Before You

by Jenna Bennett

  I squinted at him. “You know a lot about this.”

  “Let’s just say I study pharmacology.”

  “Does Georgetown have a program for pharmacology?”

  “Probably,” Ty said. “They have a program for everything else.”

  I squinted at him. “I guess this is one of those things you can’t tell me.”

  “Afraid so.” He got up from the edge of the bed and tossed my jeans at me. “C’mon. Get ready.”

  “Can’t I at least have clean clothes?”

  “Easier to wear those,” Ty said, “since they were what you were wearing last night. The police will want a look. Pack a change, though. For after.”

  I didn’t ask him ‘after what.’ I had a feeling I knew.

  “I suppose a shower is out.”

  “And washing. And brushing your teeth. And peeing. The hospital lab will want a urine sample. But you can do it all later.”

  He headed for the door. “I’ll give you some privacy to get ready. Meet me in the lobby in five minutes. I’ll arrange a ride.”

  “Don’t leave on my account,” I told his back. “You already saw my underwear last night, didn’t you?”

  He shot me a grin over his shoulder. “I did. Nice color.” He winked.

  I was still blushing when the door closed behind him.

  THE RIDE he arranged turned out to be a cop car with an impassive young officer behind the wheel. It wasn’t Stan. It wasn’t anyone I’d seen so far, or if I had, I hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t say a word on the drive through town, just gazed out the windshield while he maneuvered the car through the crowded streets.

  It wasn’t a long drive. We ended up at a women’s clinic not too far from Richardson’s Motel. The cop let us out without a word, and when I thanked him for the ride, he simply touched the brim of his hat and nodded.

  “Are you staying?” I asked Ty when the car had driven away.

  He shook his head. “Something I gotta do.”

  So he was just going to leave me here?

  He must have seen the thought on my face, because he smiled. “Detective Fuentes is on his way. He’ll wanna talk to you.”

  “But I don’t remember anything!” I protested.

  “Just tell him what you told me. You’ll be fine.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  I wanted him to come inside with me. I really did. I was a bit nervous about the whole thing, to be honest. Not so much about being interrogated by Enrique Fuentes—although that was a bit scary too—but about the whole examination thing.

  Not that they’d let Ty be there for that.

  Not that I’d want him there while they were poking and prodding my privates.

  If anything was less likely to make a guy want to sleep with a girl afterward, I imagine it would be watching her go through a pelvic exam, complete with rape kit.

  But a little bit of support going through the door would be nice, even if he had to leave immediately after that.

  “You’ll be fine.” He took my hand. “But if you want, I can stay with you until they take you inside.”

  Thank you! “That’d be nice,” I said demurely and walked up the stairs.

  IN THE end, it turned out to be only a minute and a half. We walked into a small waiting room with blue chairs and copies of Cosmo, and approached the glass enclosure on the opposite wall. A young woman in pink scrubs looked up from the computer. “Can I...?” She stopped at the sight of Ty. “Oh.”

  Struck dumb, I suppose. I smiled, since I was holding his hand and she wasn’t. “My name is Cassandra Wilder. I’m supposed to have some sort of examination.”

  She nodded, without taking her eyes off Ty. “Have a seat. Someone will be with you momentarily.”

  “Don’t you want my insurance card, or something?”

  That got me a quick glance, anyway. “Not yet.”

  Fine. I took a seat. Ty sat next to me and kept holding my hand. “You’ll be fine,” he told me again, his thumb tracing patterns on my palm. It felt so good my insides melted a little. “Tell Fuentes exactly what you told me. I’ve already told him everything I know. And he’s talked to Juan and Carmen and Stan. He just needs to hear what you know to put together the pieces.”

  “I’m not worried about that. I’m just not looking forward to the examination.”

  “You’ve been to the gynecologist before, haven’t you?” He was perfectly comfortable talking about it, it seemed. Most guys my age—his age—probably wouldn’t be.

