself alone, waiting for my Monday morning arraignment. No. The officer opened another door, only for me to peer inside and see dozens of other guys. I scuttled backward, away from them, confused.
“This isn’t where I was before,” I said, my heartrate jacking into my throat with a jarring force.
“I know.” The officer nudged me forward. “That was your classification cell until your hearing. Now…” He spread out a hand, inviting me inside. “You’re in general population.”
I gulped. General population. I wasn’t ready for general population. And I certainly wasn’t ready for the jailer to push me through the doorway with enough force to send me stumbling inside. “Got a new rapist for you guys,” He called just as the door banged shut. “Enjoy.”
I spun around and gaped at him with wide eyes through the door as he grinned demonically and waved his fingers at me. Holy shit, he couldn’t do that. Could he?
My skin buzzed with fear as I spun around to take in the convicts surrounding me who’d just heard I was a rapist.
When one huge, burly guy with a beard and long hair came strolling forward, his eyes narrowed, I froze and held my breath.
“A rapist, huh?” he asked quietly as he cracked his knuckles. I was really coming to hate it when people cracked their knuckles. “I don’t like rapists.”
Yeah, well…I didn’t either. Not that anyone in this room cared or even bothered to learn that. They became a bit too preoccupied with beating the crap out of me.
Chapter 6
BAILEY
I was the biggest coward I knew. That was all.
I woke up Monday morning after seeing the news report about Beckett the night before with every intention of skipping class and going straight to the police department to give them my statement, but…yeah, I couldn’t.
Seriously, how did you confess to complete strangers the most embarrassing thing you’d ever done?
I had no idea, that’s why I didn’t do it.
Instead of driving to the station or even class, I’d found myself at a beauty salon, and the next thing I knew, I was getting my hair dyed a pale blonde and then asking the lady to put some curl
in it. Which was why I suddenly wanted a scarf to cover my head as I entered my apartment that afternoon. Not that my new do looked bad. It was actually kind of cute; totally Bailey approved. It seemed to make the contours of my face seem more cheerfully adorable than the chubby round blob they usually felt like. I should’ve tried curly blonde ages ago.
But it was also a dead-giveaway that something was bothering me.
While some people redecorated or ate or cleaned in times of great distress, I dyed my hair. Like in the tenth grade, for example, Chrissy Jackson called me a fat bitch and got all her friends to call me one too until someone had scratched it into my locker door. And my hair went pitch black with a streak of red. Then, during the summer between my junior and senior year, I lost my virginity—horrid event—so my hair suddenly became an array of brown, black, blonde, red, and mahogany of every shade. Then seven months ago, I learned my mother hadn’t actually died when I was too young to remember her. I’d been seven when she had passed and I’d just been so traumatized by the whole event that I’d pretty much wiped all memory of her from my existence. Learning that doozey had prompted me into dying my hair every freaking color of the rainbow.
The reason why I dyed my hair during these times wasn’t that complicated. I just needed an extreme change to deal with my own overwhelming emotions, because I really couldn’t deal with them at all.
Paige might not be quite so tuned in to the hair-dyeing aspect about me since she hadn’t even known me a year and half yet, but Tess, yeah, Tess would know something was up. Tess had known me my whole damn life. She’d figure it out immediately.
Oh, who the hell was I kidding? All of them already knew something was up. But now I’d just gone and proven them right with blinding pale ringlets of blonde wrapped around my head.
Holding my breath, I tiptoed up the steps where I could already hear the television and murmured voices of more than one of my roommates in the front room, hanging out.
“Holy wow,” Tess was saying, but I hadn’t cleared the landing yet, so I knew she wasn’t talking about my hair.
“What?” Jonah asked her.
“I think this rape thing is going to blow up to be bigger than either the shooting or the theater burning down,” she answered.
Hearing the word rape made me hurry up the steps just in time to see her curled on the couch where she was cozied next to her boyfriend and was shifting the screen of her laptop around to show him what she’d been seeing.
“Just look at all the memes they’ve made already.”
Forgetting my hair, I dashed behind them to peer over their shoulders for a glimpse of the screen myself, and my mouth dropped open as I saw all these pictures of Beckett with messages below and above him, damning him for all eternity as they called him evil, vile things.
My stomach surged with unease. A great big guilty unease.
Tess shook her head. “Granton’s going to have the worst reputation of any college in the history of ever.”
I nodded mutely. Our poor university really did have enough to contend with already. At the beginning of last year, some eerie strange kid who’d lived in our dorm building and I’d met a handful of times had gone on a shooting spree and killed eleven students. Then, last semester, protestors had accidentally burned down the Performing Arts Theater, which resulted in the deaths of three more people. Now this was being talked about everywhere. It seemed as if every time Granton University was mentioned on the news, something awful had happened.
“And it looks like we made the national news again,” Paige spoke up from the love seat, where she was watching the television. She lifted the remote and turned up the volume just as a CNN reporter mentioned Beckett.
“Hilliard, a senior at Granton, had his arraignment this morning, where the judge lifted his bail to seventy-five thousand. After he pled innocent, Judge Gudrun set his trial to take place in late spring.”
