He’d given Christian something to put him out for a couple of hours. He provided Stacy a different cocktail of drugs that would free her of all her inhibitions and make her just loopy enough to seem drunk. He’d used that cocktail on more than one girl during his high school years.
Hindsight being 20/20, Lexi felt lucky that Nick hadn’t dosed her and passed her around as a party favor.
She’d completely forgotten all about it until the next day. One of Alex’s friends was dumb enough to video themselves with Stacy. It didn’t take long before everyone received it via social media. At first, Lexi wasn’t sure who or what the video was. Then the camera operator figured out how to actually point their phone at the action. She watched with an increasing sense of horror as the scene played out. It didn’t take her long to put it together and realize both what Nick had done and what her unwitting part in it had been. She quickly called Nick.
“What the fuck?! You told me it was some random girl you hired. Christian will kill us both if her father doesn’t,” she predicted.
“Settle down. There’s no way Christian will find out unless you blab. And you’re not thinking of doing that, are you?” he asked with more than a hint of a threat in his voice.
The way he said it scared her. She told him ‘no’ and hung up. Her next call was to Alex.
“You have a serious problem.”
“What are you talking about?” Alex asked.
“That girl from last night is Christian Pelly’s girlfriend. He’ll be coming for you,” Lexi warned.
“Fucking Len. I told him not to make the video. FUCK!” he yelled and hung up on her.
The cherry on top of the whole shit-storm was that two days later, Stacy’s dad tracked down Nick. To add insult to injury, during the confrontation, Nick had assaulted him. To evade arrest, Nick slipped off to parts unknown.
Alex had already planned to go back to Colombia for soccer, leaving behind his two friends, who wound up getting the crap kicked out of them. No one could identify who’d given them the beatings. Lexi’s bet was on Christian. It sounded like they were just happy that was all they’d gotten for their role in this mess.
Christian had shown up one afternoon and demanded to know what happened. She explained in detail what she knew and suspected. The whole time, Christian sat stone-faced as she filled in the blanks for him. When Lexi was done, Christian just got up and left. He never spoke to her again after that.
Lexi was left shaking as she came to realize that she wasn’t the person she wanted to be. How had she missed what a psycho Nick was? Lexi looked back at her ‘mean girl’ persona and the damage she’d done to be popular. All of that paled when compared to what happened to Stacy.
Lexi was terrified, not only of Nick but also of what would happen to her, what she might become if she kept Nick and people like him around as ‘friends.’ She remembered reading something that fit her situation to a T: Choose your friends wisely. Good friends will make you better than you are. Bad friends love nothing better than to bring you down with them.
Lexi vowed to become a better person. She also had come to see that her father wasn’t the role model she’d once thought he was and decided that she would get to the top differently. With the money Umberto had given her, plus her trust fund, she decided to take time off and figure things out.
Her parents weren’t happy when she deferred her enrollment at UCLA. Lexi solved the problem by buying a condo and moving out. She was contemplating getting a job to keep busy when she figured something else out: she still wanted David.
After he’d rocked her world, Lexi had done her research on him and found he was everything she wasn’t. Someone had told her once that you had to surround yourself with the right kind of people if you wanted to change. Lexi decided she had to find a way to get him into her life.
Present Day
Looking back, she’d made some mistakes working to win David over. It had been a long process to learn to fight her old instinct to be a bitch on wheels to get her way. In addition, David knew that she had a history of not being a very nice person; people had warned him about her.
They’d talked about it one night during the filming of the James Bond movie. Lexi never told him what had made her decide to change because she knew he would never look at her the same if she did. David wouldn’t understand her unwitting role in a girl being drugged and then raped. And who could blame him? She would feel the same if he revealed something that horrific.
She assured him that she was learning to be a better person, which he did accept. David had a strong belief in second chances and the possibility of redemption.
As time went by, Lexi found that David was much more than just someone competent at making her body sing in bed. He had all the qualities of someone she would consider marrying someday. What had started off as using him as a role model and a step to a better life had transformed, in her mind, over time. Lexi hadn’t realized it until she blurted out that she loved him.
She knew that David was big on talking things through. And that it wasn’t wise to spring something on him because he didn’t like surprises. The admission of love had caught him completely off guard. David would tell you that if you gave him time to think about something, he calmed down and made better decisions.
When she’d said what she had, he hadn’t waited to calm down. Instead, he’d sent her home.
Lexi hadn’t yet worked out how to fix the situation when a miracle occurred. Oklahoma had given her a gift, and David had transferred to USC. She still wasn’t sure how she would win him over, but at least he was now in the same city.
Lexi realized that she had to talk to Alex, and do it before he clued David in on her past. She felt her stomach twist at the thought of that conversation.
David had arranged to give her access to his dorm room. He’d given her a list of what he wanted, and she’d made arrangements to get everything delivered and set up.
She made an appointment for David at the studio to create his disguise. She’d laughed her ass off when she saw a picture of what they’d come up with. He was bringing the sexy to a nerd farm boy.
In the picture, David had worn a John Deere hat, a baggy flannel shirt, and a pair of jeans that were designed for a hefty guy. She thought they called them something like ‘comfort fit.’ For women, they called them ‘mom jeans.’ Basically, the thighs and butt areas were roomy. The shirt and pants looked to be a couple of sizes too big as well, so it gave him a chunky look.
The kicker was his bodycam glasses. David had bought some designer ones that he looked good in. These, on the other hand, were what used to be called ‘birth-control glasses.’ The old-style black frames would keep the females of the species from getting anywhere near him.
David shot back that he was working on his farmer’s walk. There was no doubt that he could pull it off. When he hit campus, he would fool most people. Heck, she wouldn’t give him a second look if she ran into him on the street.
Lexi was working on the final details of getting David’s room ready when she heard the outer door open. She knew that David wouldn’t be moving in until Saturday, so she suspected it was Camilla. Umberto had made himself scarce after their last encounter.
The two women had finished clearing out David’s room and worked on redecorating the main living area. Lexi was glad when Camilla had said that Alex had no taste, and a makeover was needed. The two of them had started to become friends over the last few days.
But it wasn’t Camilla.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Alex asked and then looked around. “What happened to all my stuff?”