I already have one.” Who made very similar comments.
Professor Gottschalk, on the other hand, had nothing but good things to say about her new eating habits and the appearance that came with them.
Kayla put her phone on the table, face down. “I’m just worried. You look great, Leah, really great, but you’re starting to get a little bony. Be careful you’re not turning anorexic or something.”
“I’m not.”
Harriet huffed. “Can we stop talking about food and who’s not eating it and start talking about what’s really important? Jackson is back at the house. Geoff says he won’t talk about what happened. All he’ll say is he got jumped and didn’t see who did it. But you know Andrea, from Bio last semester? She’s volunteering at the hospital, and when the cops were still there, she heard them talking about how there was Rohypnol in his system. With that tattoo, they were saying it was a revenge thing!”
“What?” Kayla asked, her dietary concerns forgotten. “Revenge for what—wait. Do they think Jackson roofied and raped somebody?”
“Maybe?” Harriet answered.
Kayla shook her head. “I hooked up with him once at a party in the spring. He was nice enough. Didn’t try to force me to do anything I didn’t want to.” She smiled and blushed a little. “I mean, I was pretty drunk, and I let him do more than I probably would have otherwise, but he was nice enough, and I didn’t stop him. We know what we’re getting into when we go to a Sig Rho party, right?”
“Right,” Harriet said. “Jackson would never have to roofie anybody anyway. He’s gorgeous and loaded and there were at least fifty girls there Friday night who would have stripped naked and bent over the back of a sofa right there in the middle of the room if he asked them to. Everybody knows why those guys throw parties like that and pour all that free booze, anyway.”
Lia felt ill and pushed her half-eaten salad away.
“That’s not why I was there,” she said quietly.
Harriet rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know, you want true love. But you wore my little black dress and those boots, and did your hair and makeup all sexy. You wanted their attention just like everybody else.”
“Attention is one thing. Sex is something else. And rape is neither.”
The thing was, maybe—probably—she would have had sex with Jackson on Friday night, if he’d been nice to her a little longer and asked her to go to bed with him. She was pretty eager to rid herself of her ridiculously lingering virginity. She had dressed up for attention Friday night. She wanted a relationship, but she also just wanted to be noticed, and Jackson had. Besides, in just in those few minutes of conversation she’d already been telling herself that maybe Jackson really liked her. So she totally would have had sex with him. Right up until he decided to take the choice away from her.
Why the hell had he done it? Her friends were right—there was literally no reason for a guy like him to drug a girl for sex. There was never a reason for anybody to drug anybody for sex, of course, but she couldn’t imagine what reason Jackson might have thought he had. He could have had just about any kind of sex he’d wanted, as many times as he’d wanted, from a whole roomful of eager, consenting (as consenting as possible considering all the free booze) girls.
He could have had Lia, who’d been stone-cold sober, with a few more minutes of sweet talk.
Maybe that was why she’d felt so weird and conflicted. She felt like she’d offered herself up for trouble. But that was stupid. She might have been willing to have sex, but Jackson hadn’t wanted to have sex with her. He’d wanted to rape her.
The fact that he’d had Rohypnol in his system proved that Alex had made no mistake. She was sure the Rohypnol Jackson had ingested had come from the vial he’d meant to use on her.
She shuddered and set her fork down.
He’d gotten a taste of his own medicine.
And that was very much her father’s style.
~ 3 ~
Bluto took over after lunch, and Alex hurried back to the apartment, showered, and dressed in his one good suit. He wasn’t high enough in the organization to need a suit every day, so it usually hung at the far side of his closet. This bodyguard gig was a pretty new thing; his usual job was warehouse grunt at