Page 14 of The Viper
I did. The bar. The uniform. The stranger who wasn’t a stranger to my nerves. The way his hand had landed like a verdict. I tried to keep my voice even, to smooth it into a story I’d tell on a talk show someday, funny and contained and already healed. It kept catching on the sharp parts.
When I finished, Carrie stared at the water for a long time. “You didn’t drink any?”
I shook my head. “He stopped me.”
“Thank God,” she said, with a ferocity that made my throat sting. “Do you want to go to the hospital, anyway? They can check?—”
“I’m okay,” I said, meaning it physically, if not anything else. “Just … shaken.”
“We have to tell Hannah.”
“In the morning.” My voice was small. “Please.”
She watched me for a beat. “All right. Morning.”
We sat in silence, the kind that feels like a hand on your back. Finally, Carrie fished her phone from her pocket.
“You’ve seen it already?” she asked.
“I turned mine off in the car.”
“Smart.” She unlocked her screen. It glowed against her face, lighting her high cheekbones, the tiny crease between her brows that showed up only when she worried. “The gossip accountshave clips from inside the bar. It’s dark and chaotic, but … you can see enough.”
She angled the phone. Grainy video. Music. Shouts. A flash of my sweater and hat. A uniformed arm. And then the punch—fast, surgical. The crowd lurching. The caption a bonfire of speculation:A-LIST ACTRESS CAUGHT IN BAR BRAWL WITH NAVY OFFICER?!Scroll.Who is Mystery Man?Scroll.Was star’s drink tampered with?The comments were a carnival: half conspiracy theorists, half armchair lawyers, a handful of genuine concern drowned by noise.
I swallowed. “It looks worse than it was.” A lie. It looked exactly as bad as it had felt.
Carrie swiped again. A still shot—a shaky freeze frame of the stranger’s hand over my glass. You could just make out the angle, the control. The way his body was already between me and the uniform.
“Not worse,” she said gently. “Just … realer.”
I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. Stars burst behind my lids. “Hannah is going to murder me.”
“She’s going to be pissed,” Carrie agreed. “So is Franklin if this pulls a crowd to set. He’ll pretend it’s art-related outrage about the sanctity of story, but really it’ll be about time and money.”
I laughed, because it was easier than crying. “He does love a sanctity speech.”
I’d worked with Franklin before—on a smaller indie project that somehow survived on grit. He was tough, but fair. The kind of director who pushed hard because he believed hard, even when his ego got in the way. He had a way of making chaos feel like art, and I respected that. But he also had zero patience for distractions, especially the kind that trended on social media. If he thought my mess might bleed onto his precious schedule, he’d ice me out with that cool, professorial stare of his.
Carrie’s smile tugged, then fell away. “You can’t go out like that, Lexi. Not here. Not without protection.”
“I know.” I stared at the endless black lace of the marsh. “I just … needed to remember who I was without an entourage. For a second.”
“You are who you are without an entourage,” she said. “You were that girl tonight. You got yourself out. You handled the crowd, you got home.”
“Barely,” I said. “With help.”
“From whom?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
We let that sit, the unnameable pulse of it. I felt ridiculous, like a teenager scribblingMYSTERY MANin a notebook margin. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t even wise. It was survival—and the first jolt of adrenaline I’d felt that didn’t belong to a camera.
Carrie’s voice flattened into the practical calm that had talked me down from award-show panic attacks. “Do you want to call the police?”
A hundred PR calculations flowered in my mind like land mines. Headlines. Lawyers. Statements. Fans camping outside the precinct.
“I don’t want to make this a circus,” I said. “But … if he did that to me, he could do it to someone else.”
