Warning: The author has noted that this contains strong language.
Background
Near nude modelling photos taken by a photographer who promised to give Lisa a modelling portfolio in return, turn up in a porn magazine, which someone brings to Nick and Lisa's party.
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When Nick let her go, Lisa slid sobbing to the floor in front of the desk. He looked down at her, his face full of remorse when he realised exactly what he had just done in his fit of jealous madness.
When she had come into his study, her beautiful face full of guilt, something inside him had snapped, and he'd wanted to hurt her for making him feel such a fool. He had succeeded more than he could ever imagine. He knelt beside her and took her in his arms as the sobs racked her body. She tried to push him away, but he held on to her and tried to undo the pain he had inflicted so viciously. It was too late. He had irrevocably hurt the most precious thing in his life.
Lisa broke away from his arms and got shakily to her feet, holding on to the edge of the desk which moments before had been her sacrificial altar. She looked over at Nick for a moment with tears in her eyes, wishing that she could love him in the way that she should. She knew now that if she was going to marry Nick, she would have to accept that she would never know the joy of loving someone completely again.
Nick watched as she walked towards the door. “Lisa, where are you going?” he asked, terrified that she might leave him. She looked back at him with a tortured smile before she answered.
“To bed, Nick - and I want to go alone.”
Nick was relieved to see that most of the guests had gone by the time he emerged from his study. He didn't know how he could face them without Lisa by his side. He was relieved to find out from the few guys who were left, that everyone had known about him and Lisa escaping from the party, and they couldn't blame him. The consensus of opinion, having seen her, was that no hot-blooded male would be able to keep their hands off her, given half a chance. The pictures in the magazine only led them to believe that Lisa had enjoyed whatever they had been doing, especially when her cries of adoration were heard through the study door over the noise of the party.
Nick let them believe it. He joined the diehard drinkers who were left in the bar, determined to get drunk himself. He needed to forget the look on Lisa's face before she went to her room.
While Nick drowned his sorrows, Lisa lay on the bed, and tried to work out what to do. She knew Nick had only done what he had because of the pictures in the magazine, but the thought that he might come into her room and rape her again disgusted her. She got up and looked for a lock on her bedroom door. There was none.
Nick downed his drink, and contemplated having another. Only Colin and Stephen were left, which wasn’t surprising, because it was nearly four o'clock in the morning.
Colin turned to Nick and asked him what it was like having sex with a babe like Lisa. Nick thought about it for a moment, before he drunkenly replied.
“It's fucking fantastic,” he answered sarcastically. His two friends were too drunk to pick up on the underlying bitterness of his statement.
“So why are you still here drinking with us?” Stephen asked as he tried to focus. “I know where I'd rather be.” Nick stared at him, and wondered why there was two of him.
“I don't fucking know,” he replied, shaking his head.
He got off the barstool unsteadily, and then went behind the bar to pour himself another scotch. Having downed the contents of his glass in one, he thought about what Stephen had just said. Suddenly a look of enlightenment spread across his face, and he looked back at his two friends as though he had just experienced an epiphany.
“It must be because you guys are still here...” he decided. Stephen looked at Colin before draining the contents of his glass.
”I think we better go, mate. I wouldn’t like it to be said that we were stopping Nick from getting his end away. No, no, no,” he slurred. “That certainly wouldn’t be fair.” Colin took the hint, and stubbed out his cigarette. The two of them stood up as best they could, and wove their way towards the hallway and the front door having given Nick a drunken, backward wave as they went.
When Nick staggered into her bedroom, Lisa's eyes snapped opened. She had left on the light by the bed, and seeing how drunk he was, she sat up and pulled the duvet up to her chin. She just hoped he wouldn't see the silk nightdress he had bought her in London. It was her only alternative to wearing nothing at all. He came over to the bed and tried to focus on her face.
“I love you so much Lisa – but you know that, don't you?”
She could smell the Scotch on his breath as he spoke, and memories of her mother’s drunken abuse came flooding back. Lisa humoured him by assuring him that she did, in the hope that, like her mother, she could talk him into going to his bed.
“If you ever left me, I would die - I couldn't live without you…” he told her, his eyes glazing over.
Lisa tried to stay calm. She had never seen Nick drunk before. He reached over and pulled away the duvet, revealing Lisa's naked shoulders and her silk clad body. He stared at her for a moment before shutting his eyes and smiling, as though he was reminiscing.
“I remember when you were fourteen - I knew then. You were so, so lovely...”
Lisa hesitantly interrupted him.
“You mean seventeen, Nick, not fourteen...”
Nick shook his head, knowing he was right the first time. Lisa didn't understand - how could she? She had no idea how long he had waited for her to grow up. He reached for her, wanting her again, all memories of what he had done to her earlier eradicated by the alcohol.