My mouth fell open. His bail had been raised? This made no sense. None of it. I shook my head, wondering how this could be. He was innocent. Why had they raised his bail? Why weren’t they setting him free?
“Great,” Logan muttered from next to Paige. “I can just hear enrollment numbers drop another twenty percent. I bet they’ll raise tuition again to try to make up the difference.”
“Fuck tuition,” I exploded, gaping at the national news reporter who was detailing all of Beckett’s allegations as if they were freaking fact. “They’re crucifying his poor reputation.”
How would he ever recover from this?
A stunned silence followed my outburst as everyone turned to gape at me. Then Tess screeched, “Oh my God! Your hair.”
“And fuck my hair.” I motioned toward the television. “Why are they doing that to him?”
Four pair of eyes blinked dumbly. Then the two couples shot each other confused glances before Paige discretely cleared her throat and hedged, “Umm, because he’s a rapist, maybe?”
Realizing I’d just completely ousted myself, I flushed hotly before stuttering a second, then saying, “B-but what if he’s not? I mean, has he been found guilty yet? Has he confessed? They just said he pled innocent, didn’t they?”
Of course, he would plead innocent. He was innocent. I’d been there. I knew he was innocent. I’d seen and heard the whole thing. He had not raped that Melody girl. And he’d been in no condition after that encounter to go off and rape her or anyone else later after I’d left either. This was all just bullshit.
My stomach churned with guilt as I glanced at the picture they showed of Beckett. There was really only one reason he was in jail right now.
Because I hadn’t been able to tell anyone, not even my best friends, what I’d seen.
To be honest, or maybe just really hopeful, I hadn’t thought this would blow up as big as it had. The guy was innocent; there could be absolutely no evidence against him, right? So how could he still be in jail? How could this make the national news? How come I kept feeling guiltier and guiltier every second of the day, as if my little confession would be the only thing to get him free? That couldn’t be the case. There had to be something else to help him.
Right?
I gulped and looked down just as a new nasty meme popped up on Tess’s Facebook feed. It didn’t seem to matter if what he’d done was true or not. Social media had found him guilty; he was as good as fucked. Poor guy.
“Bailey?” Paige said slowly, making me jump and remember everyone was still staring me at me.
Tired of faking it, I just clutched my new curly blonde hair in my hands and gave up. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed.
No, actually, I did know what I needed to do. I just didn’t know if I had to nerve. Was I really supposed to waltz into the police department and tell some cop I’d watched two people have sex? Confessing that was exactly the kind of mortifying thing I had nightmares about, right next to dreaming about showing up to school naked and dreaming about making out with one of my brothers. Who could confess that kind of shit?
“Okay, that’s it.” Tess plopped her laptop onto Jonah’s lap and sprang to her feet, before rounding the couch to grip my arm “We are girl talking, and you are going to tell us what’s going on. Right now.” Then she motioned toward Paige to follow us before she dragged me down the hall.
Twenty minutes later, in the privacy of my room with my door shut and the boyfriends locked out, I hugged my pillow to my chest and tried to hide my face in it while my two best friends gaped at me as if I were insane.
“Bailey! You have to tell the police.”
I lifted my face in order to shake my head. “I don’t know, are you sure? What if they don’t need me and my story is completely irrelevant and I just look like a freaking voyeur for going to them and telling them what I watched?”
“You need to tell them,” Tess stated more adamantly.
“I don’t think I can.” I sighed and buried my face back into the pillow, where everything was soft and nice and smelled like shampoo. I s
hould live in that pillow forever. Pillow paradise.
“Beckett Hilliard’s freedom is at stake,” Paige said.
The words came so plainly and practically and yet they hit the mark harder than anything, because dammit, she was right. I couldn’t do this to that poor guy. I lifted my face from the pillow, returning to reality.
I should’ve known the moment Beckett had spilled beer down the front of my shirt he would forever more be a pain in my ass. Stupid, idiot boy. He really, really should’ve stopped Melody when she’d unzipped his pants, like I knew he’d wanted to, so I didn’t have to be stuck in this predicament right now. Hell, so he wouldn’t be stuck in it.
Who knew one spilled beer would tie two complete strangers together so inexplicably.
I blew out a breath, but had no other choice except to admit, “Okay.” Then my stomach churned as a new idea hit me. “Oh God, you guys are going to tell your men about this, aren’t you?”
They were going to know I was a voyeur. They’d probably wonder how many times I’d spied on them having sex.
I was never going to live this down.
Chapter 7
BECKETT
Infirmaries weren’t such bad places. You got your own private cell, no one tried to kill you, and, okay, honestly, nothing topped the no-one-tried-to-kill-you aspect. That was my favorite part of the whole place, I was not getting beaten to a bloody pulp.
Sure, it hurt to breathe, I was pissing blood, and the nurses—I guessed that was what you called the guards who patched you up—were less than gentle. But I was not afraid for my life in here. I felt safe and secure.
I kind of wanted to stay here forever.
My welcoming committee in general population hadn’t been lying; they really, really hadn’t liked rapists, or even accused rapists for that matter. I was lucky to survive that encounter before a pair of correctional officers caught on as to what was happening and put a stop to it. Since then, I’d been safe, in complete utter pain from head to toe, but still safe, in my cozy, little infirmary cell.