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Bailey nods. “The opening got delayed by several minutes. I never did hear what happened,” she says. She eyes me curiously, no doubt wondering why my cheeks are suddenly flushed. I never heard what happened either, but I sure as hell remember what I was doing at the time.
Namely Drew in a closet backstage.
I clear my throat.
“It was sabotage,” says Drew. “Somebody tampered with the sound booth on purpose. Cost the studio several hundred thousand dollars in advertising as a result.”
“What?”
“That’s crazy,” I say. “But what’s that got to do with you?”
Drew finally meets my eyes. The misery in his gaze has me bracing myself before he speaks again.
“They think I had something to do with it,” he says.
Our shocked silence doesn’t last long.
“Horseshit,” spits Bailey.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say at the same time.
Drew looks between us and laughs, the pain on his face evaporating. It’d be a relief to see, except his eyes get suspiciously damp.
“I should have known,” he says, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“Known what? You’re making me crazy, dude,” I say, elbowing him for real this time. “Out with it already.”
He starts at the beginning, with Ty calling him into the conference room earlier tonight. When he’s finished, Bailey’s full-on furious.
“This is absurd,” she says. “I can’t believe they’d accuse you of sabotaging your own project. What possible motive could you have?”
“Good question,” says Drew. He’s glanced at me a couple of times the last few minutes, and I’m pretty sure I know what he’s not saying. So I say it for him.
“He was with me,” I tell Bailey. She cocks her head, frowning, so I go on. “During the blackout, or technical difficulty, or whatever they’re calling it. Drew was with me. I’m his alibi.”
“Oh,” says Bailey, looking relieved. “That solves everything, doesn’t it? You just go with Drew tomorrow and tell Mr. Greeley... What? I’m missing something.”
Drew rubs his eyes, focusing on the ceiling again.
“About that,” he says. “We weren’t exactly talking shop at the time.”
“What do you—” Bailey’s eyes go wide. “Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah,” I say, tongue in cheek.
“Okay,” she says, a little breathlessly this time. “Maybe you can tell me more about that part later. But I still don’t see what the problem is.”
“What do you mean?” says Drew. “I can’t out Cooper like that.”
“I mean, he was with you, but what does it matter what you were doing at the time? Even if you had your cock down his throat, nobody has to know it. Just tell them you were talking.”
Everybody shifts, the tension in the room getting thick.
“If I tell them where we were,” says Drew, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “They’ll know which security cameras to pull footage from. And even though there aren’t cameras in that particular closet—”
“Fucking cameras,” I mutter. “That’s why you pushed me in there.” I start popping the buttons of my cuffed sleeves.
“They’ll see what happened leading up to, um, that,” finishes Drew.
