Broken Silence (Silence, #2)(51)

I pulled away and smiled in thanks. “Definitely.” I looked around and the noticed the one other person I needed to see wasn’t there. “Where’s Cole?”

“He’s outside. He needed some air,” Mum replied.

My heart stopped. He needed air? That meant he was freaking out. I should have told him everything.

“We’ll go see him now.” Mum’s arm remained around my back as we walked to the exit. Linda went out of the front so the press would think I would be following, and hopefully that would give us enough time to get out.

Jasper walked stiffly. His whole posture was tense and his jaw clenched. I knew he was struggling with what he’d heard in there. Later I would need to sit down and talk to him, apologise for the way he had found everything out, if he would even let me. Jasper was too strong for his own good. All he worried about was me and Mum. I desperately wanted him to open up to me.

Ali pushed the door open, and everyone instinctively moved closer to me, in case there was any press lurking at the exit. That was when I saw him. Cole leant against the brick wall. A deep frown dominated his face. He looked so tortured it made my heart sink.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I pushed past everyone that was in between us. He looked up and pushed himself away from the wall, practically running towards me. Within seconds of us catching sight of each other, I was in his arms, being lifted up.

“Cole,” I whispered, clinging onto him.

He gripped me as if he thought he was the only thing keeping me from shattering. I finally cracked, and sobbed into his neck.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” he mumbled into my hair.

“For what?”

“For letting that happen to you. I should have known. I should have stopped it.”

I pulled back from him a few inches, enough to look directly into his eyes.

“Don’t. None of it was your fault. Cole, you were just a child yourself. Please don’t ever blame yourself.”

His eyes filled with tears, and in that moment I wanted to run back inside and tell them I had made it all up. I wanted to take it all back. I would have done anything to never see him look that painfully sad ever again. “He took pictures of you.”

I nodded slowly. “Yes, but it’s going to be okay now.”

“Okay?” he repeated.

“It has to be. I won’t be the victim any more, Cole. There are millions of people in worse situations than I was. I got out, and I survived it. I’m the one that has a future, even if they get out everyone will know what they did.”

He shook his head, staring at me with such intensity it made me self-conscious. “You’re amazing. I don’t know how you can be so calm. I want to kill them both.”

I shrugged. What other choice did I have? Falling apart wouldn’t solve anything but make me a victim again. I never wanted to be there again. I was going to do everything I could to get them both locked up, and then I was going to carry on with my life and be happy. They were not going to control any part of me ever again.

“Can we go now?”

“Of course we can.” He kissed my damp lips and stroked the side of my face. “I have questions I don’t know if you’ll want to answer, or even know if I want the answers to them.”

“I’ll answer whatever you want to know, but right now I just want to get back to Ali’s and have a hot chocolate, or a vodka. Please don’t let them get inside your head. Fuck ’em.”

Cole almost smiled; his eyes flicked in shock. “‘Fuck ’em?’ Wow, that was so un-Oakley.”

I laughed. “I know, but it made you smile.”

“Oakley, Oakley!” My name was screamed by a number of different people I didn’t know. The press was running towards us, holding up cameras and microphones.

Before I could blink a car door was opened, and I was being shoved inside. Cole got in and slammed the door.

“Go,” Mum barked at Jasper, and he slammed his foot on the accelerator. I almost laughed at the theatrics; it felt like we were in an action movie.

“Easy, Jasper,” Mum said, after we’d sped out of there like a bat out of hell. “We want to get back in one piece.”

“I just want to get her away from that. And anyway, you were the one that ordered me to go!”

“Well I meant ‘go but go responsibly’.”

I laid my head on Cole’s shoulder and smiled at how normal and petty their argument was. Under Mum’s revised instructions, Jasper drove ‘responsibly’ and we arrived home twenty minutes later.

“I’m going to lie down for a bit,” I said as we walked into Ali’s house. No one argued.

I climbed straight into my futon bed and pulled the covers over me, needing to hide from everything for a while. My make-up and clothes were still on, but I just didn’t care. I rolled into a ball and allowed the tears to fall. Dragging up those memories made me feel dirty all over again. I hated it.

Why couldn’t I just have had a normal dad? That was all I wanted, even when it stopped, I still wanted my dad. I really believed it was over, and everything was going to be okay again. I wanted him to love me, as strange as that sounds.

I just wanted the man back that carried me on his shoulders and played hide and seek with me. I should have known that he hadn’t changed. I should have done so much differently, but I had been stupidly hopeful.