Thirty-Five

CORA

It’s two in the morning when Everett shows up at my door. By then, I’ve been waiting hours to apologize. He doesn’t let me.

The moment I let him in, he kisses me, layering them on my mouth, my cheeks, my neck—and he refuses to stop.

“Shower,” he orders, and I’m not surprised. Everett is most comfortable when he doesn’t feel confined. Outdoors is best, but water helps.

In the shower, he fucks me slowly, thoroughly, with my cheek pressed against the slick white tiles and his firm hand wrapped around my neck. Taking his time, he talks me through the entire thing: I can’t believe I get to fuck this pussy. The tightest, prettiest cunt I’ve ever seen. Can you make it tighter for me? I knew you could. You’ve always been a slut. Soaked, even in the shower. You’ll take my cum, won’t you? You’ll beg for it because you like it deep. You’re such a whore that you can’t stand to have an empty pussy, can you? You always want my cock or my cum in it, don’t you, princess?

His other hand clutches my hip in a crushing grasp, keeping me steady while I go boneless from a rolling wave of an orgasm.

Just like that. The best. Nobody takes a cock like you.

He towels me off after, taking extra care around my arm before he lifts and seats me naked on the counter. He bandages my arm even though I’m capable of changing it myself, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like seeing the focused pinch in his brow and the way he meticulously presses the edges of the bandage to my skin.

I’m capable of changing my own bandage, but I’m not capable of making butterflies rise in my own stomach.

When he’s done, he steps into the space between my spread knees and places his hands on the counter, caging me. He didn’t even bother toweling himself off before he started tending to me, so droplets of water still linger in the ridges of his abdomen, sliding between the defined lines of his sculpted body.

“You’re drooling,” he comments, smirking.

I’m too busy tracing a roving droplet with my eyes to come up with a clever response, so instead what spills out is, “You make the feminism leave my body.”

“Don’t say that.” He leans in like he’s going to kiss me but stops short. “Feminism is, like, ninety-two percent of your body mass. Without it, all that would be left of you is the live snakes where your hair should be.”

I close the gap and kiss him. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m obsessed with you,” he admits as if he didn’t hear what I said. His eyes drift to the lock of my wet hair he’s twirling around the tips of his fingers. “Sometimes I think I have a handle on it, and then I realize it’s impossible.”

“You’re not angry at me?”

“Felix J. Worthington has the single cuntiest face I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t even be mad if you actually did blackmail him.”

My lips part, but I don’t speak. He just… believes me .

“I know you,” he clarifies. “Whatever happened, I know you did for a reason.”

“This is unconditional,” I realize aloud, and the gravity of that truth feels like another shower. I let out a soft laugh, a hybrid of relief and wonder.

“I told you I wasn’t going to change my mind.” He brings his hand to my cheek and runs the backs of his fingers over my skin. “So, are you going to make me jump through three flaming hoops first, or are you going to tell me outright who I’m going to destroy after this conversation ends?”

***

Most couples would probably snuggle on the couch together before a deep-dark trauma session, but Everett and I aren’t most couples. We’re overachievers. So, we sit at my kitchen table with a laptop between us—because no life-altering event can be recapped without data, a timeline, and visual evidence.

Exhibit A is seventeen-year-old Cora Flores, a precocious Harvard freshman, holding a piece of paper and flipping off the camera, tongue out. Her tongue is unpierced, but she does have a new stud in her nose—her first piercing.

Exhibit B is the actual paper from Exhibit A, her transcript after freshman year: a perfect grade point average in graduate-level courses.

Exhibit C is a picture of a twenty-one-year-old Cora, who earned her master’s in psychology from Harvard a few months before. She’s now a first year PhD candidate, studying under Dr. Lionel Carlin, one of Harvard’s most esteemed professors of psychology, also pictured. He’s old and stately, standing in the lounge in the psych building. On Dr. Carlin’s other side is Felix J. Worthington, twenty-eight and a second year PhD candidate. All three of them are beaming, having just received a humongous grant from the university to embark on a multi-year study on sex workers and the differences in their brain patterns when engaging in sexual activity with clients versus partners.