  Although actually, he seemed a little older today, with his face so drawn and tired. And more serious, too. Not at all like the guys I went to school with.

  “Are you sure you’re only twenty-two?” fell out of my mouth.

  He blinked and opened his own. But before he could get any words out, the door opened. “Cassie? Dr. Johnson will see you now.”

  I got to my feet, but Ty kept hold of my hand. “Have dinner with me?” he said.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. And nodded.

  “I’ll be in the lobby of your hotel at seven. Stay there until then. Don’t go anywhere without me.”

  I nodded. And then I let go of his hand and walked to the door where the receptionist was waiting.

  THE EXAMINATION turned out to be no big deal. Dr. Johnson—a young, black woman with braids and a singsong Caribbean accent—came into the examining room and sat down to talk to me. “Hi, Cassie.”

  “Hi,” I managed, still a little nervous.

  “I want to talk to you about what we’re going to do, OK?” Her voice was sweet and calm. Calming. Like I was about to have a meltdown any moment.

  I nodded.

  “The police think you were drugged yesterday, so we’ll draw blood and take a urine sample that we will test for drug residue.”

  I nodded. Ty had already warned me about that.

  “And I will have to do a pelvic exam and rape kit.”

  “I wasn’t raped,” I said.

  She sat back on the chair. “I’m sure you would like to believe that...”

  “No. I mean, yes. Of course I’d like to believe that.” I’d like to believe that the other two girls hadn’t been raped either, but that simply wasn’t true. “But I wasn’t raped. I know I wasn’t.”

  Her voice became even kinder. “I know this is hard, Cassie. But...”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t. You can do your pelvic exam, but you won’t need the rape kit.”

  “Cassie...”

  “Look,” I said, annoyed by the constant repetition of my name, especially in that oh-so-kind voice. “I’m a virgin, Dr. Johnson. Or at least I was last night. I’m pretty sure I still am. If I wasn’t, I think there’d probably be some blood and some pain. So why don’t we get this show on the road, and you can see for yourself?”

  There was a moment of silence, and then she grinned. “Good for you, girl. All right, then. I’ll check and make sure you’re still a virgin, and if you are, then obviously we won’t need to do the rape kit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you still have to pee in the cup and have your blood drawn.”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you go do that now, since I’ll be poking at you.”

  Good idea. I took the cup and went to the bathroom. When I came back, there was a hospital gown ready for me on the examining table, and five minutes later, I had confirmation that my virtue was intact. Whatever else had happened last night, that hadn’t.

  I won’t deny that it was a relief. I’d gone on this vacation thinking it might be a good opportunity to lose that pesky virginity once and for all, in a place where people didn’t know me and hadn’t already prejudged me. But I didn’t want it to happen like this. When it happened, I didn’t want to be drugged out of my mind, or so drunk I didn’t know who I was with or what was going on. I wanted it to mean something, with someone I liked. Not some creep who decided I was his for the taking, just because he wanted me.

  I wanted it to be Ty, to b
e honest, although he couldn’t have made it any more clear that it wouldn’t be. No matter how much he ‘liked’ me.

  But while that made me sad, I still didn’t want to go out and get laid by someone else, just so I could tell Mackenzie and Quinn I had been, when we were on the plane home on Saturday. I’d go to dinner with Ty instead, and enjoy his company, and if that was all I got this week, that and my continued virginity, then that was fine with me.

  “You can get dressed again—” Dr. Johnson began, just as a shrill scream sounded outside.

  We both jumped, and I clutched the hospital gown to my chest. “What on...!”

  “Excuse me.” She was out the door before I could finish the sentence. I scrambled into my clean clothes and put the dirty ones in the bag for Detective Fuentes to take to the forensic lab when he arrived. Even though I hadn’t been raped, there might be some kind of evidence on what I’d been wearing. Something to point them toward who was doing this.

  When I was dressed, I opened the door and ran out into the hallway.

