Part 11: Alpha Chi Theta
The first few days after Nick asked Chelsea to warn Abby were an unwanted exercise in patience. Schedules were juggled without warning, both among the patients and the staff. As a result, Nick didn't see Chelsea at all. His mother suspected that there had been an outbreak of illness at the Smith Center, but no one would confirm it; Jessica had only been able to come to her conclusion because she had been trained as a nurse herself.
When Chelsea finally arrived, she was all business. Nick couldn't blame her; there was always someone else, a staff member or a patient or one of Nick's parents, in earshot. Still, it was heart-stoppingly frustrating to have Chelsea behave as if she was nothing
but a woman being paid to help a stranger with his physical therapy after an accident. It was hard to remember that short days before her nosy, noisy chatter had felt just as out of place.
He almost hugged her with relief when they were alone for a moment as she settled him back into his room. He decided that he was too sore and sweaty. Besides, she still had not broken her professional mode. There was not a wink or a touch or a word to indicate that she was still Chelsea.
"Did you talk to Abigail?" he asked.
"I did. She knows that Sami knows. She suspected it already, actually. Sami likes to go way over the top."
"No kidding." To his surprise, Chelsea did not appear inclined to elaborate. "Did you tell her that I'm alive?"
"No. She knows that the pictures went to Sami from you, but… it seemed like it was complicating things more than it was worth if I told her."
"Okay. I trust your judgment on that."
Chelsea nodded, but remained quiet.
"What are you thinking, Chelsea?" Nick asked at last. "Three days ago, you wanted me to tell you everything. I told you one thing, and now you can't even look at me."
Chelsea looked at him. "Did you really call Abby a whore?"
"Yeah. I did."
"Abby? The girl who traveled all over Europe halfway through college and came back home still a virgin? The girl who could walk into a bar and buy a beer legally before she ever slept with a man? The girl whose magic number is still two? That Abby?"
"I'm not proud of it," he said, because he wasn't. "I did a lot of messed up things to end up here. I said even more messed up things. I thought you knew that."
"I did. It's just different to hear it from someone who saw it." Chelsea sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed, and something inside of Nick relaxed. She wasn't running away, and she wasn't putting their relationship back on strictly professional terms. "You said something similar to me when you first saw me here."
"And I told you I was sorry. And I was. And I'm sorry about what I said to Abigail, too. If I ever see her again, I'll apologize."
"Why did you say it?"
"To Abby? Or to you?"
"Either. Both."
"With Abigail… I was jealous. I was really jealous and I lost control."
"Why?"
"We're cousins. We used to be a lot alike. I screwed up my life and she- well, she kind of screwed up her life by getting with EJ but no one knew or cared. I fell off the pedestal and she was still on it."
"I can understand that." She gave him a quick, warm pat on the arm. "I can understand that really well. I don't even want to remember some of the things I said to Shawn because I was jealous that everything seemed to be going right for him, and me not so much."
"You were a kid then," Nick pointed out.
"I was old enough to know better," said Chelsea, waving off his protests. "Kids can be self-centered, but there's no excuse for how far I went. As I recall, you didn't have a problem telling me that at the time."
"I guess not."
"So why did you have an attitude with me when you first saw me? Those things you said about me sleeping around- which I totally forgave you for, I'm not going back on it- I just want to know why. You aren't jealous of me. No one is putting me on a pedestal of any kind."
"My parents and grandmother are going to if you aren't careful," he told her honestly. "And I am jealous of you. Not because of that. Because… are you sure you want an answer to this? There are seven billion people on the planet and I should probably be having this conversation with almost all of them before I have it with you."
"If I ask a question, I can take the answer. Whatever it is."
Nick had his doubts, but talking to Chelsea suddenly felt so good and normal that being completely honest was more temptation than he could take. The therapy sessions he was required to attend every day were also getting him into the weird habit of finding it natural to talk about horrible, private things. "I was jealous because someday you get to have sex again and I don't."
To her immense credit, Chelsea didn't laugh. Her years of professional training served her well, Nick noted. "And why can't you?"
"Because it's never going to be right. Not after what happened in prison. I'm never going to be right enough for it to be okay for me to be with a woman like that."
"What do you mean, what happened in prison?"
Nick could feel his eyes widen. He'd forgotten that not everyone knew. He had been sure that it had been all over his medical records, or that, barring that, Hope had told Chelsea. His throat went dry. He both appreciated the discretion of everyone involved and regretted it.
"Nick?" Chelsea crawled along the bed and planted herself right next to him. Her eyes were as wide as his felt- big and dark and worried. Her pulse had sped up so much that he could feel it when she took his hand. "What happened in prison?"
