“I was amazed you went along with it,” he says, watching me from under hooded eyelids, but there’s a trace of manly pride dancing on his lips and I am nanoseconds away from smashing something into that face.
I take a breath. “That makes two of us,” I say. But a wave of shame ripples through me as I remember how jealous I felt that day. How I suspected Geoff was turning his charms towards Mila, and how hurt I was that he had asked me to the party, and immediately left me alone, like he had more interesting people to talk to. And in the end, it was because of Geoff that I went along with Ryan’s attentions. I wanted him to watch.
See? I’ve still got it. You might be losing interest, but just watch. He’s younger than you too, and much, much more attractive.
“And that’s it? He wanted a photo of me naked?”
He nods. “He says one time in Chicago on a trip you led him on and then rejected him. He wanted to get you back. I don’t know what he was going to do with it exactly, he never said.”
Oh, but I know. He was biding his time. Sending it to me during the lecture was just a taste of things to come. He was going to tease me with it occasionally, keep me on tenterhooks with fear and shame, probably wait until I’d officially received the prize and only when the release of the photo could most humiliate me would it find its way into some public forum on the internet.
All because I almost had sex with him one night, but saw sense at the last minute.
“What about my car, did you do that too? Scratch it?”
“He did that. He told me.”
“Really? Wow.” I let out a laugh, a bitter one. “I hope you realize it’s illegal, what you did. It’s a criminal offense. You could go to jail. All I need to do is report you. You sent me the photo, I’m sure the cops can trace your phone from that.” Although I’m not sure about that last part.
“I didn’t send it to you,” he says quickly. “He did.”
“Geoff?”
“Yes. He gave me his cell that night.”
“His cell?”
“Yeah, to take the photo with.”
Which is why I didn’t see it when I returned the next day and I scrolled through Ryan’s phone. It was never there in the first place.
I’m going to be sick. I sit there, fingernails digging into my palms. It’s amazing how you can go for years with an idea of someone. You might not know what they think of you exactly, but you have a firm idea of what kind of relationship you have, then one day you wake up and find out it’s completely different. Before Geoff cornered me in the storage cupboard the other day, I really, really thought he liked me—professionally, and yes, perhaps with a little, understood-not-to-be-acted-on flirting involved too. Realistic between colleagues who got on so well, I always thought.
Turns out he really, really hates me.
“Did he send you to the restaurant, too? That day you stood outside watching me?”
“No! I just happened to walk past and I saw you, with your kids and your husband, and I felt bad. I thought about going in to tell you what was really going on.”
I give a startled laugh. “You filed a sexual harassment complaint against me, Ryan. You can’t be feeling that bad.”
He looks puzzled. “I didn’t file a complaint. Why would I do that?”
“For the same reason you did everything else, because he asked you to.”
“No, no. He didn’t ask me to do that and I wouldn’t have done it if he had. He knows I’m out.”
I think about this for a moment. Suddenly, I wonder if Geoff made it up, and the more I think about it, the more I suspect that’s right. Surely complaints like that are handled by HR, not by another professor, even if he’s the chair. God. I’m such an idiot. I almost reach for my phone but realize it’s too late to call them now.
I think back through the weeks of torment he’s put me through. The scratch on my car, the text he sent me in the middle of my lecture. WHORE. Geoff thinks I’m a whore not because I had sex with him, but because I didn’t.