“I’m not really here for pleasure,” she said.
Nobells’s brow furrowed. The decade-plus had treated him well. The lines on his face had grown deeper, but they added to his charm. His hair was still thick and espresso with no grays; his stubble was still intoxicating. Cleo remembered how he used to kiss her with that stubble until her cheeks felt raw, how she’d slather on coconut oil the next morning to try to disguise how he had left his mark.
“Do you need legal advice?” he asked.
“No.” Cleo let the silence rest between them. She wanted him to squirm, to feel as off-kilter as she did, or as she had, especially that night with the roast chicken and the Italian merlot and with his wife and children out of town.
Cleo had still been uncertain about his intentions, even when they clinked their wineglasses and he pulled the chicken out of the oven and insisted on serving her. He led her to the dining table, pulled out her chair, then placed a linen napkin on her lap. It was so intimate that Cleo couldn’t meet his eyes when he asked her if she’d like a refill on her wine.
Dinner was exceptional, as promised: the chicken and warm rolls with butter and a salad with pears and pine nuts and a champagne dressing that he also made from scratch. For Cleo, who was used to eating microwavable macaroni and cheese or the remnants of whatever Lucas left on his high-chair tray, it was, honestly, a bit of a miracle. Like manna from the heavens.
They went through Cleo’s bottle of wine quickly. Even the next morning, back at home with Lucas, Cleo realized that they’d gone through it too quickly, and maybe if they hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been so reckless. But they had, and she couldn’t turn back time.
She stared at him now, all these years later, and remembered how his bedroom had smelled of cologne and of sex and also of waffles, which he whipped up for her at ten p.m., once she begged off staying the night (she had never spent a night apart from Lucas and had no intention of doing so even then), and in lieu of the breakfast he said he would have made. She could hear him singing along to Toto’s “Africa” while she was still tucked under his duvet, naked. And maybe that was the moment to get up and walk away—while he was cracking eggs and adding vanilla extract, only one mistake made rather than a hundred of them, but she was twenty-three and exhausted and had no way of knowing how far in over her head she was.
After dinner, Cleo was certainly drunk. She didn’t know if he were or not: she hadn’t been around many middle-aged men and really didn’t have any idea how many glasses of wine it took them to wobble their way to the couch. She certainly wobbled her own self over, plunked down, and wondered what on earth would happen next. She remembered feeling like a bystander in her own story, telling herself that if he kissed her, she’d allow it, and if he didn’t, she could leave without embarrassing herself. Of the list of many concerns that Cleo had in her life, embarrassing herself was certainly up there. Top three, perhaps.
But he joined her on the couch, his leg pressing against hers and then his arm slipping around her shoulders. He told her a story about how, in his days just out of law school, as a newbie clerk for a federal judge, he slept in his office some nights because he was so terrified of missing filing deadlines or otherwise disappointing his boss, and Cleo closed her eyes and imagined this superstar professor, who was shining all his attention now on her, as a young man not much older than she was. She hoped that he was sharing these words because he saw the same potential in her. Even in her wine-soaked haze, she could tap in to her ambition, how closely it was tied to her self-perception. She liked to think that’s what Nobells saw in her too: that she was on a rocket ship to the top, and honestly, though she thought he was sexy as hell, if he hadn’t invited her here, if he hadn’t stopped her after class and run his hand down her arm, if he hadn’t kept refilling her wineglass, she never, ever would have considered him anything more than a brilliant professor who was extremely easy on the eyes. Maybe she’d have hoped to be his summer associate that next summer. That would have been enough.
She planned to say all this, to make her intentions known. She wanted to be sure that he understood this about her: Cleo McDougal was a serious law student. She was a serious young woman. She demanded to be seen as such. And what she really wanted was his mentorship, his counsel. But then, just before he finished his story and she could press him on his intentions, she felt his hand on her chin, and he tilted her face just so, and then his lips were on hers, and she sank into the couch, and oh God, it had been so long since anyone had touched her other than Lucas that she let all the rest of it go.
Regret.
She filled up on his waffles and made it home to relieve the sitter by midnight.
Now, with hindsight, she could see how much easier it would have been to get up after that first glass of wine or after his roast chicken and walk out before it even started. But once it had, once he had kissed her and all that came after, extricating herself proved much more complicated. That was how regrets worked, she supposed, there in his office, with the heavy cloud of hindsight. It wasn’t the murky middle parts or even the earth-shattering consequences that you so often wished you could go back and redo. It was the inception, of stopping something even before it began, that you lingered on. That moment, that was the one to change—the one at the start before it all got messy.
She couldn’t, of course. So today, standing in front of him, she was left only with what she could do about it now.
She felt her voice catch in her throat, then regained it, as strong as she needed it to be.
“I came here to tell you that what you did with me was wrong.”
Nobells’s features pointed downward, as if she had posed a question. Which she had not.
“I don’t understand.”
Cleo knew that he did understand. Surely he had caught at least a little bit of the coverage of MaryAnne’s stupid but viral op-ed. Surely he knew that this would awaken old ghosts. Or maybe he just thought she’d never do anything about those ghosts because she’d let them go for so long. But he underestimated Cleo McDougal.