Exhibit D is a forty-page preliminary findings report with early results from those studies. Researchers interviewed the subjects—eight sex workers—about their sexual encounters. The findings were clear: subjects’ brain patterns changed substantially when Researcher 1 (Flores) spoke to them instead of Researcher 2 (Worthington). The author of the preliminary findings report proposed an addendum to the methodology to study the psychological safety women feel in each other’s presence and how those findings may inform mental health funding and resources for sex workers.

Exhibit E is an email from Dr. Carlin to Felix J. Worthington where Cora Flores is copied. Dr. Carlin commends Felix on his detailed preliminary findings and proposed addendum.

Exhibit F is a grainy picture of Cora and Felix J. Worthington fucking in a bed.

Exhibit G is an email from Dr. Carlin, rebuking Cora for blackmailing Felix J. Worthington with the picture from Exhibit F. He proposes her dismissal from his lab.

Everett’s brow is tight as he studies Exhibit G, the email. “I don’t understand,” he admits. “You and Felix J. Worthington were both working with Lionel Carlin on this sex worker study…and then Felix proposed a new methodology based on the findings from the initial research—”

“No, I did,” I interject.

Everett’s brow tightens even more. “But the email from Carlin said Felix—”

“Felix lied.”

Everett’s jaw clenches immediately and his expression turns grave. He’s been relatively quiet since I started speaking, but now, he’s barely breathing. After a beat, he intakes a slow stream of air through his nostrils. Then he runs his hand through his hair and shakes his head. “I didn’t know—”

“Don’t worry.”

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he reiterates. “You know me. If I had known—”

“It’s not—”

“It is,” he insists, slamming his hand on the table. “I haven’t lied to you since, and I’m never going to lie—”

“I know,” I cut in before I reach over and grab his hand. Once we’re touching, his shoulders relax. “Everett, I know. Let’s just get through this.”

Everett swallows hard before he nods. “You’re right. Keep going.”

“We were supposed to write the findings report together, but Felix was a shit research partner. He’s rash. Impulsive. Quick to post conclusions without much scrutiny. I ended up doing the work by myself, so you can imagine how surprised I was to see my name omitted from the report Felix sent to Carlin, as well as Felix’s name on our lab logs. When I confronted Felix about taking credit for my work, he flipped out. He tried to gaslight me and tell me he did everything. When I said I was going to tell Dr. Carlin the truth, he brought up a really good point.”

“Which was?”

“Nobody would believe me over him,” I finish. “Felix has a lot of power. He’s attractive, wealthy, and entitled. And I…” I trail off. “Well, I was me . There were eleven PhD candidates in our lab, and I was the only woman and the only one who wasn’t white. You do the math.”

Everett looks away. “I know. I mean, I don’t know …”

“You’re the walking embodiment of privilege,” I fill in, and he doesn’t argue. He knows it’s true.

“You’ll be proud to hear that despite Felix’s attempts to gaslight me, I gave it a shot,” I go on. “I told Carlin that Felix was a liar, and there was a time when I thought he was going to believe me. Then Felix lied. Again.”

“Jesus fuck,” Everett mutters.

“He showed Carlin that picture of us and said I photographed him without his knowledge in an attempt to blackmail him.”

“But you didn’t, obviously.”

I shake my head. “We were secretly dating. We took the pictures consensually.” I clear my throat. “I had, like, a little photography fetish.”

For the first time in the conversation, Everett chuckles. “Alright. So, then what?”

“Carlin dropped me. I tried to fight the decision, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t take down Felix. He was a five-generation legacy. His father is a trustee. Even if he weren’t the university’s golden boy, he was loaded. His trust fund alone…” I trail off.

Everett snickers. “Surely my trust fund is bigger.”

“Maybe not,” I admit. “But your cock definitely is.”

“Your cock, you mean.”

“Mine,” I agree. “Anyway, that was that. I lost a year of research and got transferred to another advisor. Maybe it could have worked out, but at the time, I was still in contact with my parents. They were furious with me for losing my spot with the famous Dr. Carlin and said none of this would have happened if I had kept my clothes on.”

“Why didn’t they believe you?”

“My parents are immigrants. The pressure that comes with being the child of immigrants…Everett, I can’t articulate it.”

He runs his thumb along the back of my hand. “Do you want to try?”

