Exotic - Chapter 52: Chapter 52

The time it took to get out of the city, we were both silent, save the ragged breathing and general sounds of life. By the time Reece pulled over, I had managed to drag myself to sitting, with my knees pulled up under me and my naked arms wrapped around my torso. I couldn't meet his gaze when he flicked his eyes off the road. I just stared down at the goose-flesh of my thighs. I heard a soft tapping and turned my head just enough to see Reece texting an unknown number. I didn't have the mental energy to ask who, at a time like this.
More silence, and then Reece started to shift about. A few seconds later, I was being passed an olive-green fleece jumper that smelt like oil. "Put that on while the heater gets going."
I accepted it without thanks and pulled it over the dress. It caught on my hair, which reminded me I was still wearing my wig. I dragged it off my head, dropping it onto the dashboard in front of me and running shaking fingers through my hair. My dry bangs fell like curtains over my eyes.
"What do you need?" Reece asked. "Food? Home? Police?"
The word police shocked me into reality. Of course, I wanted the police. Of course, I wanted Peter punished. But as I rolled the idea over in my head, imagining the questions they'd ask, the samples they'd take, and how I looked; the short trim of my dress, the makeup, the bare feet, and just how drunk I'd show up as if tested. They'd ask how I'd gotten into the club, they'd ask who had been serving me without an ID, they'd find out about my history there, Jamie could get in trouble, so many people could get in trouble... and all of a sudden I wasn't so sure. "I... don't know."
"Did you know the guy?" he asked without missing a beat.
"Not really..." I responded dimly, and then with a hint of offence, "Not how you're thinking."
"I'm not thinking anything," Reece met my eyes in the mirror-like front windscreen. I looked away first, raising a hand to my right cheek. It was tender to touch, already beginning to swell. My teeth were all in their rightful places, but I could still taste blood on my gums.
"He's done it before," I said softly.
Reece turned in his seat. His eyes were wide and furious. "He's hurt you before?"
I was taken aback by his outrage. "No. No, my friend. He hurt my friend."
He relaxed a little, reaching up a hand to scrub his eight pm shadow. I saw two of his knuckles were split. "I don't suppose your friend reported this?"
I shook my head.
"I'm not going to make you do anything," he assured me. "But some people don't stop until they're stopped. Now we can go home, and you can think about it..."
"No," I said decisively. I had to put aside everything else; Peter couldn't get away with it again. Scaring him away from Crescendo would only push him towards other victims. My pain was multi-layered, scratches on the surface, bruising on the inside, humiliation at my centre. But I didn't want to waste time he could use cleaning himself up and finding an alibi. "No. Let's go now."
Reece nodded and turned over the engine. I pushed my arms through the sleeves of his jumper, then pulled it over my knees. The fleece was like a warm blanket soaking up my panic. The smell wasn't unbearable. If I was honest, its familiarity was another layer of comfort. Slowly, my stomach unclenched, my jaw relaxed, and I stopped shaking as the cabin simmered to room temperature.
"How'd you find me?" I asked in a whisper. I wasn't sure he'd heard me before he answered.
"Your mate... Aaron," he turned the wheel carefully, a smooth arch around a corner. "He came knocking soon after you left. We split the places you might be between us. Been looking since."
I blinked, surprised. "Aaron... and you?"
Reece let out a very middle-aged sigh, which seemed to get caught on something near the end. "You've got good friends, Miles."
A hot flush of anger surged through me, producing further hot tears. "Yeah. Thank fuck for that."
Silence. The car slowed to a crawl, and Reece fell back into the driver's seat. Time suspended; I watched through the rippling pools gathering in my eyes as he opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked across, met my cold, intoxicated gaze, and then quickly away again.
"Miles," he started, then cleared his throat. "Miles. I owe you an apology."
I heard him testing each word as it left him. I didn't respond, keeping my eyes fixed in my lap.
"I know after what was said, it's not nearly enough... and I understand if you don't accept," he continued. "You don't owe me that. I just want you to know that I know I failed you today."
