Page 11 of Serpentine Valentine
I shouldn’t have been home.
I was supposed to be out with my friends from the field hockey team at some party one of the sorority houses was throwing, but I was bored by the end of the pre-drink at Courtney’s house,so I’d decided to head home.
So Mom didn’t know I was around to hear her, and having never heard her so angry before, I took advantage. The third stair to my basement suite creaked, so I skipped it, slinking up the case and the hallway to lurk behind her closed door.
“We need legal on thisnow,” she ground out over the faint thud of her pacing footsteps. “This is a total shit show. Morgan is a Fulbright scholar, for fuck’s sake. His book on Poseidon was a bloodyNew York Timesbestseller. He brings more money to the Classics program than any other facultycombined. We cannot afford to lose him to scandal, let alone one like this.”
There was a long pause, and then, “I don’t know, Mary, I really don’t. I never would have thought Alexandra Gorgon was the kind of girl to lie so flagrantly, but obviously, I was mistaken.” A long, shaken sigh. “Yes, I saw her. She was…she was brutalized. But it was not by Morgan. Professor Monique Fournier told me she was with him all night, and you know those two have been on and off for a while now. No, whatever happened to Ms. Gorgon was done by someone else.
“Well, obviously he’d decided to pass her over for the assistantship,” Mom argued. “The little, ungracious bitch decided to use the age-old play of crying rape.”
I flinched, nearly falling on my ass in the corridor. I’d never heard my mother curse so much, never could have imagined the vitriol in her tone while she spoke about sexual assault against a woman.
Even if Lex Gorgon hadn’t been attacked by Professor Morgan, she had still been a victim of a heinous crime. I learned later that her attacker left her in the forest behind campus, broken, bloodied, and torn at the roots of a gnarled tree like some ancient pagan sacrifice. So how could Mom lack sympathy for her? How, having seen herbrutalized,could she not find forgiveness in her heart for a twenty-year-old girl who was takenagainst her will?
A crack opened inside my soul at hearing my mother speak like that, like somehow the student had deserved such treatment. A crack that split straight through the hero worship I’d harbored for my superstar mother all these years. The first sign of serious erosion in the total love and adulation I’d clung to even as I’d grown up and witnessed how flawed she could be. She was a single mother who’d made the decision to have a baby with a sperm donor. I’d only ever known her, relied on her,trustedher to set my world views for me.
I’d felt concussed by her words, mind ringing, world breaking into parts like a kaleidoscope.
It was ten months after the incident that rocked Acheron. Though, it was hushed up so poorly that threads of scandal still webbed the halls, catching students up in its snare.
“I heard she got what she deserved,” someone said in the hall one day on my way to my Russian History seminar. “She was gagging for all her male professors. Everyone in her classes knew it.”
My stomach clutched and wobbled like an open and closed fist.
“You can tell just by looking at her,” a guy on the soccer team said on the sidelines of Godwin Field Complex when I jogged by on my way to practice. “She’s sex on two legs. She’s probably into that fucked-up shit.”
It was impossible to escape the toxic whispers. Oh, I heard some people sympathize with her, but not many. Not enough.
I’d never really noticed Lex Gorgon before the rumors, but when she appeared on the first day of term following the incident, my eyes were drawn to her along with everyone else’s.
I was sitting in the commons, propped between Haley’s legs doing some reading for my History of Warfare class, when the energy in the quad went thick and still, like the atmosphere before a tropical storm broke. Flora stopped talking, Haley went stiff behind me, and Kenziedropped the apple she was eating straight into her lap.
I knew she was there before I even looked up. Curiosity hooked me through the mouth, urging me to raise my head to see what everyone else saw. But a part of me hesitated. I felt a strange need to give her privacy, to avert my gaze when everyone else was making her an object of public consumption.
How vulnerable must she feel, I thought, the words of text beneath my gaze blurring as my eyes watered with sympathy. She had already been torn by the hands of some vile monster masquerading as a man, and now again in the court of popular opinion. If it had been me––I shuddered at the thought––I would have transferred schools. Maybe even changed my name.
Yet here she was, facing down the firing squad.
“Wow,” Haley breathed, the word almost pulled from her involuntarily.
I lost my battle, and on a shaky inhale, I looked up at Lex Gorgon.
I’d only had a vague impression of her before the incident, and when I’d thought to look her up on social media, she wasn’t there. So all I had in my memory was a pretty face, dark hair, and a full, sullen mouth.
That wasn’t what I saw.
What I saw was a woman.
Not even a girl, not like the girls beside me in the field hockey kits because we had practice later that day, not the pimply-faced freshmen gaining fifteen pounds without the scrutiny of their mothers, not the fresh, eager smiles and giggles of newly independent boys and girls.
A woman.
It was hard to explain why I was suddenly breathless at the sight of her. Oh, she was lushly curved, deep hand holds between tapered ribs and flared hips, shapely legs bared beneath a short black skirt, and leather boots laced to mid-calf. Her breasts were obvious beneath her conservativelybuttoned black blouse, but they would have been obvious in anything she wore, heavy, but high with youth. It was more than her coloring, which was striking, the pale eyes beneath dark, arched brows and thick lashes, the sun-warmed, almond dark complexion, and all that hair, a curly mass of black that writhed around her head like dark serpents in the wind. It wasn’t even the snakes themselves, tattooed on her forearms peeking out from rolled cuffs, one on her throat, licking at her pulse point, another two curling down the length of one strong thigh like lovers.
All of that was good, better than good. It wasdelicious.
And even as I thought it, I wondered how I could think such a thing about someone, let alone a woman. That she was edible, worthy of drooling over, capable of satiating my sudden hunger.