He gulped down the dryness in his throat. "The first thing you thought of. That's what happened. Every day. Over and over and over."
"Oh, Nick." She didn't hyperventilate like Gabi had or dissolve into weeping and caresses like Maggie. She took half a second to catch her breath, and then her voice was hard and demanding. "What happened to the guy? Or… guys?"
"Jensen. He's dead."
"Good," said Chelsea. "Saves me having to do it myself."
"I don't need you to protect me," he muttered.
"Oh, it's no trouble," she said, mock-carefree. "Killing people who rape my friends is a hobby of mine. Just ask Ford Decker. Oh wait, you can't. Not since December 5, 2007, one of the proudest days of my life."
"You know that isn't true."
"You know what, Nick? It kind of is. I was supposed to feel sorry. I told his father I was sorry. And, well, I'm sorry that Carmen and Sloan never forgave me. I'm sorry that my plans pushed Cordy even further past her limit when the poor girl was already hanging on by a thread. I'm sorry for the stress it caused Morgan, trying to balance what everyone in the sorority needed. I'm sorry for every minute of sleep Stephanie lost worrying about me. I'm sorry that it left a stigma on Alpha Chi Theta that none of those girls deserve. But I'm not sorry that Ford Decker isn't out there raping his way across some other college campus, and I'm not sorry that I'm the reason."
"You didn't kill him on purpose, Chelsea."
"No, but it was my idea. Everything was my idea."
"I was so jealous of your sorority back then," Nick mused, happy to be talking about something that wasn't his stay in prison. "Everything you did was with them, you wanted to be with them every second of every day. I thought you were avoiding me. I had no idea what you were going through."
"You were teaching classes at the university, so we couldn't tell you what was going on. You would have been in a really bad position, and after what you'd gone through with me and Willow and the stupid hairbrush, it wasn't like I could mess up your career again." Chelsea rolled her eyes. "God, I sound like Julie justifying not telling Hope that you're alive. And of course the joke was on me, because as soon as I broke the whole sorority oath of silence and told you, that was when things started getting straightened out. You helped me be honest and do the right thing. Like always."
"And then they tried to throw you out of the sorority."
"They didn't, though. They had to have the vote. It was only fair that Carmen and Sloan and everyone else I dragged into the mess get a chance to say how they felt."
"You didn't force them," Nick pushed. "If Carmen or Sloan had called the police that night, it all would have been over right away. My parents and my grandma don't blame Julie for pulling them into faking my death. They all made their own decisions to go along with it."
"They aren't twenty years old. The older you are, the easier it is to tell people no. And you know how I can run over people when I'm determined."
"I'm mildly familiar with the situation." Nick thought back to Chelsea's days in the sorority. She'd told him the story, hastily and retroactively, and they'd set about trying to protect everyone involved and giving Crawford Decker closure. He'd never gotten most of the details, and a month later Daniel Jonas had come to Salem and Nick's relationship with Chelsea had never quite been the same. "Want to tell me what really happened back then?"
"I did tell you," said Chelsea, looking hurt. "Remember the whole, now we can vote you off the island for snitching to your boyfriend the professor thing?"
"I mean, the whole story. Like you remember it now."
Chelsea sighed, but not unhappily, and stretched herself out on the bed beside him. She nudged Nick to stretch out, too. "Better for you after a therapy session," she reminded him. Nick didn't ask which kind of therapy she was talking about.
"Okay," Chelsea began. "I always wanted to join a sorority, from the time I was a little girl. I didn't have sisters growing up, and just the idea of borrowing clothes from all those other girls in the house alone was enough to make me want to pledge. You know I loved dancing, and parties, and clubs. It was going to be a huge adventure. Then when I actually started college, Abby was a total stick in the mud about it. She wanted to spend all her time studying and working and whatever."
"The way I remember it, you wanted to spend all your free time trying to get Bo and Billie back together."
"That too," admitted Chelsea. "I'd lost my adoptive family and I wanted to force my new family to love me, and how was I going to do that from a sorority house?"
"They do love you."
"And I never forget how lucky I am. Anyway, when Max dumped Abby and she hauled ass to London, it made me feel more vulnerable than I wanted to admit. Like, she wasn't there to be Little Miss Perfect in my ear all the time, so I had to have all the doubts myself. Plus, you and I were starting to talk about growing up more, and we were making some wonderful plans. When Stephanie came home and wanted to pledge, I told her it was a bad idea. She had to talk me into it. All of a sudden she was the wild child and I was the sensible one, and it was just weird. Alpha Chi Theta seemed like a good compromise. Morgan had just been elected president and she was so strict about things like not allowing underage drinking and making sure we did all that Earth Day stuff year round. The thing that definitely convinced me that it was the right place was meeting Cordy. Remember Cordy's real name?"
