Finding Emma

by K. Ryan

  Finn

  I knew something was wrong the moment Emma opened her apartment door. It was written all over her gorgeous face—there was a weariness, a tiredness there I wasn’t used to seeing and I reached for her before I could stop myself. I tugged her into my arms, reveling in the feeling of her smooth skin against my cheek, her warm breath on my shoulder, and her perfume that smelled like musk and sunlight and honey.

  I could say I’d missed her, but that would be like saying water is wet. Or that the Seahawks really didn’t get that touchdown back in 2012—it was an interception, dammit. Everybody and their mother knows that.

  “Em,” I murmured into her hair, breathing it in and knotting my hands in its softness. “You okay?”

  Of course she wasn’t okay, but I had to start somewhere, you know?

  “I will be,” she whispered. “I think I will be. Do you wanna come in?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Unfortunately, that meant I also had to take my hands off her for the time being and I begrudgingly slipped my hands down from around her waist to shove them into my front pockets.

  I got my hands in my pockets and I’m crossing my fingers.

  I guess I was always going to feel that way around Emma...out of sorts, a little out of my mind, tossed in the scatter. Man, maybe it was time I switched it up and listened to more than just Kings of Leon for a while. No. I couldn’t believe I just went there. If Taylor Swift—good God—spoke to Emma, then Caleb Followill and the rest of his dysfunctional family spoke to me. I’d never turn my back on them.

  Emma just had a way of making normal things like brain functioning short circuit. When I was with her, I just didn’t see anything else. I just didn’t think about anything else. She’d needled her way under my skin, burrowing deep until I’d forgotten where I ended and she began. I’d only known her for two weeks, but it felt like years. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel in a month or six months or a year or…

  I’d never known these kind of deep-rooted, soul-jerking feelings could seep in so quickly—a kick in the balls and a shot in the arm all at the same time. It was like my eyes locked on her and my heart went, “Oh, there you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.” It didn’t make much sense to me and I guess it didn’t have to either.

  I wasn’t quite ready to throw that L-word out there. Maybe, though. Maybe when the time was right.

  When I finally stepped through the door of her apartment and little contraband with his huge plastic cone came running at me, the bell on his collar tinkling, it was weird how much this apartment felt more like mine than, well, mine. I’d only spent one night here on the couch and already, I’d maneuvered around, figured out where everything was and how everything worked, and pretty much made myself at home. The couch wasn’t quite as comfortable as I might have liked and the temptation to peek inside her bedroom was a little too enticing, but what else was I supposed to do?

  I wasn’t planning on stepping foot inside Emma’s bedroom until I was asked, or at the very least, shown the way.

  “Hey there, RB,” I greeted the cat and bent down to scratch the top of his head.

  His little white chest jumped a little at the contact and a pathetic mew sounded from his throat. It really was too bad...everything was just a tiny bit more lower pitched before he’d gotten his balls lasered off. Now, all that talking back was high and whiny. Ugh—just the thought of that had me reaching for my package with a wince.

  Now, though, as Emma trailed into her living room, my focus was all on her. Something was up. I liked to believe I knew her well enough by now to be clued into her moods and the neuroses I think she’d rather pretend didn’t exist. That was pretty much why I’d all but forced her hand with the Packer game in two weeks—she needed a little push, but I couldn’t push her too hard.

  If I pushed too hard, I’d lose her.

  But when Emma set her computer down in front of me, gesturing towards it like I was somehow supposed to know what she wanted me to do with it, my brain couldn’t really follow through with its normal functioning.

  Emma swallowed tightly and rested a light hand on my forearm. “Hey, Finn?”

  “Yeah, Em?”

  “You know how I said we needed to go slow?”

  I frowned down at her. “Yeah.”

  “I’m ready to tell you why now.”

  All I could really do was just stare dumbly back at her. I gestured towards her computer, which was open to a Google search, its cursor blinking up and down manically. “What does this have anything to do with it?”

  The edges of her lips lifted up, but it wasn’t really a smile. “Google me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she gestured to the computer again. “Google me.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Like the plague, Finn.”

  I blew out a deep breath, eyeing her carefully. God knew where she was going with this, but who was I to question her methods? And even though I had a sinking feeling this wasn’t heading anywhere but bad, the kind of place that would make me need to hit something, throw something, or scream at something, I did as I was told and typed the words Emma Owens in the Google search she’d already set up for me.

  I hit the search button and waited, not knowing what, exactly, I was waiting for. There were a lot of ways this could play out—there was obviously some secret, something she didn’t want me to know. Any idiot with half a brain could’ve told me that. The cageyness, the way she skirted around the subject of her life in Hickory—all signs pointed to some sort of bombshell I wasn’t going to like.

  But when my eyes finally landed on the pictures that popped up from that Google search...I don’t know what I’d been expecting. It wasn’t this. It definitely wasn’t this.

  My blood ran cold and my mouth dried up like I’d just swallowed a fistful of sand. Tingles of ice slivered down my body, making the hair on my arms stand on end.

