The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Like Stella was last night?” Felicity asked.

Taylor peered at us from beneath a furrowed brow, her eyes guarded.

“It was the first night we arrived, before you all got here. I woke up the next morning all sandy and wet in my bed with his shirt on the bedside table, and I didn’t remember anything. He said I’d gotten super wasted and tried to fuck him, but promised me we hadn’t actually done it.”

“That asshole,” Felicity fumed.

“Are you sure it’s his?” I asked.

Again she nodded. “There hasn’t been anyone else. Well—there hadn’t been. There is now, but it’s new, and we haven’t slept together.”

“Rick,” I sang gleefully, and Felicity gave me a sharp glance.

Taylor nodded, staring up at the bas-relief wood Buddha on the wall. “I guess that’s over now. I already had to cancel going out with him tonight.”

“Last night wasn’t the first time Cole drugged me,” I admitted. “He did it once years ago, when we were married.”

Both girls gaped at me.

Veins of lightning shot across the sky out over the water as I dragged my mind for yet another sordid detail of our relationship I’d buried under an avalanche of drugs and therapy. “I’d been on a juice cleanse. I hadn’t even had a drink. I was so confused when I woke up naked with no memory of the night before…I knew we’d had rough sex because I was sore, but also because I was on my period and our bed looked like a small animal had been sacrificed—sorry, TMI. I couldn’t understand it; I would’ve had sex with him, done whatever nasty thing he wanted. I confronted him, and he laughed it off, saying he’d thought it was hot to fuck me while I was asleep. When I balked, he gave me a lecture about what a judgmental prude I’d become.”

Felicity’s eyes narrowed as though trying to understand something much more complicated than what I was saying, while Taylor furrowed her brow, disturbed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s…awful. I’m so sorry.”

“I later found out it was kind of his thing,” I went on. “He had a fetish, or whatever, for having sex with women while they were asleep. He’d hire hookers and consensually drug them, then have sex with them when they were passed out.”

“He did this while you were married?” Taylor asked, aghast.

“And you knew about it?” Felicity piled on.

Reluctantly, I nodded. I couldn’t believe I was confessing this to them, but the cat was out of the bag. “You have to understand, it was nearly fifteen years ago, long before #metoo or #timesup or any of that, and the circle we ran with at the time—people were into some weird shit. We had so much money and fame—everything at such a young age, people wanted more; they’d go to extremes to feel something. My arrangement with Cole was less than ideal, but it was part of who he was and I’d married him. Still, I didn’t want him doing that stuff to me. The girls were clean and he paid them well; they knew what they were in for. Consenting adults. I figured that was better than the alternative—what happened to you.”

Taylor picked at her cuticles, nodding slowly. “It makes sense now. I’d found his explanation hard to believe, but…” She wiped the tears that spilled from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I feel so violated. And I’m so mad at myself. It’s like I’m two completely different people—professionally I’ve got my shit together, but personally I’m a fucking mess, and my personal shit gets in the way of my professional life and now I’m completely screwed and freaking pregnant and without this job working for a guy who raped me, I have nothing, and I just…” Her chest heaved. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“This is not your fault,” Felicity said.

We put our arms around her as she broke down sobbing. “It’s gonna be okay,” I soothed. “At least you weren’t arrested high on ketamine, half-naked and throwing pickle jars at bystanders in a Hollywood grocery store.”

Taylor almost laughed through her tears as the picture on the television switched to a radar image of our corner of the Caribbean. The colorful patch of storm activity currently hovering over our island paled in comparison to the ominous splotch of angry red surrounded by yellow and green that seethed out in the Atlantic to the east of us. Felicity grabbed the remote and unmuted the volume.

“…tropical disturbance east of Barbados in the southern Caribbean has formed a tropical depression,” said the weathercaster in the yellow dress. “We are currently issuing a storm watch for the area in red.” Another map popped up, showing a swath of red over the long chain of islands that included ours. “This is a fast-moving depression, and there is a real possibility it could quickly turn into a tropical storm, though it’s too early to accurately predict a path for the storm. Stay tuned as conditions develop.”

The screen returned to the radar image of the storm as she went on about the early start to hurricane season this year. “Rick did say the unusual warmth of the water meant a hurricane was likely,” Taylor said. She took a ragged breath and dried her tears on her sleeve. “I’ve gotta go talk to Price and Jackson.”

“But your food,” I protested.

“We’ll send it to your bungalow when it comes,” Felicity said.

“Thank you,” she said, rising. “For everything. And please, please don’t tell anyone what I told you.”

“Of course,” we answered in unison.

As we shut the door behind her, a flame of renewed fear flickered to life inside of me. I’d narrowly avoided Jackson shutting down the production this morning after I was drugged; if a hurricane were to hit, the film would be over, taking with it my career.

Felicity saw my sudden shift in mood and squeezed my shoulders. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said, echoing my words to Taylor.

But her voice was