"Cordelia, wasn't it?"
"Right. I didn't think about it at the time, but I have since then. What a perfect name, right out of Shakespeare. She worshipped her parents, would rather have died than shamed them. Her father worked three jobs to make sure Cordy could get the best education anyone could buy, and she hardly ever saw him growing up. Her mother was on her hands and knees cleaning houses for extra money. Cordy, God, she'd barely been on a date, barely even looked at boy in her life. Any sorority that had Cordy as a member, well, I couldn't regress or get into trouble joining, right?"
Nick opened his mouth. Chelsea held up her hand.
"Rhetorical question. Out of all the wannabe pledges, the ones who raised the most money for charity were going to get in automatically. Stephanie and I went to the Cheatin' Heart and held a bachelor auction. I guess by then Morgan had decided that she wanted Stephanie and me to join, because she bid $500 for Max."
"That I remember. Stephanie was not happy."
"She was not. So I asked if there was anyone who thought he could bring in more money for charity than Max, and of course Ford Decker couldn't resist that. Cordy had a crush on him but she was too shy to bid. Stephanie bid for her, and from then on Ford always had his eye on Stephanie. He told Cordy he'd take her out the next day.
"Poor Cordy panicked, told us to tell Ford that she had the flu and he was off the hook. I wish we'd done it. Instead, we thought we were doing such a great thing when we got her dressed up in this red dress and fixed her makeup and sent her off with Ford. We sent her off like a lamb to the slaughter.
"A few weeks later we were having a party and of course Ford never missed one of those. He asked Cordy to dance, and she screamed and ran off and said she wanted to drop out of school. Then- remember the whole thing where some psycho kidnapped me to get you to hand over Artemis and DeMarquette?"
"Vividly. Sorry about that."
"Not your fault. Anyway, that's why I didn't go with Stephanie to the next party. That's why I wasn't there to fill in the blanks when she started acting weird but she didn't seem to know exactly where she'd been. So all of a sudden it's Halloween." She flashed a quick smile. "You in that angel costume."
"And you in the devil costume. You looked great."
"So did you. Ford was there, he was bothering all the girls. Morgan decided to get rid of him. He was so drunk she thought he'd be a danger to himself and everyone else if he got behind the wheel, so she did her presidential duty and drove him home. That was when Cordy told us what really happened. That Ford raped her. She was pretty sure she was drugged. We hacked into Ford's webcam- thanks for teaching me that, by the way- and that was when we saw him with taking off Morgan's clothes. You called the campus police, they got there just in time.
"You know how it went after that. Ford would show up everywhere, making comments to Cordy and Morgan and everyone else. We decided to go to the dean's office to testify against him. Then Ford showed up with his father, who was on the Board of Directors. He scared Cordy so much that she couldn't even talk. Now Morgan, Morgan was someone you couldn't shut up if you covered her mouth with duct tape. I've always admired her for the way she stood her ground in that office with Ford and Crawford staring her down. But Crawford won. He twisted every word Morgan said until it sounded like Morgan was the one who was drunk and that she'd asked for it. Like Ford was somehow the victim.
"As if Morgan would ever in a million years have wanted Ford's filthy hands all over her. She loathed him almost as much as I did.
"After that I decided that we should hang posters of Ford all over campus so everyone would know that he was the campus rapist. Sloan and Carmen said we would get thrown out of school. I convinced them. It was always me. Then Ford caught us hanging them up in the Cheatin' Heart."
"The day you punched him in the face."
"What was I supposed to do? He was all over Cordy, telling her to tell us that he always got what he wanted!"
"I kind of wish I'd seen it, actually."
"If I hadn't been number one on Ford's hit list already, that would have done it. The next thing I wanted to do was break into his dorm room and look for evidence."
"And I told you it would be inadmissible."
"So I told you to forget it."
"But I knew you'd go alone if I didn't come with you, so I came."
"Like Sloan and Carmen. You knew I wouldn't stop, so you went along. It felt like we staked out that dorm for hours. Just staring at the front door. Can't you still count every brick on that wall if you close your eyes?"
"If you want to know a secret, I was really looking at you. The avenging angel. I couldn't take my eyes off of you." He shook his head, embarrassed. "Even with everything else going on, we were in a good place right then, you and I." I liked sitting in a car with you for hours, because it was you, he decided not to add and make things even more awkward. His feelings were in the past and were about things that had happened a lifetime before. They had no place in the present.