  The commotion was coming from a room down the hall. The screams had turned into hysterical sobs by now, and things had calmed down a little. I got to the door just in time to see a girl in a hospital bed, her face battered, slump back against the pillows as Dr. Johnson pulled a syringe out of her arm.

  Next to me stood another girl, also blond, her eyes huge. When she noticed me there, she turned to look at me. Up and down. “You too?” she said.

  “Um...” Another blonde. My height. My age. Sweet, as Ty would say, but for the haunted look in her eyes. “Yeah,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m Jeanine.”

  “Cassie Wilder.”

  She looked back into the room, where the girl in the bed was breathing more calmly now, even as tears ran silently down her cheeks. Jeanine lowered her voice. “I heard they found her this morning.”

  Oh, God. I could feel the color leach out of my face. “This morning?”

  Jeanine nodded, but before she could say anything, a shadow loomed up behind us.

  Or not exactly loomed, although he did the best he could. “You two,” Detective Ricky Fuentes said, “out.” He pointed down the hallway. “Wait for me in the lobby.”

  It didn’t occur to me to protest. I scrambled, with Jeanine right behind.

  We sat in silence. I didn’t feel like talking, not with what I’d just found out. Another girl had been raped last night, and beaten up, too, it seemed. And it should have been me. And although I was glad it wasn’t, it seemed horribly selfish to be happy that another girl was in pain right now because I wasn’t.

  Had he—whoever he was—been angry that I’d gotten away from him, and he had taken it out on her?

  Ricky Fuentes came back out the door after a few minutes, his face a half dozen degrees grimmer than it had been on Monday morning. “C’mon,” he told us without slowing down, “we can talk in the car.”

  I got to my feet, and so did Jeanine.

  “I wanted to talk to you together,” Fuentes said when we were in the car and driving down the street back into the thick of the Old Town, “to see whether you might remember more together than separately. There’s only the two of you who might be able to help me. The girl who was...” he hesitated, looking for the right word, “attacked on Sunday night has already left Key West. And you saw what happened in there.”

  We nodded. Obviously the girl who had been attacked—I assumed Fuentes wanted to avoid the words ‘assaulted’ and ‘raped’—last night wasn’t in a frame of mind to talk about it.

  “Is she OK?”

  Duh. Of course she wasn’t OK. “I didn’t mean...” I added, feeling stupid.

  Fuentes shook his head. “I know what you meant. Physically, she’ll recover. Emotionally, she’s worn thin right now. It’ll be a while before I can talk to her.”

  So he wanted to see what little tidbit of information he could squeeze out of us in the meantime.

  “I don’t know much,” I said apologetically. “I don’t remember anything between the time I left the bar and when I woke up.”

  Jeanine nodded.

  “Nothing at all?” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Um... I think maybe someone asked me to take a drink from a bottle of water. Ty said it wasn’t him. But it could have been my imagination. Your... Carmen had been telling me about Count Carl and Elena, and I may have been dreaming.”

  He nodded. “Jeanine? Do you remember a bottle of water?”

  Jeanine shook her head. “I was drinking shots of tequila. At Captain Crow’s.”

  “With the Ivy League Dudes?” I said.

  They both looked at me. “What?”

  I blushed. “Just a bunch of guys who sit there all night doing shots of tequila. Rich guys. Or look like they are. My friend Quinn has been hanging out with one of them.” Or vice versa.

  “Names?” Fuentes said.

  “I only know his. James Somebody Hunt. The second or third or something.”

  “Is your friend Quinn a blonde?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not saying these guys had anything to do with anything. Just that they’ve been at Captain Crow’s drinking tequila every time I’ve been there.”

  “That’s reason enough to talk to them,” Fuentes said, and went back to Jeanine. “So you were doing shots of tequila. Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I don’t remember what happened after that. Until I woke up the next day in the cemetery.”

  Ugh. I tried to imagine the horror of waking up on the spongy ground, naked and in pain, surrounded by all those gravestones, and knowing that something had happened but unable to remember what.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, and reached for her hand. She looked a little surprised for a second, but then she squeezed back.