My expression gave him nothing to work with. I didn't have the energy to pretend. Not with exactly what he'd said still fresh in my mind.
"I shouldn't have had a go at you in the car. I was being a self-righteous prick," he kicked up the heater a few notches. "And you were right. I had... I have... no idea. I should have... well, I don't know what I should have done, but I shouldn't have left you on the side of a bloody highway."
Please don't cry. Please don't cry. I didn't know if I could deal with tears from Reece, who I'd vehemently told should have died in my mother's place just hours ago. In a gracious show of selflessness, Reece kept his composure; but his knuckles were white over the steering wheel, and his voice was thick with emotion.
"Maybe if we'd talked a little more about it, I could have figured out what you needed," he continued. "But I wasn't thinking about you, I was thinking about me, and that's not how this works. Because Grace trusted me with her boy, and I... I haven't done right by either of you."
I shuffled around in the seat, hands clenching the front of it next to my toes. My mind was cloudy with a healthy dose of scepticism, but with all my searching, I couldn't find a reason for Reece to be insincere. He'd just fought off Peter, saving me at the very less from a beating on the level of Zsa Zsa's, at the worst... the worst made me feel sick just to imagine. He could have decided that was apology enough and driven me to the police station without another word. I definitely wouldn't have demanded one in my current state.
"What changed?" I asked in a tone he probably didn't deserve, considering he was doing his best to apologise. I decided I didn't owe him gentle. "You didn't feel that way last we talked."
"No. I was..." he searched the cabin for the right words. Soft words. I decided if he said 'blindsided', I was ducking and rolling straight out of the car. "I was..."
"Angry. You were angry."
He made a less than pleased noise in the back of his throat. "I wasn't angry at you, I was... if anything, I was..."
"You were angry at yourself?" I finished. My voice raised, and I grew more furious every time I slurred a word unintentionally. Tears clung for dear life to my eyelashes. "It doesn't really matter though, does it? Anger is anger. And anger is scary when you're not sure what a person is going to do with it. I don't really care if you were going through the five stages of grief and if I'd waited long enough, you would have settled into acceptance. First impressions are everything, and my impression was that me being gay was something that made you angry. Offended. Loud.
"I'm not going to stick around and give you the benefit of the doubt. Historically, that hasn't worked out well for people like me."
Reece listened. When I sank back into the seat, he took a look across at me. I averted my gaze, pulling my finger into the sleeves of the jacket and burying the lower half of my face in the collar.
"I'm ashamed of the way I responded," he finally spoke, quietly, his voice pained. "I'm ashamed that I made it impossible for you to tell me this. I never thought I'd be that kind of fa... that kind of man."
Father. He'd almost said father, I was sure of it, in the beat red colour of his face and the clunky self-correction. I kept my face downcast, but a lump was rapidly forming in my chest. He was ashamed, but in the moment, he'd almost made me ashamed of who I was. You want to be a girl? Norman Bates. Get you help. What are you? Years ago, it might have worked, scaring me into playing straight and sent me apologising for ever crossing the binary.
But if there was one thing in the world that I would never be ashamed of, it was Sephora Utah.
"Aaron didn't pull any punches when he came looking for you," he continued. "He's always seemed like a quiet one but christ, he can dress a man down when he gets going."
I couldn't imagine Aaron kicking up that much of a fuss, especially to an adult. Especially to Reece, who he knew almost exclusively from my stories about him. I'd never let the two of them spend more than a few minutes in each other's presence at a time after Aaron came out. "What did he say to you?"
"Nothing that wasn't true. He started with the obvious, that I was brain-dead and awful and a caveman, and he told me I'd reacted the exact way anyone who'd spoken to me more than a few minutes would expect. That... that no wonder someone had been able to use 'telling me' as blackmail."
My heart seemed to stop in my chest. He was talking about Caleb.
Did that mean...
"Then there was just a lot of swearing," Reece sighed. "Promises that I was going die sad and ignorant and alone and he was going to make sure you never had to speak to me again. I had to chase him down the street to stop him from driving away. After convincing Mrs. Dodie that we didn't need the police."
