Cole in My Stocking Read Online Free PDF

Crap.
    I didn’t want Cole to see me vulnerable. I didn’t want him to see me as the reckless wild child this town assumed I’d been. I wanted him to see me as the strong, mature woman I’d become since leaving.
    I don’t know why it mattered what he thought of me. I hardly knew Cole. Maybe it mattered because I’d always admired him. Maybe it mattered because he’d implied I’d been stupid last night, and that had stung more than it should have. Maybe it mattered because he was one of the cops who had seen me at my absolute worst, at a time I wished I hadn’t been seen by anyone.
    Flashes of memory brought back my abject humiliation. Suddenly I was back at the Newburgh Police Department six weeks from graduation. I smelled of hard-liquor and sex and was sporting a skirt barely long enough to hide the fact I’d lost my underwear, and a top that barely covered the bruises I felt blooming on my breasts.
    Yes, I’d gone out that night to party, but what Cole didn’t know—what no one knew—was that the sex I’d had hadn’t been my choice. I’d been dragged from the party by three men too old to have been hanging out with teenagers, one of which, admittedly, I had been making out with. That’s where my voluntary participation had ended.
    The men had driven me down a deserted road and raped me in the covered bed of a pick-up truck. I still remembered the sting of gravel their tires kicked up as they drove away after. Their fading whoops of victory still rang in my ears like the most insidious tinnitus.
    It had been too dark to read the license plate number. I’d been too drunk to remember it anyway. I’d been too drunk to even remember the whole ordeal. I think I’d blacked out during some of it. What I hadn’t been too drunk for was to ping the breathalyzer test Chief Tooley had made me take when he’d found me wandering down the side of the road, disoriented and aching with wounds I was determined no one would ever see. Especially not my dad, who had told me when I’d left the house that night I was asking for trouble dressed the way I was.
    I would never forget the mortification that had pulsed over my entire body like waves of fire when Cole looked up from his paperwork in time to see Tooley push me down in a plastic chair and handcuff me to his desk. “Knew you from the time you were a little girl, Mandy Holcomb,” Tooley had said. “Never thought I’d see you like this. Dressed like a whore. Smelling like a whore. Drunk like a cheap whore. You don’t change your ways, young lady, you’re going to end up a whore for real. You want that? You want to turn tricks in Boston for a shit living? You sit in that chair and think about your life and the direction it’s going. I’ll call your father in the morning, and he can decide if we need to bring charges or not.”
    For the next few hours, I sat beside Tooley’s desk in that unforgiving chair, my eyes closed against the intense pounding in my head, hoping I wouldn’t throw up on myself while Cole was in the room, wishing I’d never gone out that night.
    “You okay, Mandy?” I heard Cole’s voice and for a second thought it was part of the memory. He’d said the same thing back then, coming to crouch in front of me while Tooley had been out of the room. His gentle tone had been a startling contrast to the hard set of his mouth, like the granite our state was known for.
    But it wasn’t a memory. He was here. On Dad’s doorstep.
    Like back then, I nodded. Like back then, I had trouble meeting his gaze.
    He shifted one hand to the aluminum door frame. He held on just above where my hand still gripped it. “Hey. It’s okay. You’ll be okay, you hear me?”
    He couldn’t know I’d gone back in my mind to the last time he’d spoken to me before the flat tire. He thought I was upset over Dad. I was upset over Dad. But that night at Newburgh PD jumbled together with Dad’s death in a knot of grief too powerful for me to contain. Being home