Treadmill

XXII.II

"Just some background, because I know you don't know anything about my life...since I ensured that you didn't know anything about my life. And also, you're going to be hearing a lot of shit that you probably won't like, so just...try not to interrupt me too much, or we're going to be here until the sun comes up."

Rebecca nodded silently.

"My parents are divorced, which I guess is kind of common knowledge. My dad remarried that stupid model that you set up a photoshoot with, Lydia Abrams, but she goes by her maiden name when she models. When my dad married Lydia, we had a falling out. I hated him for screwing up his marriage to my mom and then for immediately deciding to marry someone closer to my age than his. It's disgusting, having your father being attracted to someone close to your own age. Makes you think he'd be attracted to you if you weren't his daughter. But, anyway, I met the woman once right before they tied the knot and then never saw her again, until you were kind enough to intervene."

Rebecca remembered the instruction to not interrupt, and kept her retort to herself.

"So, fast forward a few years. I'm at Clemson last September, beginning of my sophomore year, life is great. Lyla convinced me to go see some motivational speaker that was coming to campus, and I tagged along with her and Doug. The guy who was speaking was definitely attractive, but also older than me by a long shot. He talked about his wife in his set, but no kids. Cool speech, didn't think much of it, until I went to the bar across town that night. My friends had left because they were lightweights, and I was still chilling, trying to find someone to cover my tab and maybe stick up for me if the bartender figured out that my ID was fake. And then I saw him.

"It was the guy who gave the big speech, the married one...Hank Wilcox. He was sitting at the bar by himself, just making small talk with the bartender. So, I walked over and let him know that I was at his show and he was a pretty good speaker. We continued to talk, he bought me a few drinks, and eventually I agreed to go back to his hotel room. I honestly kind of forgot about the wife from the set, and we were both a little tipsy, and it just...happened. Like something out of a movie where you're absolutely screaming at the dude to not cheat on his wife with the college kid, but he does it anyway, and then you're pissed off and hate the guy for the remainder of the movie.

"We kept seeing each other for the next eight months. Honestly, it was longer than any relationship I had ever kept, and it was probably because of the secrecy of the whole thing. I loved it, and we both kind of fed off of it. I tried not to think about his wife when I went to bed at night, and it worked. We would meet halfway between Tampa and Clemson whenever he could get away from home with a decent excuse, and I told my friends I was sleeping with a guy from a different school. No one got suspicious. And then, everything went to shit when he told me he wanted to leave his wife for me."

Rebecca resisted every urge to roll her eyes. Of course a thirty-something year old man would leave his wife for twenty year old Kennedy after a few months of sleeping with her. Only Kennedy Abrams.

Why was Rebecca slightly jealous?

"That did it for me. The second he said that, it was like every single ounce of basic human decency that had left my body for the previous eight months came rushing back. I remembered my parents and how my dad left my mom for a much younger woman, and how it impacted me as a kid. Hank didn't have any kids, but still...I didn't want to do that to another family. So I ended it that night, drove back to Clemson, and tried to put the entire thing out of my mind.

"But, Hank wasn't too happy about my breaking it off. He started calling me relentlessly, and when I finally picked up, he told me that he would be pulling all of his donations from my father's plastic surgery business. I was absolutely mortified at the fact that he even knew my father to begin with, as that had never come up while we were together, and I told him I didn't care if he did that or not. Evidently, after I said that, he called my father—an apparent old neighborhood friend from when my father moved away from my mother—and informed him of the fact that I had stolen money from Hank after meeting him at a meet and greet, and that he would not be able to continue supplying my father's practice with donations. Obviously, my father didn't know that I had been sleeping with his old neighbor and assumed that Hank was telling the truth about my stealing from him.