I huffed out a dry laugh. "And what, he pardoned you?"
"Absolutely not. He made it very clear that it made no difference to how he saw me," he shook his head. "But he was worried about you, and so was I. That was enough to justify a truce."
I sat up quickly. My abdomen throbbed from Peter's lasting hit there and forced out a groan. Reece turned in his seat, eyebrows creased in concern, but I waved him off. "I need to talk to him. Can I use your phone?"
"I let him know you're with me. Told him what happened, where we're headed," he still passed it to me, open on a text chain with a familiar number. Aaron's messages to Reece were curt and short, mostly consisting of 'Not here' and 'Anything?'. Reece had ignored several calls from him over the last few minutes while he'd been driving. I hit call and pushed the phone to the side of my face. The corner pressed into the bruise on my right cheek, and I nearly dropped it, the bolt of pain that shot through my jaw unforgiving. Aaron answered to hear the second half of my reactionary string of swear words.
"Miles??" I tasted disbelief, fury, and relief in his voice, all rolled into one. "Are you alright?"
I considered the answer to that and answered with Reece's choice of words from earlier. "I'm safe. And I'm sorry."
He released a long breath, and I could picture him deflating in the driver's seat. "Please don't be. I'm just glad... glad you're safe. Is Reece still with you?"
"Yeah," I squinted out the window, against the glare of the streetlights. "It's alright."
"He said you're headed to the police station?" he asked, and I heard his engine rev. "I'll meet you there. If you want."
I could have cried at that tiny addition. Aaron. Always checking twice that he was doing what you wanted, not what he wanted. "I want. Thank you... just thank you."
"Where'd it happen?" Aaron had moved right along, digging for facts. Maybe he didn't trust my memory would hold out all the way to the police station, maybe he was readying himself for an act of vigilante justice. "Did you get a good look at the guy? Did Reece?"
"Just near Crescendo," I pinched the bridge of my tender nose, praying the ache across it was carried over from the bruising on my jaw, not a face-altering break. "It... it was Peter, Aaron. Zsa's ex."
Aaron was silent over the other end of the line. I could almost hear the heat of his anger, radiating through the phone. "Right. Fuck. Alright."
"I'll see you soon?"
"Yes. Yeah," he sounded distant, and like he was speaking through gritted teeth. "I'll see you soon. I love you."
I startled. "I love you too."
Aaron seemed to realised what he'd said only when I responded. It wasn't like I'd ever thought for a second that Aaron didn't love me, it was just something we'd never felt the need to say out loud to one another. It was another difference between his brother and himself. Max told you; Aaron showed you. "Uhm. Sorry, it's kinda been a long night..."
"No takes backsies," I chirped and hung up before he could dig himself into an unnecessary hole.
Reece was giving me serious side-eye.
"We're not..." I started, and then frowned. "Not that it's any of your business, but we're not together. We're just two homosexuals who happen to be friends."
Reece had the decency to look embarrassed. "Oh. I didn't... well, I didn't not wonder..."
The street around us had shifted from dark shopping districts back to the bright lights of the inner city. Reece pulled up outside the police station with a jerky parallel park that left us more on the curb than beside it.
"You could do worse than him," he offered.
"Let's not do this."
"Fair enough," he coughed, and climbed out of the driver's seat into the street.
The station was enclosed with glass panels, a stark fluorescent glare spilling out onto the street, and there was a small bevy of police motorcycles parked outside. Two officers in neon and silver stripes were smoking just outside the door. There was a man being ushered out of a squad car in handcuffs. My body felt suddenly stiff, my fingers digging into the seat as my heart picked up the pace. My naked legs prickled with goosebumps.
This was a stupid idea. I was going to get laughed out of the building.
Reece opened the passenger door like a prom chauffeur and ducked his head low to look at me. "Are you ready?"
I tried to nod but my neck joint seemed to have eroded. I just cowered back against the centre console like a wounded animal, bare legs tucked under the jacket and lungs shrunken down to cherries. I couldn't seem to catch my breath.
