Page 55 of Thicker Than Water
“So Jason didn’t tell you about the office holiday party? The most recent one?”
I squint at her, trying to remember, but all I can conjure is a cozy image of me and Sienna. I’d been sick with a cold that night and decided at the last minute not to go to the Integrity Plus party. Instead, Sienna came over to take care of me, bringing me sugar cookies to dunk in my chicken soup, queuing up Christmas movies we could fall asleep to.
“What about it?” I ask.
Maeve’s discomfort is obvious. Her hands fidget in her lap, like she’s knitting without any needles. “I got really drunk. Drunker than I’d normally get at an office party. But I’d heard some bad news a few hours before, about my aunt who’s sick. I wasn’t in the best place.”
She flattens her palms against her legs. “I’d been hanging out with Jason for most of the night—as friends. We were just friends. And we were joking about how sloppy I was getting. Spilling my drink. Knocking over napkins. It was so unlike me that it was funny, at first. But… laughing with Jason is the last thing I remember. Because the next thing I know, it’s morning, and I’m lying in my bed.”
“Jason took you home?” Against my will, I picture it: Jason’s palm on Maeve’s back as he guides her inside; Jason easing her into bed, tucking her in so tenderly—the way he does with me, nights when I doze on the couch and he carries me to our room.
“No.” Maeve’s eyes harden—lead between her lashes. “Gavin did.”
I frown. “Gavin?”
“That’s what I found out the next day, from Jason. I was blackedout, which hasneverhappened to me before. But I guess Jason went to the bathroom, and when he came back, I was gone. He said he asked people where I went, and they told him Gavin had noticed I was a mess and decided to drive me home.”
Her hands squirm on her lap again, playing with their invisible yarn. Her expression turns stormy, like she’s stuck in the darkness of a memory—or the lack of one.
“My boss,” she says, gaze drifting toward the wall, “who sexually harassed me in an empty warehouse. He drove me home.”
“Wait.” Horror skitters up my spine. “Are you saying— Did Gavindosomething to you? While you were blacked out?”
“I don’t remember.” Her voice is eerily flat. She stares at something I can’t see. “All I know is, when I woke up, I was still in the dress and tights I wore to the party.” She blinks hard, as if forcing the movement. Her eyes return to mine, glinting with determination. “Which would mean he didn’t, right?”
I open my mouth, shake my head slowly, relieved when she continues without an answer.
“When Jason called and filled me in about Gavin driving me home, he asked if Gavin had hurt me at all—and I told him the truth: I didn’t even remember getting home. And Jason started freaking out. He said he’d noticed Gavin watching me throughout the party, and he thought I got drunk much quicker than I should have, given the number of drinks I’d had. He was suddenly so worried Gavin had slipped something into my drink, he wanted me to geta tox screen.”
“Did you?”
“No. I had a massive hangover; I wasn’t getting out of bed for anything. And honestly, I thought Jason was being paranoid. Because, in a weird way, that incident with Gavin in the warehouse seemed to affect Jason more than me. He couldn’t get past it. He obsessed over it—like I said before, he gave me the loan because ofit. And now he had it in his head that Gavin might’ve been biding his time at the party, waiting for Jason to leave my side so he could swoop in and…”
She swallows down the end of her sentence.
“But I told Jason that, to the best of my knowledge, that did not happen. As far as I knew, I got in bed safely, and alone. But he wasconvincedsomething happened that I couldn’t remember. For weeks afterward, he kept asking me, over and over, exactly what I remembered, if any details of that night had come back.”
I bite my lip. What was Jason thinking? It’s an invasive question to ask even once, let alone multiple times.
“It was like he was desperate to do something about it if his suspicions were true,” Maeve adds.
My tongue goes dry, sticking on one phrase in particular. “Do something about it?”
“I eventually had to tell him to drop it, because now he was freaking me out. I started having trouble sleeping. I’d lie in bed,shivering, because Jason’s theory forced me to entertain a… fucking traumatizing idea.”
Her hands keep moving, knitting at nothing on her knees. Her shoulders are hiked toward her ears, but as she takes a deep breath, they begin to settle, relax. Her fingers go still.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t like thinking about that. Obviously.”
I wave off the apology, my mind leaping to Sienna. The story is similar to one of hers—how, after Clive Clayton touched her at that party, his fingers raking over her even as she tried to push him away, she struggled to sleep, struggled to simply close her eyes, because always, on the back of her lids, was the image of what might have happened if Jason hadn’t intervened.
“But now that more time has gone by,” Maeve says, “it’s become harder for me to believe Gavin did do something. Not because he’ssome upstanding guy or whatever—we know he’s a creep—but it seems like I’d feel it, you know? Like, even though my mind can’t remember, it seems like my body would.”
She pauses, her gaze rising toward mine, tentative. “Don’t you think?”
Sienna once told me that the memory of Clive’s hands was like worms on her skin. She could feel them crawling there, maggoty, insatiable, months and years later. But what do our bodies record when our minds are tucked away? I think of Jason, miles from me in his hospital bed. When he finally wakes up, will his hand remember how many times I held it this week? Will it remember that I let it go?
“I don’t know,” I tell Maeve.