“What you did with me. Sleeping with me. Seducing me. That whole year. It was wrong. For a long time, I thought that it was a mutual . . .” Cleo shook her head. “And what you did to me afterward—”
He cut her off, now on his feet. “You were a consenting adult.”
“I was twenty-three. You were forty-three. You were my professor.” Cleo stood up taller, refusing to be cowed. “And that makes it wrong. It doesn’t have to be illegal to be wrong, Alex. And I want to know how many others.” She gestured to the couch. “How many other second-years did you invite to your office hours or bring into your home under the guise of offering a homemade meal and some counsel?”
“Cleo,” he started.
“Senator,” she corrected.
He pursed his lips together, refusing her request. “Ms. McDougal. I am sorry that you seem to have misinterpreted our situation from so many years ago. I cared very much for you, and I thought it was reciprocated. In fact, I am certain that it was.”
“I was your student.” Cleo kept her voice steady. She wouldn’t be called shrill or hysterical or emotional.
“And you were an adult. And I helped you.”
“It was an abuse of your position,” she said. “And I want to make sure that you haven’t done it since.” She paused. “And we both know that not only did you not help me, in fact, you later tried to do the opposite.”
His eyes flared wider at these two notions, the bold accusations that she came to level. But Cleo thought of Emily Godwin and also of herself when, just before the end of her second year, she saw Nobells on the street with his wife and two kids, and how he saw her too, and crossed to the other side as if she were an inconvenience or, worse, as if she were a distraught stalker who intended to blow up his life. She wasn’t and she hadn’t, and she found that more insulting than anything else. She had known the whole time that she didn’t love him. She didn’t expect him to leave Amy and the children
; she didn’t envision moving into his three-bedroom. She did, however, expect respect, and when he scurried down the street, fleeing past her as if they weren’t neighbors and this sort of thing might happen, and then he emailed her and said it would be for the best if their arrangement ended, well, that’s when Cleo McDougal realized what an insouciant piece of misogynistic garbage Alexander Nobells was. That after eight months, he’d peg her as a crazy stalker. That after eight months, she wasn’t worth more than an email. He added at the end of it that he was proud to be part of her story, to have contributed to her next chapters. And Cleo started to reply back: FUCK YOU, YOU DO NOT GET TO CLAIM OWNERSHIP OVER MY SUCCESS, but she decided that flaunting how wildly she would succeed without him was perhaps the best revenge. And she had.
It was only the next day that she got a second email—revoking her summer position at his firm. And then the third email, from the dean of the law school, who had offered to put her in touch with the New York attorney general, in case Cleo wanted to pursue that path, rescinding the offer, ostensibly under the guise that the AG was “underwater right now” and “perhaps we can revisit this down the road.” But Cleo knew they weren’t going to revisit it. And Cleo knew that Nobells had torched her.
And that’s when he went from being a philandering asshole to a vindictive one. So she had scrambled. All the summer positions were locked up by then, obviously. None of the big firms was hiring, and besides, they’d want to know why she’d been let go at the other one. She made phone call after phone call in her two-bedroom apartment, while Lucas slept or was at day care or toddled around in a Pull-Up singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and spilling Cheerios, until finally, because they sounded as desperate as she was, she landed an interview at a women’s health nonprofit. It paid next to nothing and was not the shining star she wanted for her résumé. But ironically, it pushed her into public service—it was gratifying in ways that reviewing briefs for law partners could never be, and it helped Cleo see that her privileged voice could perhaps help less-privileged ones. Her next step out of law school was running for Congress.
So maybe she had Alexander Nobells to thank for everything after all.
But she wouldn’t. Because he’d tried to cut her off at the knees, and she had risen to her feet anyway. So fuck him.
“How many others, Alexander?” Cleo felt bolder now, more like herself, not the version of her she had been in his shadow. More like the girl she had been at twenty-four, rising.
“None, Cleo, none.”
“I am a fucking senator, so you can address me as such,” she said, though she wished she hadn’t sworn, because she knew Bowen was behind her, doing what she’d asked.
“Calm down, please.” He moved to put his hands on her shoulders, just as he had so many years ago in the precipice of his classroom. Cleo was faster, though, and stepped aside. “Look, I can see that you are quite upset,” he offered.
“Don’t tell me that I am upset,” she said. “Don’t tell me to stay calm.”
“Well”—he opened his palms toward her—“it appears to me that you are very much upset.”
Cleo wasn’t surprised that he went for the overly emotional patronizing bullshit. He wasn’t the first man to be on the losing end of an argument to do so. He wasn’t even the hundredth, the thousandth.
“You tried to alienate me; you tried to wreck me.”
His voice dropped to a lower register, a menacing one. “You enjoyed yourself in my bedroom, Senator.”
“I was a twenty-three-year-old who was stunned that her professor took an interest.”
Nobells recalculated, softening. “What do you want from me? Amy left me three years ago. Are you here to seek revenge? To tell me that I was an unfaithful husband?”