"Miles."
I shook my head, my spine apparently allowing one movement but not the other. "I can't do this."
"You don't have to," Reece did his best to sound assuring, but all I heard echoing in my brain was relief. Of course, he didn't want to go in there, with a boy wearing a dress. "But I think you should."
"What if they don't believe me?"
Reece ducked lower, back hunched low into the doorframe. "I saw what happened. I'll back you up in there."
"What if they don't care?"
He didn't respond at first. I realised I had started to shake. I opened my mouth to tell him never mind, that I wanted to go home. I was being selfish, coming here. Too many people's reputations and livelihoods were at stake. I was selfish and stupid for letting myself get punched in the first place, just like being caught mouthing off about Aidan's girlfriend, anyone would believe as much, ask me what I'd thought would have happened when I followed him down a dark road and instigated...
"I'm not going to give them that option," he told me.
I glanced up. Reece's face was partially illuminated by the car's overhead lights. His eyes were fixed on me, searching me, his mouth downturned; his hand squeezed at the roof of the car like a stale stress ball. He looked severe, but not in a way that was directed towards me. It made me think Peter had gotten off lucky with just a few hits.
I slid my legs out of the jumper and shuffled across the seat. Reece got out of my way as I dropped down to the pavement, loose bitumen pushing into the bare soles of my feet. I limped after Reece towards the brightly lit station, arms wrapped around myself, head down.
We made our way past the smoking police officers. We were nearly through the doors when I thought I heard one of them snort, a barely contained laugh in my direction. My blood ran so cold that I froze for a second, but Reece didn't seem to hear, so I put it down to my imagination and followed him through the door.
The floorboards were cold, and the blasting air conditioning was colder. There was a stout man behind the curve of a front desk, flicking through a manila file, sipping a 7/11 coffee. He glanced up as we entered, eyes travelling first to Reece, before sliding down to me and sticking there.
I felt liable to throw up. The dry alcohol taste in my mouth made my mouth sticky and glued my lips together. I couldn't speak. I felt guilty under the weight of the officer's gaze as if Reece were bringing me in to be processed as a criminal. I wish I'd kept my wig on.
"Evening, gentlemen?" the officer grunted, a question where there wasn't one.
Reece waited, giving me ample space to speak up, before letting loose himself. "We'd like to speak to an officer and file a report. My son has just been assaulted."
My son. I suppose it cut down valuable time not to explain the exact nature of our relationship ship, but I nearly choked on my tongue. He gave me a sideward glance, grimaced at my expression, but didn't correct himself. Strangely, and despite my previously strong feelings on the subject, I didn't either. It didn't seem like the most important thing in the world anymore.
"Your son?" the officer's eyes kept jumping between us, almost sceptically. "Him?"
As if I wasn't even there. I didn't know if I could hear the disdain or not, the insinuation of Son? Him? I didn't know if I could trust my own mind.
"Yes," I didn't imagine the annoyance in Reece's reply, spoken through a tight jaw. "Miles?"
I know he needed me to confirm the story. I know he needed me to give details. I knew he couldn't do all the talking. But my mouth felt filled with cotton balls, and my legs felt boneless, and my face felt hot, and my stomach felt watery, and then vice versa. My abdomen was blazing and my face was wet.
Every instinct was telling me to bolt.
You do it so well.
"Mate?" the officer said, and it felt like he was amused rather than concerned. "You wanna speak up?"
I opened my mouth and tried to push out the words that would set people on Peter's trail and get him off the street, but the officer's scrutiny stole my voice. I almost whimpered. The officer looked back to Reece, his eyebrows arched. He looked down, to Reece's split knuckles, crusted in recently dried blood. Then back to me, black and blue and unable to get a word in edgewise. I realised what he must be thinking. I was going to have to speak up in Reece's defence unless I wanted to get him locked up on assumptions alone.
"A guy attacked me, outside a club," I blurted out. "I'm underage. I know who it was. I know where he works. Reece fought him off. I'd like to report it please."
