lecherous men preying on less-powerful women, making them appear as if they were equals, then rattling off an email eight months later letting them know that not only were they never equal, they were, in fact, disposable. And to add insult to figurative injury, maybe also believing he was responsible for these young women’s triumphs. But not too responsible, because now they were no longer employable. No. Fuck that.
“You were a piece-of-shit husband,” Cleo retorted. “But that was between the two of you. I’m here for your job. I’m here for your reputation.”
Nobells, on instinct, jumped closer to her, as if he were gearing up for a physical fight. Cleo didn’t flinch.
“You say one fucking word about any of this, and I will sue you for defamation faster than you can run a reelection poll,” he said.
“I thought I was the only one you ever did this with,” she replied, her voice even, her tone serene. “So what’s your concern?”
“Fuck you, Cleo.”
“Senator McDougal, Alex.”
He looked less handsome then, Cleo thought. His cheeks flushed, a little spittle in the corner of his mouth. Cleo wished that all the young women in his law classes could see him as he was, a panicked shell of himself. She cocked her head and thought he looked like a cornered, defanged reptile, hissing and quaking but without its teeth, unable to puncture her skin.
“Fuck you, Senator McDougal. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“You’re right, Alexander. It probably didn’t.” Cleo shrugged.
“If I read a word about this, you can expect a lawsuit.”
Just then, Bowen stepped out from his angle by the door, his phone aloft, his hand steady.
“Sorry, Professor,” he said. “Too late for that. We’ve already gone live.”
FOURTEEN
It had been Cleo’s idea—to livestream it on her Instagram account, with Bowen mentioning it in his own to direct more eyeballs (he had 300k to her 48k)—because she knew if she’d done it any other way, asked him to report it like a standard story, edit it, interview her, all the usual paces—she’d have lost her nerve, and addressing her regrets list couldn’t be done without complete commitment. (Bowen had insisted on fact-checking the whole thing on the train, and Cleo had come prepared—forwarded him the aftermath emails, had shown him her GPA and her Law Review accolades, and, of course, some of Nobells’s texts when he was still heady in lust. Those were, for better or worse, stored in the Cloud forever.) Still, though, she was shaking by the time they hit Amsterdam Avenue, and she actually had to stop and lean over, her palm flattened against the window of a Taco Bell just next to Greene Hall, to ward off the nerves that had presented in the form of an extremely angry bowel.
Bowen was rubbing her back, telling her to take deep breaths, and trying to be as comforting as possible without violating any of her personal space. They were friendly, the two of them, but they weren’t exactly friends, and he, unlike Nobells, had been raised in a generation where you didn’t touch a woman unless she really, really wanted you to. (Or unless you were an asshole. Plenty of those too.)
Cleo heard the notifications on his phone, dinging one after the other. She felt the vibrations of her own phone, a steady buzz in her back pocket.
“Don’t tell me what people are saying,” she muttered to him, still bent over, still palming Taco Bell. “It was the right thing to do. So . . . just don’t tell me, OK?”
“It’s not all bad . . . at all,” he said. He scrolled down with his thumb, one hand resting on her back, as if he were checking to ensure that she was still breathing. “Actually, a lot of it is quite good.”
“OK.” She righted herself. Felt a little less green. She hated that her body betrayed her like this. She didn’t want her stomach to collapse into a mosh pit of gaseous nerves every time her past resurfaced. Or every time she resurfaced her past. She’d worked her whole life to be tougher than anyone expected, to be less penetrable than anyone demanded. She hated that these regrets made her more vulnerable, made her more porous. And yet now that she’d started down this path, she wanted to see it through. Even when it backfired, like making MaryAnne even angrier (though she was also beginning to see how she could have handled that one differently—this was not yet a perfectly oiled machine),