10

As it turned out, the beach was just the thing I needed to kick the damn writer's block to the curb. I woke early on Sunday, took my iPad down to the beach, and managed to get three chapters written as the sun came up. I had just packed it back into my bag when Luna made her way down to sit beside me. "It's beautiful here," she said as she plopped down on the lounger.

"It is. Makes me mad that I spent part of my spring break stuck at home and the rest of it marrying an asshole in Vegas."

Luna laughed. "Yeah, but could you have afforded this excursion without the trip to Vegas?" I had explained to her where the money for our impromptu getaway had come from, so that she wouldn't feel guilty when I wouldn't let her contribute her own money.

"That is true. Thank you, Mr. Poker Chip!" I added to the thanks by making it a toast as I held my Mimosa up to the brightening sky.

"Damn, I need one of those," she declared and then hopped up to go get her own drink as I soaked up the early morning sun on the beach.

While she was gone, I took a chance and turned my phone back on. My sister was already aware of where I was, who I was with, and when I would be back, so Bea was thankfully keeping my family off my back. There were however messages from my husband. A lot of them, apparently. I didn't even look, though I was tempted. Instead, I did something worse. I googled his name.

Apparently, one of the 'snow patrol' women, as Luna had referred to them, had sold her story to the press. Venla Couri, the woman who had been pictured with Tucker, was said to have previously dated my husband. Venla's friend, who sold her story, claimed they were serious for a while until Venla screwed it up, and when she found out he was back in Helsinki, she took the chance to try to seduce him, and hopefully win him back. When asked how she knew he was back, the woman explained that Ms. Couri received a message from one of Tucker's family members informing her that he would be there, and that maybe there was a chance they could reconcile things.

According to one of the other women who had been there that night, Venla had not been informed about the fact that Tucker was married now, and she felt horrible that his wife might have seen those photos.

I turned my phone back off, wishing I'd never read that. I could just imagine who had put the woman up to it. Dear old Grandpa Brighton was probably getting his revenge since I wouldn't sign his post-nup nonsense. That didn't change anything at all though, because you could set someone up to seduce another person all day long, but that didn't make the target fall for the seduction. The fall, that was entirely on Tucker's shoulders, whether it had been fabricated to set him up or not.

When Luna made it back to me, it must have been obvious that my mood had shifted. She sat quietly, sipping her Mimosa at first. Then she turned to me. "Do you love him?"

"No, I barely know him."

"Then why are you so hurt by this?"

I don't know why that question started it, but the damn floodgates opened up and tears didn't just come pouring out of me. Instead, they were joined by gut-wrenching sobs. Luna moved off her lounger, onto mine, and had her arms wrapped around me as I cried everything out on her shoulder. That's right, the girl who had spent the past three and a half years hiding every emotion from everyone, lost her shit on a sunny Florida beach for all to see. I would regret that later.

"Oh, Mina, I'm so sorry. Please, tell me what I can do."

"It's not him," I blubbered through my sobs.

"What is it then, and why was he the trigger? Let's face it, we both know it's the truth."

"I've never told anyone before," I admitted. Then I looked up at her, through eyes so glassy from tears that she appeared a blurry blob.

"I promise you that whatever you tell me will go no further," she swore the words so solemnly that I wanted to believe in them.

"I was a freshman, living in the dorms," I started, and she stopped me for just long enough to pull the other lounger beside mine so we could sit as close as possible and not be on top of each other.

"Okay, now tell me," she insisted.

"It was my first time being away from home, even though the university is right there in town, I still got to live away from my family and be my own person, you know?"

Luna nodded at me.

"My best friend went to the same school too, but she didn't room with me because she was living with her family still, to save money. I roomed with another girl. She was from New York originally. Karly was pledging to be in one of the sororities on campus, but I wanted nothing to do with that scene. I'd grown up around girls who thought they were better than everyone else, so it was just not my thing. Maybe that made me a judgmental ass, I don't know. When Karly explained to the girls from the house she really wanted to get into, I guess they developed a plan."

"A plan? To get you into the house too?"

I shook my head. "Nope. They wanted Karly to prove herself, because despite coming from New York, she was there on scholarship. She didn't come from money, have a fancy name, or impressive pedigree. She was a nobody and that sorority rarely enlisted nobodies."

"This is why I went to college online," Luna added with a smile, trying to make light.

"I wish I had thought of that, but when you are fresh out of high school with the world at your fingertips, you sometimes crave that new experience. I know I did. That's why I was living in the dorms, after all."

"So, what exactly did they want Karly to do?"