The officer blinked at me, and his mouth twisted. "You know all the buzzwords, don't you?"
My face burned hotter, beyond the pain of the swelling bruises. We should have never come.
"Right then," the officer picked up the phone and dialled two numbers. "Let's get you seen to. See if someone can't find you some... Uhm, pants, mate. Or whatever you prefer."
I wanted to curl up in a corner and hide. I automatically veered around to the door, but Reece caught my arm gently, holding me in place. Please. I want to go. I silently begged, but Reece was historically bad at picking up on cues.
Within a few minutes, I was sitting at a desk inside the station with a pair of blue track pants (several sizes above my own) dragging the floor underneath me. There was only one seat on the side of the desk we'd been assigned to, so Reece stood over my shoulder like my security detail. I picked at the sleeves of his jumper as we waited for someone to occupy the seat on the other side of the desk. People passed by, milling around, topping up coffees, chatting to colleagues, and occasionally throwing amused, the things you see on a Tuesday night glances my way. But no one seemed all that concerned about getting us seen to.
"Is your hand okay?" I asked him, voice slightly hoarse from the effort of being decent to him after two years of nothing but bitter poison. He'd said I had no obligation to forgive him, but there was no reason I couldn't test the waters. See how peace felt, for a change
"Smarts," Reece shook it out, massaging his fingers with a grimace. "Guy had a thick skull. Teeth set in concrete."
I let my legs swung under the chair, then out in front of it. The souls of my feet only brushed the floor. "I need to ask you something."
Reece appeared resigned. "Go 'head."
I prepared myself for the worse while hoping for the best. "Who told... I mean how, how did you find... you know. My closet. My stuff. Narnia."
I braced from the potential answer of, Lauren's brother came to the door and told me what you were. There was no escaping the fact that Caleb could have, in his upset, exposed me to Reece's unpredictable response. I wasn't sure whether that was something I could forgive, even after my carelessness had led to it.
Reece looked surprised, and then something like shame took over his features. Although he stood over me, he seemed to shrink. "I was looking for your mum."
My brain short-circuited, and the lump growing in my throat vanished. "What?"
"I know you think it's weird," he was chewing the inside of his cheek, eyes averted. "I knew... I knew you had the urn, and I got home and all I could think was, Grace would know what to say. She was always the first person I talked to about anything I was feeling, and sometimes just having her... what's left of her, nearby, helps me get my head on straight. I know it's not her, it's just... sorry."
I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. "You went into my room to look for mum's ashes?"
"Yes."
"No one..." I gripped the plastic seat tight, grounding myself in the reality that existed where Caleb had not betrayed everything I'd ever believed him to be, "... no one told you about me?"
"You think if I'd had it explained to me, I would have dissected it like a damn scientist?" he trailed off, tone laced with shame. "I had no right to touch your property. I didn't understand what I was seeing, I thought... well I thought I was going insane. I thought I'd walked back in time, into Grace's closet. It's been so long since I've seen women's clothes, women's shoes, makeup in our house. I'm not... I don't remember everything after that. Everything I did. But I know I made a mess of things."
I didn't dispute that. But I remembered what he'd said, about therapy, about him realising he wasn't going about handling his grief the right way. I tried to put myself in his shoes. I failed miserably. If I'd never taken a chance on Sephora Utah, would my view of drag be that of Norman Bates, of boys who loved their mummies too much? I shuddered to think of myself as being that closed-minded.
"In more than one way," he elaborated.
I didn't dispute that either, but I did stare up at him until he met my eye. "I'm sorry for what I said too."
He narrowed his gaze at me, creases protruding from his forehead, confused. "What do you mean?"
"That you should have died," I said weakly, and his confusion fell away. "I didn't mean it. For what it's worth."
His body rose and fell with a sigh and very tentatively, he placed a hand on my shoulder. Just four fingers, really. He removed them after a second, as if he had expected me to shrug it off and didn't know how to end the gesture otherwise. I continued to swing my feet.