  Picture after picture...Emma—so much younger than the Emma standing tensely next to me with her baby-faced cheeks and wavy hair flowing all the way down her back—God, Emma.

  Emma straddling a pillow in a pair of bra and panties. Emma topless, lying on a bed, both hands drifting lower to the edge of her panties, oozing sex and desire at the camera. Emma cupping herself with both hands, arching her back up against the bed. Emma completely nude, legs open wide, sharing something that only a few people—people she chose—should be able to see.

  I scrubbed my eyes with both hands and hoped that would be enough to make this go away. This wasn’t how I’d wanted it to happen. Too many days and nights I’d spent daydreaming and fantasizing about what she’d look like when she was ready to let me in, ready to shred both her insecurities and her clothes for me, ready to share the intimacy I knew we both wanted when she was ready.

  But this wasn’t the way I’d wanted to finally see her. This wasn’t just for me. Some motherfucker had done this to her...and then white-hot burning rage splintered through the shock and the horror of what I was seeing.

  I wanted to tear her computer to pieces and smash every last scrap into dust. I wanted to flip over her kitchen table. I wanted to rip this counter top off and smash it into the wall. I wanted to scream for her. I wanted to cry for her. And most importantly, I wanted to hunt down the piece of shit responsible for this and tear him apart limb by bloody limb.

  “Wha…” I couldn’t even form one coherent word, let alone a full sentence. “I don’t…”

  Emma’s aquamarine eyes shone with unshed tears and she shook her head. “I know. It’s a lot to take in. I can explain—”

  “You don’t have to explain shit to me, Em,” I growled.

  Her eyes widened and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t sit here, in this kitchen, with the most perfect, beautiful, and kind-hearted woman I’d ever met in my life and continue to look at those pictures. My fist closed over the top of her computer and I slammed it shut, shoving it back at her. Just the idea of
what still lingered on that screen, of what I’d seen, I didn’t know if I could handle it.

  Both hands clasped the edge of the counter and I leaned all the way back, desperate to clear my lungs and my head. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get through this without throwing open her door and hunting down someone to murder painfully and slowly.

  “You remember how I told you about my ex-fiancé? The one I had the pregnancy scare with and then I called it off?”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to do much else.

  “He posted those pictures to Twitter, emailed them to my family, all my friends, my principal, and sent them to just about every online porn site you can think of.”

  What. The. Fuck.

  My face must’ve said it all because she jumped to continue.

  “He was mad about our break-up and my reasons for it, obviously, and I guess I could’ve handled it better. I could’ve been nicer, more sensitive to his feelings—”

  “Don’t make excuses for that fucker,” I bit out hoarsely. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She smiled tightly. Neither of us were convinced by it. “Didn’t I?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Emma lifted a shoulder and stared down at her feet for a long moment. “I took those pictures for him when I was 19—”

  “Em,” I told her desperately, my fingertips grazing her arm. “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

  “No,” she shook her head, but didn’t shy away from my touch. “I want to. I want you to know. You deserve to know and I want to be honest with you, Finn. I don’t want to keep this from you anymore.”

  When she put it like that, the logic was difficult to argue with. So, with my hand planted firmly on her shoulder to remind her that I was here and that I wasn’t going anywhere, she delved into the rest of it.

  “I was trying to be sexy for him, you know?” she smiled wistfully and took a moment to breath in and breath out. “We’d just started dating and he was only the second person I’d ever been with. He was a year older, so somehow I thought that meant he was more experienced, wiser, too. I didn’t think anything of it when I did it all those years ago. I thought I was going to be with him forever. I thought he was my soul mate. And...he just wasn’t. And that wasn’t my fault either.”

  “No, Em,” I murmured, my thumb rubbing circles soothingly into her shoulder. “It wasn’t.”

  “He posted those pictures a week after we broke up. I hadn’t heard from him since then, but I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was too busy looking forward to my future, to all the things I’d be able to do that I never would’ve been able to do if I’d stayed with him, and he’d already taken it all away before I even realized it.”

  She sighed heavily and lifted her eyes to me for just a second before finding the counter again.

  “When he tweeted them, he made sure to include one of our school’s hashtags so everyone in the school would eventually see it. I had no idea. I just showed up for school that day thinking it would just be any old Monday. You know how you asked me once about the worst thing a kid ever did in my class?”

  I nodded tightly, my hands clenched around the edge of the counter.

  “Literally five minutes after I realized what was going on, I went back to my classroom, thinking I would actually be safe there for a little while. Someone had written, ‘slut’, in big red letters all the way across my whiteboard. I got called to the office not even a minute later, sat down with the principal, and got let go about ten minutes after that.”

  Holy shit.

  “It’s not like I had much of a leg to stand on, you know? By then, it seemed like everyone in the school—the students, teachers, librarians, secretaries, janitors, everyone—they’d all seen everything they needed to see and already knew everything they needed to know. And then the rumors started. The comments started. The memes and the videos. All of it. You know, I actually threw up in the bathroom right after I first saw the pictures and then all of a sudden, there was a rumor going around that I was pregnant, too, and then when everyone realized that I wasn’t, in fact, pregnant, that I’d had an abortion instead. How’s that for irony?”