Lisa looked at him, and felt revulsion rising up inside her. She knew then, it would never go away. After what he had done, she never wanted him to touch her again.
“Why don't you go to bed, Nick? We can talk in the morning,” she suggested, hoping that he was drunk enough to fall asleep. Sadly, he didn't want to go to bed without her…
Lisa had dressed and packed what few things were really hers. There wasn't much, because she had left most of her own things at the hotel. When she'd eventually talked Nick into going to bed with the promise that she would join him in a few minutes, she had known exactly what she was doing.
Just like her mother, he was asleep within seconds, and Lisa knew she was only safe until he woke up. She had decided to leave. When she had gone to bed earlier, she’d fooled herself into believing she could forgive Nick for what he had done, but she couldn't. The very thought of him being anywhere near her, made her feel physically sick. She knew she had to leave before he tried to touch her again, or she wouldn’t be able to hide her feelings. Lisa knew that if she waited until the morning, Nick would try and talk her round, and she might never get away. Just like when she ran away with Alan on the day her mother attacked her, she didn't want to give Nick the opportunity of getting her back. It was over.
Lisa picked up her bag and looked at the jewellery Nick had given her, which she’d left on the dressing table earlier. She decided that it would be better if she put it all back in his safe along with her engagement ring. She didn't care what they were worth, she didn't want any of them.
She would leave Nick without anything he'd given her, that way she owed him nothing. She would sort out the car when she got back to the school. The pain she felt inside was the only thing she would take with her, and she knew it would be a long time before it went away and she would be able to love again, if at all.
Lisa turned off the light in her room, and made her way down the hall to Nick's study. She pulled open the painting that covered the safe, and pressed in the code to open it. It had been easy to remember after she’d seen Nick opening it the day before. Seventeen and thirty-three, the ages they were when they met. Nick had referred to the numbers as being a perfect combination. It couldn’t be further from the truth. The age gap between them was obviously too great. She knew now that his love for her was obsessive, and he wouldn't be happy until he controlled her completely, just like her mother had before. In her haste to escape, she had only picked a different jailer.
Lisa pulled the ring off her finger, and it felt as though she had taken off a chain, the chain that bound her to Nick. As she placed the two boxes with the necklace and the earrings at the back of the safe, she searched for the box for the ring, and found it underneath a large red photo album with ‘Lisa’ written on the front….
The cold air bit into her as she walked down the road. Lisa had no idea how she was going to get back to the hotel, but she was determined to get there.
When she passed through the village, she started to panic because the streetlights finished at the end of the street, and the road ahead looked dark and threatening. She remembered back to the year before when she had tried to get to her brother’s flat in Glasgow and had nearly got raped because she came off the main street in the early hours of the morning. She would never make that mistake again.
Lisa looked around for a call box in the hope she could call a taxi, but there were none. Lisa froze when she heard a car coming because she thought it might be Nick. She stepped back into the shadows of a shop doorway, but she had already been seen by the two occupants of a police car doing its nightly rounds.
When the policeman in the passenger seat told his partner to slow down, he put down his window and asked Lisa if she was all right. She stepped out of the doorway, and told them she was trying to get back to her hotel in Castletown. She then asked if they knew of any taxi firms who operated at that time of night. The driver looked at her suspiciously, but his partner couldn't see the harm in giving her a lift. They were going back that way anyway on the way to the station.
She still had to suffer the embarrassment of one of them escorting her into the hotel to check that she was actually a guest, but fortunately Charlie, the night porter, recognised her immediately. When Lisa got up to her room, she locked the door and sat on the bed. It was half past five.
She picked up the phone and dialled nine for an outside line. Lisa didn't care what time it was, she had to speak to her father. She let out a sigh of relief when his sleepy voice answered the phone.
She told him that Nick had lost his temper, although not that he had raped her. She knew her father would have been in a terrible state if she had. All she told her father after that was that Nick had threatened her with violence, and she would feel safer if she got off the Island as soon as possible. Lisa could hear the panic in her father's voice as he asked her if she was all right. She told him she was, so he asked her if she thought she should ring the police.
“No, Dad - I just want you to get me the first plane out of here. I don't care where it's going to.”
She didn't have to say any more. Donald Collins could hear how scared she was and promised to phone back as soon as he could. He told Lisa to sit tight, and keep her door locked.
Lisa looked down at the brown envelope she’d found at the back of the photo album she’d discovered in the safe. When she’d first looked at the album in Nick's office, she had been confused. It contained pictures of her on holiday at the hotel going back three years.
