Page 30 of The Assistant
He looks at me with a darkness in his eyes that sends a chill through my body. I open my mouth to tell him he doesn’t have to answer, but before I can, he speaks.
“I was fourteen,” he says, resting his hands in his lap and taking a deep breath as his eyes stay glued to mine. “I’m surprised Henry didn’t tell you everything about it already.”
“No, he didn’t tell me anything at all,” I admit, torn between telling him to stop and wanting him to explain. It’s a morbid curiosity, but I want to know more about him. I want to know what made him the way he is.
“I was supposed to be at an after-school club, but it was canceled because our advisor was sick. I wasn’t supposed to be home as early as I was, and I wasn’t supposed to be the one to find her,” Dawson says with a heaviness in his voice that makes me want to reach out and wrap my arms around him, to tell him it’s all going to be okay. I already know where the story is going. But I sit quietly and let him continue, anyway. “She was in the dining room, hanging from a ceiling fan with the chair kicked out from under her. There was a note on the table for my father, but I didn’t see it until after the paramedics came.”
“Oh my god, Dawson. I’m so sorry,” I instinctively say, knowing that it doesn’t do much to comfort him. He’s probably heard this enough as it is.
“I’ve had nightmares ever since. So, I know what you’re going through. No matter what I do, I can’t get the image out of my head.” He sighs and finally looks away from me back to the stew on the table. “Do you know how much therapy I had to go through? Absolutely none of it helped. There are just some things you’re not meant to forget about.”
He takes a deep breath and leans back, finishing telling me about his mom. I just watch him in silence, trying to imagine what he went through. I can’t even begin to put myself in his shoes. Walking in and seeing something as horrific as that must have been traumatic for him. It must have had a big impact on who he is now. If he hadn’t seen anything like that, would he be as tense and strict as he is now? He might be an entirely different person if that didn’t happen.
“I was fourteen when it happened too,” I say, blurting it out before I can think any better of it. I can see that Dawson looks ashamed, distressed about sharing such a vulnerable thing. Dawson might make my life a living hell sometimes, but I don’t want him to feel this alone.
“Is this about what happened in the living room?” Dawson asks, sitting up straighter and wrinkling his eyebrows. I nod and dig my fingernails into my knees while I try to urge myself on.
“My mom married this awful man. He made me uncomfortable from the moment I met him. He was always a little too interested in me, not like any of the other guys she dated,” I begin, taking a deep breath as I try to steady my nerves to keep the emotion at bay. “I tried to tell her he was always looking at me. Whenever I was alone with him, I didn’t feel safe. But she didn’t listen because he was paying all of our bills. Then one day, I was in my room drawing while Mom went out to dinner with some friends. He stormed into my room and pulled down his pants,demanding that I give him a blowjob. I try to fight him but he was just so much stronger than me. I didn’t stand a chance.”
I force myself to look Dawson in the eye to see the icy, white hot anger brewing within them. His fists are clenched on the table in front of him, and he’s absolutely seething.
“What did Diana do about it?” he asks through gritted teeth.
I shake my head and let out a bitter laugh. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told. My mom never would have believed me if I told her, so I chose not to. I think there was a part of me that would rather her not know than deal with the idea of her knowing and not caring.”
Dawson just shakes his head, sitting silently while he processes what I’ve told him. I hear him taking long, slow breaths as he tries to calm himself down. He’s furious about this.
By the time both of us are done talking, our food is cold, and Dawson brings both of our plates to the sink to clear them off. He puts the food away, and I sit at the table not knowing what to do. The conversation was just incredibly vulnerable, and tiptoeing back to my room to draw for the rest of the night feels wrong. So, I just wait for him.
“We should both get some sleep. I think you should sleep in my bed tonight,” Dawson says, wiping his hands off on a dishrag. I’m about to open my mouth to protest, but he holds up a finger to stop me. “I insist. I swear, it’s just going to be sleeping, maybe some cuddling. You’ve had a long enough night. I’m not going to do anything.”
“Why?” I find myself asking. Dawson takes a few steps closer, and I stand up to look him in the eye.
“Now that I know what you’ve been through, I might be able to help you if you have another nightmare. I know how it is.”
“Okay,” I say in a quiet voice.
Dawson leads me to his room and encourages me to slip out of my clothes. He looks at me while I’m naked before handing me one of his T-shirts to sleep in. At first there’s a part of me that thinks he might change his mind on only cuddling and start trying to warm me up to the idea of sex, but he doesn’t.
He wraps his arms around me and holds me close. I fall asleep to the rhythm of his breath as he softly inhales and exhales.
For the first time in my life, I told someone a secret, and it didn’t push them away. This wasn’t just any secret, either. If Dawson were anyone else, he might have blamed me for what happened or made me feel terrible.
Dawson and I have our differences, but it feels damn good being able to share something so vulnerable with him. Maybe he’s not as bad as I once thought he was.
Chapter 15
Dawson
I haven’t beenable to stop thinking about what Harper told me last night. Every time I look at her, when I hear her moving around the penthouse, when I think about her, I’m reminded of the story. I’m reminded of just how much I wish I could find the man and rip his heart from his chest.
Nobody hurts Harper and gets away with it. Not if I have anything to say about it.
After trying as hard as I could for hours to focus on anything else, I give in and start looking into it. I was hoping I could show some semblance of self-control and resist this urge, but I was wrong.
Luckily for me, Diana is a public figure, and information about her love life is relatively easy to access. All I have to do is some simple math. Harper is eighteen, so I need to figure out who was married to her mom four years ago.
According to her Wikipedia page, a real estate magnate named Dave Cornwall fits the bill. The two of them were only married for a brief time before he divorced her, managing to wiggle outof paying her half of his net worth even though they didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. I have no doubt that’s because Diana cheated on him like she has most of her spouses.
