I smile to myself, sipping my wine because I know exactly what’s coming. “Go on. You won’t offend me.”
“Okay.” He takes a sip of his own wine, licking off the small residue on his lips before pinning me with his intense blue eyes. “I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful at all. I think the work you do is noble and critical and there should be more people like you out there.”
“But,” I cajole.
“But why are you a nurse?”
“You mean why am I a nurse instead of a doctor like the rest of my family or why am I a nurse when I come from a family of billionaires?”
He nods. “Yes. All of it.”
“Well, like I said, all of my family, with the exception of my mother who runs our family foundation, are doctors. It’s just what the Fritz’s do. My brothers are like fifth-generation doctors or something, going back to Germany and then here when they left to avoid the Nazis. It’s really not a thought in our lives. Kaplan, my eldest brother, will eventually run the Abbot Foundation after my mother retires.”
“Okay. I get all that. But you’re dodging my question.”
I am. And given everything that’s happened in the last week, there is a reason behind it.
I talk about Harrison stalking me. The very basics of it anyway.
My friends all know. That part is not a secret. I’m also well aware that the wrong secret can become a plague. A necrosis on your soul.
But I don’t talk about that night. About the things that happened.
Yes, my family knows and what they don’t know they guess at. I also spoke to therapists after it happened. Same with Savannah and London. It’s not that I’m pretending it didn’t happen. Or that I’m avoiding my own reality. It’s just that in thinking about it, in talking about it, I relive it. Still. Regardless of all the therapy and work I did.
It never gets easier.
So I stopped talking about it. Besides, it’s one thing for your friends to know you had a stalker and now you’re cautious about men and dating. What happened to me is another thing altogether. It’s also not anyone else’s business.
It doesn’t stop me from living my life, because I don’t let it, and that’s what’s important.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel the aftereffects and act cautiously. I developed a level of OCD that comes and goes as a way to preserve my checks and balances. This time of year it’s obviously worse. Finding out his father has been calling me has added to it. And that’s the part that bothers me. The tapping, the counting, the trivia facts, they’re a self-soothing mechanism more than anything else. A way to keep my brain occupied on something other than my fear. They’re part of what got me through that night when I thought nothing could. I counted. I tapped. I recited useless facts in my head. It’s obviously carried over and I know it makes my family nervous. But the double, triple, quadruple checking my drawers, locks, and cameras is different.
That ensures I’m safe and that’s not something I’m willing to part with.
“You want to know why I’m a nurse and not a doctor.”
“Yes,” he answers, though it wasn’t a question.
I finish off my glass of wine and set it down on the coffee table, shifting a little so I’m tucked tighter under the blanket. “It’s not a pretty story.”
“Life rarely is.”
“Aria already knows. You could just ask her.”
He shakes his head, his eyes burning into mine the way they have been all night as we’ve gone back and forth. Talking so much I’m shocked my voice still works. “I want to hear it from you.”
I shrug like it’s no big deal. And I guess at the heart of it, it isn’t. I could just give him the, ‘I wanted to be something different than my family BS,’ but for some reason, I want Brecken to know. I want him to understand me.
“I had always thought about being a nurse instead of a doctor. Any time I went to visit my dad at work, the nurses were always nice to me. Always on the floor or in the OR making the place run. Always smiling and helping people. I asked my dad once why anyone would be a nurse when they could be a doctor. He told me that was the key. That anyone could be a doctor, but only someone truly special could do what a nurse does. That kinda sold me. But I’m a Fritz, so as a freshman at Columbia I started out premed. That was also when I met Harrison Bishop.”
“Bishop,” he parrots like he’s testing the name on his tongue for familiarity.
“His father is Bishop Energy.”
“Ah. Okay. Their stock has been all over the place over the last few years.”
A bark of a humorless laugh flees my lungs. “Oh, I bet it has.”
His brows knit together in confusion, but he stays silent.
“Harrison and I started dating, although he was a senior and I was a freshman. He saw me at a party at his fraternity house, we talked, he took me out on a date the next night, and that was it. We were serious after about a week. Our families were in heaven over it as you can imagine. Harrison was set to inherit Bishop Energy, and I was going to become a Fritz doctor. All was perfect. For about six months.”
“Then what happened?” he prompts when I fall silent, my mind wandering back to places I wish it would never go again.
“Harrison had always been possessive, and I would have been lying if I said at first I didn’t love that. I was young and I thought his brand of possession meant he loved me and wanted to take care of me. Slowly his not wanting me to go out with my friends or be separated from him or talk to any other guys—even just my friends—became suffocating. And when I spoke with him about this, he pushed me even harder. To the point where he’d magically show up at the same bar or club or restaurant if I was out with my friends.
“I was set to go to Aspen with my girlfriends for spring break and he threw a fit about it. Demanded that I either not go or he come with me. I told him no and broke up with him. I had had enough by that point. He came to Aspen anyway, followed me around, demanded I come back to him. He even caused a scene in a restaurant and almost got arrested.”
Brecken’s turbulent eyes haven’t left mine, nor has he moved an inch. Hell, I’m not sure he’s breathed since I started telling him. I hear him swallow as he forces himself to blink. “Please, go on.” he whispers, his voice hoarse and reluctant, but there is an edge to his tone he’s trying desperately to conceal. It doesn’t take a genius to see where this story is going.
“I told him I was done and that I never wanted to see him again. Then things started missing from my dorm room. Things like a random pair of panties and my shampoo from my shower caddy. At first, I didn’t think much about it. I lived in a dorm and I had a roommate and things just go missing sometimes. But then my perfume was gone. A few of my shirts, especially the ones I slept in. I came home one day to find the contents of my drawers ransacked. My textbooks everywhere. The items in my desk emptied onto my bed and weeded through.”
“Did you ever tell anyone what was going on? Go to the police and file a complaint?”
“I confronted him first. Demanded he stop and leave me the hell alone. When I started catching him following me around campus, I told my parents he was terrorizing me. They brushed it off, saying he was just a guy in love trying to win me back, but that they’d speak with his father about it since they had become friends. I think they were afraid of what me filing a restraining order would do. Of the potential media storm. They were trying to protect me or maybe just trying to protect our family name. I was naïve, and I listened when they told me it would stop. I even confronted Harrison again and that time he promised to back off.”