The question surprises me. Usually, this topic comes across as off-putting. Countless times at Harvard, people asked about my family and clearly regretted it when they realized how heavy my baggage was. But Everett is nodding encouragingly. And then I remember: Everett may know more about the futile quest for perfection than I do.

I let out a slow exhalation, eyes shut while I try to find the right words. I blink. “Imagine sitting on a stage under a spotlight with Shakespeare’s complete works in front of you. Your parents are in the front row, watching you and telling you to recite all that iambic pentameter perfectly. They can’t do it. They can’t even help you do it. They can’t comprehend how rare it would be for someone to do it. They just expect you to nail it: every sonnet, every rhyme, every intonation has to be perfect . If not, you’ve squandered an opportunity they claim they would have wanted when they were your age. You’ve disgraced them. You’ve let them down.

“No matter what I did, there was always more . My grades were perfect, and my mother would still ask why my teachers weren’t offering me extra credit assignments. Then I would get extra credit, and my father would ask why I wasn’t tutoring other students—as if anyone wanted that. It was incessant. I couldn’t breathe .

“I pretended to be the daughter they wanted, but when they weren’t around, I did everything I wasn’t supposed to. Sex, drugs, drinking. At some point, when you’re pretending to be two different people…”

“It’s impossible to figure out which version is real,” Everett fills in.

“Or if either of those versions are real at all. So, when my parents blamed me for losing my place in Carlin’s lab, I finally realized they didn’t love me. They loved a person who didn’t exist, and I was tired of pretending to be that person. So…I emailed the department a video of Felix and me fucking.”

Everett’s eyebrows shoot up. “I probably would have tried to publish a story in the Crimson, but that’s me.”

“It then became abundantly clear that Felix and I weren’t a one-time thing. We were both going to get kicked out of Harvard, so we both dropped out. Mutually assured destruction.”

“Damn,” he mutters.

“I’m not proud of it. Exposing someone’s body without consent is heinous. I wish I could blame it on being heartbroken and following Felix’s lead, but ultimately, I wanted revenge. I learned my lesson though. I lost everything and had to start over while broke, disowned, and with no work experience. Conversely, Felix lost everything and came back like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.”

“What about the women you were researching? They could have proved he was a fraud.”

“I messaged the girls when everything started, but Harvard was still paying them for the study. Then, once the study fell through, all eight of them told me Felix contacted them first and offered them a buttload of money to do interviews for a book he was writing. Now, they’re bound by an NDA they can’t afford to break. All I got out of those conversations was a recommendation to try camming.”

Everett lets out a slow exhale through his nostrils before he looks to the side, staring into my living room. He faces me. “I don’t understand why he did it. If you two were together, why would he turn on you? Nothing was stopping both of you from getting your PhDs and completing the study.”

I raise a shoulder. “That’s the thing. To this day, I still don’t know why he did it. It was like he woke up one morning and…didn’t love me anymore.”

Everett is quiet. “He changed his mind.”

“Like my parents did.”

He releases a slow sigh. “Well, I’m going to destroy him. Do you want to watch?”

“Everett…” I begin, shaking my head.

“No, I am,” he assures me. “I’m going to make him pay. I’m going to enjoy it too.”

“I still don’t believe in revenge.”

Everett’s eyes widen. “Why the hell not?”

“I told you: The last time I tried to get revenge, it backfired and turned me into a horrible, obsessive person. I don’t want that.”

“Not only did he hurt you, but he also put my campaign at risk. I don’t have a doubt in my mind he leaked the blackmail story to Regina’s producers in a bid to clinch his own show. He used this against us.”

I pause. Everett called it an “us” problem. Exhaling, I reach across the table. “Did I cost you the election?”

“I’m not going to lose.”

“But—”

Everett shakes his head. “Remember what you told me? You don’t suck off losers,” he replies, somehow managing to get a smile out of me. “I’m going to win.”

“How?”

“No clue,” he admits, letting out a slow exhale. “It’ll come to me. For now, we have more important things to do.”

“Like what?”

Everett grins and his expression is lively, rich with the promise of intrigue—with the promise of everything.

He leans forward, eyes locked on mine, and asks, “Do you want to run away together?”