We waited in silence for a quarter-hour, until someone approached us with intention. A female officer with a ponytail of corkscrew curls, round features, and a promising softness to her features sat down across from me, offering a water bottle from the vending machine and an icepack, and began to sort through stacks of paperwork, rather unhurried.
"About time," Reece muttered to no one, and I wished I was at the right angle to kick him. "Didn't know you were booking the Zodiac killer tonight."
The easy smile wiped clean off the woman's face as she regarded Reece. Her lip curled. "You're the father?"
"Legal guardian," he corrected, looking at me for approval. I quietly passed him the icepack, for his knuckles. He pushed it back into my hands. I carefully applied it to the side of my face, winching at the pressure but quickly relaxing into the cold relief it provided.
"I'm Officer Bloom, you can call me Olivia if you like," she told me directly; I doubted the second option was available for Reece. "I'm going to take you through the reporting process. I just need you to give me as many details as you can. If you need to take a break, just let me know. Do you understand?"
I nodded stiffly.
She gave me another matronly smile. "We're going to start with some personal details."
The first section was easy enough; my full name, age, and contact information. It wasn't exactly harrowing to recount that. But then we got to the details of the attack. Officer Bloom started with basic questions; key events, locations, and description of the attacker. I gave her everything I knew about Peter. Name, approximate age, physical description down to the colour of his eyes and size of his closed fists. The hospital I knew he worked at, and most of what he'd said to me leading up to the assault. I tried to leave Zsa Zsa out as much as possible, but there came a time when I couldn't avoid it.
"How do you and Peter know each other?" Officer Bloom asked, eyes fixed on the computer. I swallowed hard, conscious of Reece hovering over my shoulder. His presence had been a comfort, but I didn't love that he was learning about my private life in this setting.
"He was a friend's boyfriend," I said simply.
"Was? As in they're no longer together?"
"No."
She wrote for much longer than my monosyllabic answer should have taken her to. "Any reason for that?"
My pulse thrummed. "Not... pertinent to what happened."
"No?" Officer Bloom turned to look me in the eye. "Were you and Peter close while this relationship was going on?"
"No. We barely spoke."
"You were never..." Officer Bloom considered the question, which should have warned me it was a bad one, "... involved in their... goings-on?"
Despite my nervousness, I felt my anger flair at that. "No. They were monogamous, and he's an abusive dick."
I did not say 'dick', sliding in a far worse four-letter descriptive. I was pleased when Officer Bloom bristled in response.
"If you weren't particularly close, was there any reason you followed him down an alleyway?" she recovered quickly. "Did you trust him?"
"It was a street," I felt my walls being erected at a rapid pace. "And no. I didn't trust him."
"Did you think he was capable of violence?"
"Yes."
"Were you afraid of him?"
"I didn't think..." I started and then thought better of it. "Yes."
"How much have you had to drink tonight, Miles?"
My mouth froze in a shocked O, and my voice stuttered out. I closed my mouth and swallowed, and pressed the icepack harder to my face.
"Were you served alcohol in the club?" she continued. "Did you take anything stronger, such as..."
"I don't see how this is necessary," Reece growled from beside me. Officer Bloom ignored him.
"Being seventeen, you shouldn't have been allowed entry, correct?" she pointed out, as if she was solving the biggest case of the night. "As it is not an all-ages club?"
Here it was. The beginning of the end. I shut my eyes tight.
"Are you seriously going to ride his dick about that?" Reece demanded. "What teenager doesn't sneak into clubs? Can we get back to the crime being reported?"
"Mr. Hewitt, I'm interviewing Miles, not you," Officer Bloom snapped, and I wanted to slide beneath the table. "I will decide which information is pertinent."
"You want to talk about what he was wearing next? What he said to lead this Peter guy on?" Reece dropped a hand to the table. "He's given you everything you need to arrest the guy and you want to talk about bouncer policy in North Perth?"
Officer Bloom stared him down, and I was certain she was used to that glare melting men down to size. "I'm afraid it's a little more complicated than arresting the guy, Mr. Hewitt. I appreciate your feelings on the matter, but there is due process..."
