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“Just… We…” All that blood pounding in her brain was doing her no good at all. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t even feel. Her body had gone numb. “No reason,” she managed.
“Are you okay, Beth?” Cairo started to reach for her, but Beth backed away.
“I’m fine. I just…I’m not feeling well. Are you still willing to cover for me for an hour? I think I’d better head home.”
“Of course, but…”
Beth rushed back into her office to grab her purse and her phone. She shut down her computer and cleared the history, not quite sure why—all she knew was that she felt ashamed. Ashamed because she’d been tricked. Made a fool of. And, my God, that was an awful, familiar feeling she hadn’t had to deal with in years.
She started hearing the words in her head that she’d absorbed over years of studying sexuality and women’s history. Someone else can’t bring you shame. Shame means you did something wrong. You did nothing wrong. But how else was she supposed to feel after being tricked and lied to?
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she growled her frustration as she blinked them back.
She wasn’t seventeen this time. She didn’t have to simply sit quietly and take it. This time, she’d confront it head-on, and give the shame to the one who deserved it.
When she stalked out of the office, Cairo was helping a customer, dusting a sample of honey body powder on the woman’s arm, but she looked up with concern in her eyes as Beth passed. Beth watched the customer bring her arm up and tentatively touch her tongue to her wrist. The sight would have made Beth smile on any other day, but today she simply watched in blank confusion.
Her body was still numb, her head still beating like a pulse. It occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t drive, but she pushed through the doors and headed straight to her new cherry-red Nissan 370Z. The engine roared to life with the barest turn of the key. She’d purchased it for herself five months before, because she’d wanted it, and she was trying to train herself to take what she wanted. Though right now all she wanted to do was kill someone. Someone whose name she didn’t even know.
The shock of it hit her again, and she gasped in a breath to try to stop the dizziness. She was in a car on a public street. She couldn’t indulge the black spots dancing at the edge of her vision. She took another breath, and another. And even though her whole skull still thumped with every beat of her pulse, her vision cleared, and the closer she got to the brewery, the calmer she felt. Not less furious, but more. Angry in a focused way.
When she pulled into the brewery lot, she shut off the engine, got out of the car and quietly shut the door.
Her heels ground sand against asphalt as she walked. She watched her own hand curl around the door handle as she opened it, as if her fingers had nothing to do with her.
She stepped into a cheerful scene. Fiddle music fell from speakers. Laughter erupted from a table nearby. Beth walked through the laughter as if she were in one of those dreams where nothing made any sense, but she just kept moving.
The man behind the bar turned around, and she felt her heart brace itself, but he was no one she knew. A stranger. Though they were all strangers, really.
She waited until he looked at her. “Is Jamie Donovan here?” Her skin burned with regret as she spoke the name.
The man—a boy, really—leaned forward. “I’m sorry? I didn’t catch that.”
The music had seemed quiet when she’d walked in, but now it swelled in her ears, along with the noise of the early Friday crowd. “Jamie Donovan?” she said more loudly. “Is he available?”
“He’s not working the bar tonight. Is there something I can help you with?” He said it as if the request was a common one. As if women walked in here all the time looking for a man named Jamie who’d lied his way into sex. A scalding wash of shame crashed through her. She’d been laughed at before, and she couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t. So she nodded and started to back away.
A door opened to her left, and she jumped in horror, thinking it could be him. But it was just a customer coming out of the bathroom.
When Beth realized that she’d felt genuine fear, she smashed it down and turned it into anger, like pressure turning coal into diamonds.
She stood straight and met the gaze of the bartender again. “I need to see him. It’s personal.”
The boy’s eyebrows rose, but after a wary moment, he shrugged. “I’ll see if he’s in the back. What’s your name?”
“My name is Beth Cantrell. Tell him that and see if he’ll come out.” She put a hand on the bar, not to steady herself but to give her fingers something to squeeze, because the anger was eating her up.
And then she waited to find out exactly who she’d had sex with six months before.
ERIC PICKED UP A HALF-FULL bottle of pilsner and squeezed the neck tight in his hand. He wouldn’t throw it against the wall. He wouldn’t. But this damn bottling machine was supposed to have been fixed last week, and now it was doing an even worse job, jostling the bottles so much that half the beer foamed out before it reached the capping station.
“Shut it down!” he yelled at Wallace.
Wallace scowled and shut down the line, and when the roar of machinery died down, Wallace’s stream of creatively foul curses pealed through the cement-walled room.
Wallace didn’t care about bottling or distribution or profit margins. His only concern was the beer, and a lot of it was slowly crawling its way toward the drain in the floor.
Eric cursed. “I’m going to have that mechanic’s head on a platter.”