  I shook my head, unable to sift through the torrential horror Emma had just laid at my feet. Maybe if I shook my head enough, the motion would somehow shake out the images, the story, and the devastation of what all this had meant for her life. Everything clicked now—her move to Milwaukee, the need for a fresh start, the reason why she just didn’t seem to have any real friends here beyond a stray cat, the reason she’d holed herself up in her apartment with wine, music, and her blog as an excuse to hide, her evasion of social situations, the cageyness and skittishness in those early days of our relationship—it all made sense now. And I absolutely couldn’t blame her.

  Now, the only coherent thought I could pin down long enough to growl was: “Please tell me that asshole is in jail for doing this to you.”

  She blew out a hard breath and I knew the answer before she even said the words. “There weren’t any laws...nothing anyone could charge him with. Those pictures went up in February last year and there was no actual legislation signed into law until April. They couldn’t charge with a crime after the fact, you know?”

  My hands clenched around the edge of the countertop until they turned white. My stomach churned, but I needed to put my fist through something more.

  “So, you’re telling me that nothing happened to him? Nothing?”

  Emma rubbed the side of her neck and grimaced. “Well...the day he posted the pictures, my brother hunted him down, dragged him out of work, and beat him up. Noah got arrested, Justin pressed charges—I’m sure you’re not shocked by that—and Noah did two months for assault.”

  “I think I like your brother already,” I mumbled under my breath, but Emma’s head shook furiously from side to side.

  “That was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t need anyone going to jail for me, getting hurt because of me—”

  “That asshole deserved a hell of a lot more than what he got,” I snapped back.

  “I was talking about my brother. He sat in a cell for 60 days, paid thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and—”

  “He made a choice, Emma,” I argued hotly. “He was defending you.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but shut it just as quickly. Finally, after a long moment of awkward silence, she finally spoke again. “All Noah did was just make everything worse.”

  I wanted to argue, but what was the point? My heart tore at the seams, ripped apart and tumbled to the floor in a tangled mess at my feet. She didn’t think she deserved any defense. That’s what she really meant. She thought she deserved it—the shame, the humiliation, the loss of her job, the loss of her privacy...I didn’t know how to even begin to wrap my head around that.

  “So, basically,” I clarified incisively, my fingers curling around the counter top to keep myself from latching onto the first thing I could find to smash. “You’re telling me that your ex ruined your life, your career, and your reputation and he’s the victim here? All because your brother beat him up, which he deserved and then some, and that somehow makes it all okay? No charges, no jail time, no fines, no public indictment...nothing.”

  Emma winced at the bite in my words, but I couldn’t apologize for the harsh delivery. There were only a few people who’d earned my unadulterated rage, enough to the point where I’ve wanted to cause actual, possibly even fatal bodily harm: the punk who beat Sling up my sophomore year of college all because Sling ‘looked at him funny’, the prick I’d caught Claire with in our bed, Brandon Bostick when he missed that goddamned onside kick, and now, Emma’s bastard of an ex.

  When she just lifted a shoulder helplessly, I scratched at my beard for lack of anything better to do with my hands. I wanted to pull her to me, but didn’t know how she’d take that right now. I wanted to smash her computer into the countertop, but I knew exactly how she’d take that right no
w. Finally, my brain managed to pinpoint a logical question.

  “Why are those pictures still out there, Em?”

  She pushed out a shaky breath and glanced at me with that smile that was more like a wince. “It’s not as simple as you might think. After a little while and a lot of begging on my part, Justin deleted the pictures from his account, but they’d already been online for a week. That was more than enough time for any sites that he hadn’t emailed to pick them up and post them and anyone else to at least download them.”

  “But there are companies that specialize in this shit, right? Ones that can clean all that up?”

  “Sure,” Emma just shrugged. “I did that as soon as I was coherent enough to start making some decisions and not even five hours later, they were all all out there again. I think every student and their mother had at least one picture downloaded to something by the end of the first day, let alone week. I tried a different web service about a week later and it was the same thing. Noah and Cristina did it too, same result. After a little while, I think Justin started to feel bad enough to realize what he’d done to my life and he tried to have all the pictures removed. He even went as far as emailing the porn sites he’d originally sent the pictures to, but it was the same thing. At a certain point, there’s only so much money you can spend on something that you know is only going to matter for days, maybe a few weeks if you’re lucky.”

  I wasn’t going to dignify her asshole ex’s lame attempt at fixing the damage he’d done.

  “But, I mean, there are other things you can do, aren’t there? Some kind of law out there about online sexual harassment...something?”

  Emma winced at the words sexual harassment, but that’s what it was. All I’d done was state the facts. She sighed heavily and I reached up to wipe a stray tear from her cheek.

  “We tried claiming copyright on the pictures since I was technically the owner. I took them, I sent them, so they should be mine, right?”

  I nodded. That sounded about right to me. The only people who should’ve ever seen them were people she chose to see them.