Reality

Chapter 25

Climbing out of my bed, I pad across my room and out into the hallway, making sure to softly close the door behind me so Alex can sleep. He's finally getting some rest after all that's happened to him the past few days, sleeping for nearly ten hours straight now.

I walk out to the living room, standing in the middle of it with my hands on my hips, feeling anxious and restless. Spotting our suitcases in the corner, I kneel down in front of mine, itching to do something to make myself feel useful and find some sort of distraction from my taunting thoughts. I roughly tug at the zipper, pulling it around the border, and it whines out sharply in the silence, causing me to flinch and slow down my movements.

Sitting on the floor, I pull out everything from my suitcase one by one, making two piles of clothes: worn and unworn. After separating the two, I stare at the piles of clothes for a long time before just scooping them both up in my arms and shoving them in the washing machine, programming it to the correct settings.

Feeling exhausted but wired, I sit down on the floor in front of the washing machine, watching the clothes spin around the circumference. In a trance, I bring my knees up to my chest, trying to focus on the hum of the machine, but not even that can silence all the thoughts in my head and the gut wrenching feeling in my stomach.

After Addison showed up to Alex's condo last night, I felt like my whole world came crashing down on me. Scratch that—the whole world came crashing into me, like a sudden blind head on collision, knowing my name once again but for a totally different reason this time.

Before I was just Addison's assistant, but now the whole world knows me as a whore, a homewrecker, a... mistress.

Feeling sick, I let out a groan, flopping down onto my back and covering my face with my hands.

Even though it's only been a few hours, everything has gotten worse. Much worse. More "incriminating" photos have come out of me with Mike—some photo shopped to make us look closer than we actually were. And then there are the low quality pictures of him walking out of clubs with dark haired girls that could pass as me from a distance, and of course the media is playing them off as me. Then, to top it all off, there's the "inside sources" that give details all about our supposed affair.

Alex hasn't seen any of this yet. It all came out this morning around ten o'clock, and I didn't have the heart to wake him and show him. He's had enough on his plate the past couple of days, and I'm not going to disrupt his first few hours of real sleep after being mental and physically drained and beyond exhausted.

I feel my eyes start to burn, and I mentally curse myself. I need to stop crying dammit. I need to stop worrying over it. But how do you even begin to not worry when the whole world views you as a mistress? It would be one thing if this was some silly high school rumor floating around. I could handle that, but this is the whole world—millions of people I don't know— we're talking about, hearing a nasty and completely untrue rumor about me.

Hot, angry tears spill from the corner of my eyes and run down my temples and into my ears. I feel so embarrassed and helpless, like a sitting target, knowing there's nothing I can really do. It's not like I can just go out and release a public statement to make everything better. No matter what I say or do, the media will always twist it around and paint me out to be a bad person. So much damage is already done that I can't even bring myself to try to fix things, and it's beyond frustrating knowing that even if I did try to fix everything not everyone would believe me anyway. I'd just be wasting my breath and drawing more unnecessary attention to myself.

The washing machine's loud whirling and slight thumping fades, and I hear the drum drain before the machine beeps out, signaling that the washing cycle is done. I realize that means I've been laying on the floor for fifty minutes, but now I don't even have the energy to get up and switch the load to the dryer.