There were pictures of her when she was just fourteen, a skinny teenager without a care in the world. There were pictures of her by the pool, walking by the sea, even sitting looking bored after dinner. Some were close ups of her face, some of her eyes. It was a pictorial diary of her change from a gawky teenager into the young woman who had been back at the hotel for her usual family holiday that summer - the summer she had met Nick for the first time - or so she had thought.
Lisa now understood Nick's apparent obsession with her. She had always thought his urgency to get engaged was strange, considering they’d only met. He hadn’t given her time to get to know him, and she now knew that was because he had waited too long already. He must have watched her all that time, waiting for her to grow up.
As Lisa tried to get her head around Nick's obsession with her, she looked in the envelope at the back of the album. It contained more pictures in black and white, and they looked as though a professional photographer had taken them. She couldn't make out the faces of the people very clearly in the time marked pictures, but as she focused, she recognised her own face in nearly every one. The first picture was one of her and Alan walking into the police station in Chelmsford, the second of them walking back out, Alan's father behind them. The third picture showed Lisa going into Alan's parents' house, and the fourth of them coming back out on the morning they went to London for the copy of her birth certificate.
The fifth showed her and Alan kissing in the car when they had stopped in the lay-by when the windows had steamed up. The sixth showed them kissing goodbye at the station, their faces sad as their lips parted. The seventh showed Alan and Mike getting into Alan's car outside the flat. The time was 10.10pm. September 4th, the day Lisa had left for the school.
But it was the eighth picture which was the most heartbreaking of all. Alan's car lay on its roof, the bodywork beaten and crushed. The time was barely ten hours after she'd left. Through the shattered window of the car you could see Alan's hand, the fingers curled upwards towards the night sky like that of a sleeping child. You could just make out his face, his eyes closed below his blonde hair which was matted with his blood.
Lisa’s hand had risen to her mouth as she looked at the pictorial evidence of her and Alan’s shattered dreams. If she hadn’t spoken to Alan since the pictures had been taken, she would have assumed, from the pictures, that he had died on the night that she went to London to meet her mother. Of course he couldn’t answer her calls. The enormity of that was bad enough, but when she read the cut out article from the Chelmsford Observer, she broke down completely. It was dated the sixth of September and explained that Alan was fighting for his life after a serious car accident which had claimed the life of his flatmate Michael Parker. Lisa sobbed as she read it. Wonderful, funny Mike was dead…
Even though Lisa didn't know about Alan's accident, it was obvious that whoever had taken the pictures in the envelope knew in advance that the accident was going to happen. The fact that she had found the pictures in Nick's safe confirmed he was behind it all. He had tried to have Alan killed after she left Chelmsford. All the time she had been ringing Alan’s mobile, believing he had chosen to stay with Carla,he had lain in a coma. The whole thing was too much to bear, and she felt bitter, angry hatred enter her heart at the thought of how Nick had shattered both their lives.
When the phone eventually rang just after six, Lisa nearly jumped out of her skin. Her father had managed to get her a seat on the 7.15 to London and, if she wanted, he could book her a connecting flight to Glasgow at 10.50. That wasn’t an option as far as Lisa was concerned. She was in no doubt as to what she needed to do.
“It's okay, Dad, I know somebody in London who might be able to help me. I'll phone you when I get there.” Her father wasn’t happy and wanted her to come back home immediately, but she told him she couldn’t. She promised to explain everything to him later.
The airport was only ten minutes away, and she had to check in at least half an hour before, so she phoned down to Charlie and ordered a taxi for six-thirty.
“Charlie, can you make sure that it comes to the side door, please?” He assured her it wasn’t a problem.
“And can I ask another favour, Charlie? If Mr. Corday turns up before I go, can you not tell him I'm leaving, but give me three rings to warn me that he's here?”
The old man was happy to oblige, all this excitement made his shift much more interesting…
Author Notes
Lisa Collins...Main Character
Alan...A boy Lisa met whilst visiting her friend in Chelmsford.
Carla...Alan's girlfriend
Mike...Alan's friend and flatmate, who is tragically killed in Alan's car accident.
Fiona Collins...Lisa's mother
Donald Collins...Lisa's father
Scott Collins...Lisa's brother
Nick Corday...A multimillionaire who has fallen in love with Lisa.
Vikki Clark...Lisa's friend from Chelmsford.
Dave Wilson... Policeman
Eve Brookes...Police woman who befriends Lisa
Jack Turner... Alan's father
Kathy Turner...Alan's mother
Karen Turner...Alan's sister
Richard Clark...Vikki's wealthy cousin from London.
Amy...the girl who befriends Lisa when she arrives at the school.
Teddy, Veronique, Chloe and Linda...Lisa's new school friends.
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