  “Thanks.” She kept holding on to me as we navigated the streets.

  Fuentes dropped her off at the entrance to her hotel. “You going home this afternoon?”

  Jeanine nodded. “My mom’s flying down to pick me up. She’ll be here soon. I’m going to go upstairs and pack my things, and then wait in the lobby.”

  “D’you have someone who can wait with you?”

  I’d barely had time to ask the question before the doors opened and three girls came rushing out, hair flying. They surrounded Jeanine and whisked her off inside.

  “Guess she does,” Fuentes said. I nodded.

  He put the car back in gear. “You were very lucky, you know.”

  Tell me about it. “I’m aware of that, Detective.”

  “You really can’t remember anything at all from last night?”

  “Not aside from what I’ve told you. I spent the night at Captain Tony’s with your... with Juan and Carmen. Stan was there for a bit too. Carmen texted Ty and told him I was there, and to come walk me home, but I left before he got there. He said he’d been delayed...”

  I trailed off, thinking Fuentes might volunteer something, but he didn’t.

  “And that’s the last thing I remember. I was drinking Sprite, and then I was drinking almost-virgin Sex on the Beach. I was a little bit tipsy when I left, but not so much that I would have been stupid. I don’t drink much at all, usually.”

  He nodded. “That’s what Juan said. You didn’t stop anywhere on your way home?”

  “Not that I can remember. But I don’t remember anything after I walked out the door. Except for that bottle of water that may or may not have been imaginary.”

  “Can you tell me anything about the voice?”

  I blinked at him in the rearview mirror. “The one who told me to drink the imaginary water? Why?”

  “Because if you didn’t ingest the drugs in the bar,” Fuentes said, “and Juan, Carmen, and Stan all say you couldn’t have; you had Carmen on one side of you, and Stan on the other, and Juan behind the bar—then the drugs must have been given to you later.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was just a voice.”

  “Male?”


  “I assume.” Although to be honest, I couldn’t even swear to that. It was seriously just a vague memory of a voice; a memory I might have imagined.

  “Any kind of accent?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Had you heard it before?”

  I blinked. “Maybe.”

  He perked right up at that. “Really?”

  “Sure. If it was a real voice and I didn’t imagine it, it had to have been someone I trusted, at least enough to take a water bottle from. I mean, I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t have accepted a drink from a stranger. Even a bottle of water.”

  Fuentes nodded. “Makes sense. So whose voice would you recognize?”

  “Not a lot of people in Key West. Quinn and Mackenzie. You, Juan, Stan, Ty, Barry—the bartender at Captain Crow’s—Carmen, the bartender at Sloppy Joe’s, the two guys who run the haunted trolley tours, the tour guide at the Hemingway House, the desk clerk at Richardson’s Motel, the staff at my own hotel, a couple of the other guests who have talked to me, or to each other...”

  “A lot of people.”

  Maybe. “But I wouldn’t accept a water bottle from most of them. Not if I were myself.”

  “Who would you accept a water bottle from? If you were yourself?”

  “You,” I said. “Ty. Juan.” Had to include him, since he was Ricky Fuentes’s brother. And besides, I’d been accepting drinks from him all night yesterday. “Stan.” Had to include him too, since he was Fuentes’s colleague. “If I was sitting at the bar at Captain Crow’s, Barry and Austin. If I was in my own hotel, the staff. But on the street? Not a lot of people.”

  “Did you go to Captain Crow’s last night?”

  I shook my head, and then amended the negative. “Not that I remember. Ty was there, and I didn’t want to see him.”

  His eyes sharpened. “Why didn’t you want to see A... Ty?”

  A...?

  “Personal reasons,” I said.

  He looked at me in the mirror, but when I didn’t volunteer any more information, he didn’t push.

  A minute later we pulled up outside of my hotel, and I reached for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “That your clothes from yesterday?” Fuentes asked, nodding to the bag in my hand.