"She was to convince me that they weren't all that bad and that I didn't need to join the sorority. She wanted me to hang out with them and maybe then I would trust them enough to pledge the following year. I figured, what the hell, it would allow me to keep the peace with my roommate. I liked Karly. She was smart, and so enthusiastic about everything. She matched my energy back then, so we started hanging out more, going to parties, getting to know people and doing all the social stuff on campus together.

"I got to know the other girls too. I thought we were all becoming friends. I trusted them enough to talk about my crush at the time." I stopped to take an extremely long sip of my mimosa, while consequently wishing I had a stronger drink because I was going to need it for the rest of this. "I'm a tiny girl," I admitted.

"No! You don't say?" Luna teased. "You're fucking adorable though. I love your pixie figure."

"Well, not many people do, apparently. After I told them about my crush, suddenly he started showing up everywhere. I didn't think anything of it. I brushed it off as coincidence. One day, he bumped into me in the library. Did I mention that my crush was a running back on the football team? He was huge. The guy was over six feet tall and outweighed me by a lot, obviously since he was all muscle. The good kind though, he had to be fast, so he wasn't as bulky as some of the other guys. Anyway," I waved the thought away quickly. "He was a junior that year, and I was an idiot. That day when he bumped into me, it was the beginning of their elaborate setup. He asked me out, told me he had seen me around and had been asking about me. I ate it up. I wasn't that popular with the guys in high school because I never had the boobs that the other girls could flaunt, you know?"

Luna glanced down at herself. She was naturally curvy. "Yeah, I remember the type. They couldn't seem to look me in the eye once I grew these suckers during the summer between ninth and tenth grade. I almost want to say you were lucky, but something tells me it didn't feel that way to you."

I shook my head again. "I was actually fine with it in high school, because it kept me focused, but it also did something to my confidence that made what happened in college possible." It was the first time I had admitted that out loud and I had to suck in a deep breath to keep from crying again.

"I went to a party that weekend with the running back. I was supposed to meet him there though, so Karly came with me. Her sorority friends were supposed to be there too. The weird thing was, there didn't seem to be a lot of people when we got there." I glanced up at Luna and her worried gaze made me look down again. "It was so quiet when we entered the house. The music was low, the lights too. I'd never been to a quiet college party before. It should have been a sign to get the hell out of there, but Karly assured me that everything was all right and the girls had told her it was a low-key event since there was a game the following day. She made me believe it when she talked about how coach would kick the guys' asses if he knew they were throwing a wild party.

"So, I stayed, and people started trickling in from upstairs and out back on the lawn. Eventually, my crush showed up too and took me downstairs to see their trophy from the year before. I went, like a dummy. Only, when I got down there, the girls from the sorority were waiting. They grabbed me, tied and taped me to a chair, and started cutting my clothes off me."

"Oh my God! Mina, you can't be serious." I couldn't respond if I was going to get this out, so I just swallowed down the scream that wanted to come out as I remembered the worst night of my life.

"They stripped me bare while I was tied to that chair. Then they put a diaper around me and stuffed a pacifier in my mouth." The past humiliation flared up as I recounted everything. "They put my hair in pigtails, and then, they opened the door and called for the other guys to come down. My best friend, the one from high school who was staying at home instead of the dorms, was with them. She went right into the arms of the running back I'd been crushing on. Apparently, they had started dating during the first week of school, and when Karly's friends informed her that I had a crush on him, she thought I was trying to steal him away."

I swiped at the tears that were falling down my cheeks again. "I didn't even know she had been seeing anyone. We didn't have the same classes and since she still lived at home and I was trying to befriend my roommate, we hadn't seen much of one another."

"That's no excuse," Luna hissed.

"No, it wasn't, especially when she saw what they had done to me. They put me on display like I was a baby. I was tied to a chair, not having sex with her boyfriend or something. She did nothing to help me. Actually, she did worse than nothing. She laughed at me. They all did. The things they said…" the sobs choked off any more of my words for a bit and Luna was back to holding me.

"Karly and my high school best friend both took pictures of me like that. I had never done anything in my life to purposely hurt anyone. I had never gone out of my way to even talk shit about people. I just knew that the sorority life wasn't for me, and by saying it out loud, I became a target for that. They hated me because I didn't want to be like them."

"How did you get out of there?" Luna finally asked.

"They eventually got bored of taunting me when I stopped crying and just sat there silently. I guess a target is only as fun as the reaction they give you." Luna handed me the rest of her Mimosa when I tried to drink some more of mine and realized it was gone. "There was one guy, from the football team, who had yelled at everyone while it was happening. He told them how wrong they were and that what they were doing was a crime. He actually called campus police on his own team. He called the coach and had him come to the house too so that he could see for himself what his players had done."