"My feelings on the matter?" Reece was getting loud, and I saw Officer Bloom's hand come to rest on the butt of her taser. "Here are my feelings on the matter; maybe if I'd taken Miles home first, to change into his school uniform and wash his face instead of coming directly here, then you might take this a little more seriously. We thought maybe the quicker we'd come down, the faster you'd get this guy, who both of us could identify for you in a second, who has done this before, off the streets. But instead, you've faffed about as if we were here to report a stolen phone and now you seem more interested in his BAC than catching the guy who did this."
Officer Bloom continued to glare. "I think we ought to take a break."
"No!" I yelped. I didn't want to be here any longer. I felt like I'd lose my nerve and retract everything, with any more time to mill on it. "Please. I'll answer your questions."
Officer Bloom's expression softened again. "I don't think I said before that's it's awful what happened to you. We just need to be thorough. Otherwise, we can't guarantee guys like Peter get punished. Your BAC is something that will come up if we convict him, and that sucks, but I'd prefer we knew that from the beginning than have some lawyer use it as a trump card against us. I'm not justifying anything he did. I'm just trying to develop a clear picture."
Reece stood up straight and said nothing, turning his head away from her. I continued to knead the sleeves of his jumper between my fingers.
"As for what you were wearing..." Officer Bloom heaved a sigh. "It's actually nothing to do with what you looked like. If there was CCTV in the area, we need that information so we can locate you. That's our best shot of getting the guy; solid, visual proof."
My heart lifted a little. "Crescendo... Crescendo has CCTV out the front."
"We'll look into it," she assured me, and it dawned on me that meant Jamie was going to find out. What a way to learn you'd been taken advantage of. What a way to learn the truth. "Now, I'd love to circle back to something you said, Mr. Hewitt... something about Peter having 'done this before'?"
Reece looked to me to confirm what I'd told him in the car. All the moisture left my mouth. I realised that, without retracting everything I had said, I was going to have to betray my friend's trust. I silently weighed up the two options.
"Miles?" Officer Bloom leaned forwards on her desk. "If Peter is a repeat offender, we might have him on file. We might..."
"You won't," I replied disparagingly. "It wasn't reported."
Before I could say another word, I held the bang of the front door being flung open. Officer Bloom jumped to her feet, and the lethargic energy of the police station suddenly turned anticipative. I broke out into a cold sweat, imagining for a second that Peter had followed me and intended to take me out before I could force out the full story, as ridiculous as that thought was in hindsight. I saw Reece step in front of me, in what I thought was an attempt to get a closer look at what was coming, but I quickly realised was an automatic move to shield me.
Oh.
And what was coming was Aaron. Aaron Sanchez, for once owning every inch of his height as he searched the desks for me. And beside him, supported by a pair of silver crutches and wearing a hideous orange kimono over silk pyjama bottoms, was Grayson, Zsa Zsa Magnifique, looking like he'd tumbled straight out of bed and hobbled all the way to the station. As he swung his way past the desk, several police officers protesting behind him, I could see his expression; stony, determined, like an avenging angel who had just smacked down to earth and was still recoving from the crash.
Both of them reached me despite the trail of officers insisting they come back behind the desk, and I opened my arms for Aaron to wrap me in a hug. I buried my face, despite the pain, in his jacket, which hung over his school uniform. He mumbled something I didn't hear, but just the sound of his voice tipped the scales and I finally released everything I had. My sobbing was muffled by his shoulder, but my body shook violently with every breath. I held him tight, and he held me tighter, and the entire day washed out of me in a torrential downpour of tears. When I finally peeled myself off Aaron's jacket, exhausted and surely splotchy, I met Zsa Zsa's gaze.
He took one, long look at my face, turned to Officer Bloom, and announced, "I would like to report my ex-boyfriend, Peter Tyson Stoll, for sexual assault, physical assault, stalking, harassment, theft, property damage, and whatever the fuck else I can pin on him. Who do I talk to?"