Cleo thought of Jonathan Godwin. No, this wasn’t just about that. It was about protecting another second-year student who might not be as game when he ran his hand down her arm outside the classroom but felt obligated to accept his dinner invitation nonetheless; it was about stomping out the perversions of lecherous men preying on less-powerful women, making them appear as if they were equals, then rattling off an email eight months later letting them know that not only were they never equal, they were, in fact, disposable. And to add insult to figurative injury, maybe also believing he was responsible for these young women’s triumphs. But not too responsible, because now they were no longer employable. No. Fuck that.
“You were a piece-of-shit husband,” Cleo retorted. “But that was between the two of you. I’m here for your job. I’m here for your reputation.”
Nobells, on instinct, jumped closer to her, as if he were gearing up for a physical fight. Cleo didn’t flinch.
“You say one fucking word about any of this, and I will sue you for defamation faster than you can run a reelection poll,” he said.
“I thought I was the only one you ever did this with,” she replied, her voice even, her tone serene. “So what’s your concern?”
“Fuck you, Cleo.”
“Senator McDougal, Alex.”
He looked less handsome then, Cleo thought. His cheeks flushed, a little spittle in the corner of his mouth. Cleo wished that all the young women in his law classes could see him as he was, a panicked shell of himself. She cocked her head and thought he looked like a cornered, defanged reptile, hissing and quaking but without its teeth, unable to puncture her skin.
“Fuck you, Senator McDougal. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“You’re right, Alexander. It probably didn’t.” Cleo shrugged.
“If I read a word about this, you can expect a lawsuit.”
Just then, Bowen stepped out from his angle by the door, his phone aloft, his hand steady.
“Sorry, Professor,” he said. “Too late for that. We’ve already gone live.”
FOURTEEN
It had been Cleo’s idea—to livestream it on her Instagram account, with Bowen mentioning it in his own to direct more eyeballs (he had 300k to her 48k)—because she knew if she’d done it any other way, asked him to report it like a standard story, edit it, interview her, all the usual paces—she’d have lost her nerve, and addressing her regrets list couldn’t be done without complete commitment. (Bowen had insisted on fact-checking the whole thing on the train, and Cleo had come prepared—forwarded him the aftermath emails, had shown him her GPA and her Law Review accolades, and, of course, some of Nobells’s texts when he was still heady in lust. Those were, for better or worse, stored in the Cloud forever.) Still, though, she was shaking by the time they hit Amsterdam Avenue, and she actually had to stop and lean over, her palm flattened against the window of a Taco Bell just next to Greene Hall, to ward off the nerves that had presented in the form of an extremely angry bowel.
Bowen was rubbing her back, telling her to take deep breaths, and trying to be as comforting as possible without violating any of her personal space. They were friendly, the two of them, but they weren’t exactly friends, and he, unlike Nobells, had been raised in a generation where you didn’t touch a woman unless she really, really wanted you to. (Or unless you were an asshole. Plenty of those too.)
Cleo heard the notifications on his phone, dinging one after the other. She felt the vibrations of her own phone, a steady buzz in her back pocket.
“Don’t tell me what people are saying,” she muttered to him, still bent over, still palming Taco Bell. “It was the right thing to do. So . . . just don’t tell me, OK?”
“It’s not all bad . . . at all,” he said. He scrolled down with his thumb, one hand resting on her back, as if he were checking to ensure that she was still breathing. “Actually, a lot of it is quite good.”
“OK.” She righted herself. Felt a little less green. She hated that her body betrayed her like this. She didn’t want her stomach to collapse into a mosh pit of gaseous nerves every time her past resurfaced. Or every time she resurfaced her past. She’d worked her whole life to be tougher than anyone expected, to be less penetrable than anyone demanded. She ha
ted that these regrets made her more vulnerable, made her more porous. And yet now that she’d started down this path, she wanted to see it through. Even when it backfired, like making MaryAnne even angrier (though she was also beginning to see how she could have handled that one differently—this was not yet a perfectly oiled machine), like hearing Nobells threaten to sue. Maybe it was just that Cleo McDougal had never started anything that she hadn’t finished, or maybe it was because she really did believe that, at least for now, Nobells wasn’t going to touch another unsuspecting twenty-three-year-old, if he were so inclined, or box her out of a deserved position at his law firm, and what she lacked in power back then, she made up for now. And that had to be something.
“I could use a drink,” she said to Bowen, who was typing fairly frantically into his phone.
“What?”
“I could go for a drink.”
He stopped typing for a moment, looked toward her. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.” His phone buzzed again. “Oh shit. Here, this one’s for you.”
He held his screen in front of her, and Cleo squinted against the midday sun to read it. It was from Gaby in all caps.
Gabrielle: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, BOWEN?
. . .
. . .
Gabrielle: TELL CLEO TO CALL ME NOW.
Cleo did not call Gaby. She did not call her sister, who did not call herself because they did not have that type of relationship but indeed texted to express concerns for her mental health and please, could Cleo reply? She did not call Lucas, who had been sent the livestream from his friends and texted to say: WTAFuuuukkkkk? and so she banged out a reply that said: I’ll explain, I promise. She would. Once she got ahold of herself.
Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Page 18