"Wow," Luna hummed the word out. She wasn't wrong to think that was a ballsy move on the guy's part, it had been. He went against his entire team to get me out of there that night. If only he had called the actual police.

"The coach got me out of there and took me to his office where we had a nice little chat about what it would cost the school if word got out about what happened. He promised me a free ride for the rest of my academic career if I wouldn't push things. So, I made a deal with the devil."

"What? So, they got to humiliate you like that, take pictures, and got off Scott free?"

I shook my head. "No, they didn't. The sorority was disbanded on campus. My roommate and previous best friend were both kicked out of school since they had evidence of what happened on their phones. Everyone else with pictures were also basically kicked out. They put pressure on them to leave the school of their own accord or end up being expelled or having charges filed against them. That did not apply to the football players though. The ones who are still at the school, who were involved, have to stay in the dorms, not the football house. No one knows why, but it's a rule. They also cannot be caught attending any parties, they are tested for drugs weekly, and they are made to stay far away from me." I laughed. "The coach couldn't kick the entire team out; it would have ended their year and possibly damaged the next couple of years too. There were only handful of players that hadn't been there that night."

"How could you still show up to that school, Mina? I couldn't even imagine having the strength to do that."

I shrugged. "Sometime during that night, I went numb," I admitted. "There's a point when everything just shuts off and you no longer have to live through it because it doesn't matter anymore."

"Come on, I know that can't be true. Look at how you just broke down," she insisted.

"I've been numb for three years, and only just started to thaw back out."

"Around the time you saw your husband making headlines with other women?" She questioned.

"Around the time he made me believe it wouldn't happen, only to have it thrown in my face how wrong I was to believe someone again."

"Oh, Mina! Does he know about any of this?"

"No, and I don't want him to. You promised that what I said would stay between us. Please, don't make me regret telling you."

"You will never regret telling me, I swear it."

For some strange reason, I believed her. Luna, a woman I had only met a day ago, had somehow broken through the wall I'd built around myself to keep my heart safe. We sat there for a few more minutes, as I collected myself and used my beach towel to wipe away the heartache that leaked from me in the form of tears.

"It's really a shame that you have to get back for school. I think you could use some more time on the beach, it obviously did you some good if you've kept all of that bottled up for three years."

"I don't think it was just being at the beach that made me unleash. Thanks for listening," I managed to get out as we packed up and headed back to our room.

"Anytime, and I mean that. Even if you divorce Tucker, and never speak to him and my brother again, I hope that we can remain friends. I think we could both use someone to trust who knows what it's like to be betrayed."

"Speaking of, it sounds like you owe me a story too."

"Oh, I definitely do, and you'll hear it. We're going to call this your weekend of release, mine will come another time."

"So, you're saying we need to start planning another beach weekend?" We both laughed at the suggestion.

"Well, if a girl has to relive some shit, at least she can do it in paradise, right?"

"Obviously," I told her. We managed to get everything packed up for our trip back to Atlanta. There was definitely a part of me that did not want to go back there. I thought about heading to Middleton again, which was the suburb just outside of Atlanta where my parents lived. If I went back there, I would have to answer questions about why, and I really didn't want to do that.

"Are you trying to figure out where to go from here?"

"Am I that obvious?"

"Nah, I just thought about inviting you to come stay with me so you could hide out a little longer. The problem with that is Wes knows that we met, and he will assume I offered."

"What you're telling me is that your brother knows what a wonderful person you are." I smiled at the thought. "As much as I would love to take you up on your non offer, for obvious reasons, you're probably right. I think I'll just grab a hotel for now until I can think things through. Besides, I can get a place closer to campus and not have to worry about waking up early for the commute to school."

"Sounds like a plan, but before we part ways, make sure we exchange phone numbers. I can't believe we haven't done that already."

"True, but then again, there hasn't been a need since we were together the entire time."

"Mina?"

"Yes, Luna?"

"I need you to know that if I swung that way, I'd steal you from Tucker and rub his nose in the fact that he lost a wonderful woman because he was a complete idiot."

I laughed so hard that it took me a moment to respond. "Luna, I want you to know that if I swung that way, I'd take you up on that offer in a heartbeat."

"Well, since we can't be lovers or wives, I propose that you become my new best friend, since neither of us seems to have one."

"Perfect!" And that was how my shitty, almost two-week-long marriage was responsible for me having the first friend - who wasn't my own sister - in three years.