"We were, weren't we?" said Chelsea casually. "So we broke into his room. We found the drugs and the mortar and pestle. And that creepy journal he kept where he rated all the girls he raped, identified by their sorority."
Nick only just stopped himself from shuddering. (For a few hours after physical therapy, something like shuddering hurt.) "I blocked that thing out."
"We saw one Alpha Chi Theta on the night he raped Cordy, and another on the night that I was kidnapped. The night Stephanie wouldn't or couldn't talk about. I thought my Dad would accept the evidence anonymously, but of course he said that we'd committed breaking and entering and he couldn't do anything." She rolled her eyes. "Thanks for not saying 'I told you so.'"
"I wished I'd been wrong."
"And that was when I came up with my great plan. We'd lure Ford over to Alpha Chi Theta and make him feel just as helpless as all the girls he raped did. He hated me- he knew I was the one behind the posters, and of course I'd hit him in the face- so he wouldn't come if I called even though he was pretty much obsessed with punishing me. But Sloan, remember, Sloan looked a lot like me."
"You were prettier."
"Sloan looked a lot like me to anyone who isn't you. I begged Sloan to call Ford and invite him over. She didn't want to do it. She didn't want to be alone with Ford, even with all of us in the next room. Carmen told me to stop. Stephanie told me to stop. Cordy told me to stop. Even Morgan- and Morgan wanted Ford's head on a platter bad- finally told me to stop. I shouted them all down. Sloan did it. She picked up the phone and called Ford. She said that the rest of us were out and she was all alone and wanted to see him. It didn't take much convincing. That's how big his ego was.
"Almost as soon as she hung up the phone, she knew she'd made a mistake. She wanted to back out. At least I didn't do the same thing to her that I did to Cordy and hand her over to Ford. I told Sloan to go hide in Cordy's room with the other girls and the baby monitor. When Ford showed up, I was the one who answered the door.
"He wanted to leave right away, of course, but I told him all sorts of stories about how I had Sloan call him because I knew he would never come if I called. I said I wanted to apologize. I said I knew that Cordy was a liar and I was sorry I'd believed her- that Cordy was just too intense and of course she'd freak out if she had sex with a man she barely knew and call it rape. I said that Morgan and I weren't speaking, that Morgan was a stuck up, full of herself rich bitch who got off on being in charge. I think what really convinced him was when he asked if I was still with you."
A mirthless smile curled the edge of Chelsea's lips. "That was one of Ford's ways of getting to me. He'd call Morgan a slut, or he'd threaten Cordy, or he'd insult you. Usually he said two words about you and I was at his throat. You were right before. Back then we were as close as we ever were. Things were practically perfect between us. The idea of anyone wanting to hurt you or insult you just made my claws come out."
"So what did you say about me?" This was far more detail than Nick had gotten at the time.
"I said that I dumped you because you got too excited about the Human Genome Project."
"Sounds like reasonable grounds for dumping."
"Well, Ford bought it. Or he pretended to. So I offered him a drink. He wanted bourbon on the rocks. You know, I've never had bourbon again, even once, since that day.
"I went into the back where everyone else was waiting. Morgan had the drinks ready; they were listening to everything on the baby monitor. I stopped her. I made everyone stir the drug in Ford's drink because we were all in this together. But what I was really thinking was that I was somehow going to mix the drinks up. I was chanting under my breath the whole time 'Ford left, me right. Ford left, me right.' It's a wonder he didn't hear me.
"Or maybe he did.
"He told me to go put on some music. I tried to get him to choose. He insisted that I do it. I guess when my back was turned, that was when he drugged my drink.
"I came back and he said he still didn't trust me. He said that considering how I'd treated him in the past, I couldn't blame him for being paranoid. He said I should taste his drink first. The drink that I had drugged myself from the stuff we stole from his dorm room."
"You didn't," breathed Nick. Chelsea had definitely left out this detail the first time she'd told him the story.
"Of course I did. I had him. I had him there with the drugged bourbon in his hand, and if taking a roofie myself was what it took, then I was going to close my eyes and think of Alpha Chi Theta and do it.
"So I drank, and he drank, and it was amazing how fast I started to feel dizzy. I was slumping into the couch and telling myself to get up but everything was so fuzzy. He took my hand and I knew I didn't want that. He said 'You know, Chels, I'm glad you were here instead of Sloan. Because after everything you did to me, you deserve exactly what you're gonna get.' He pushed me back into the cushions, and he was kissing me, and that revived me a little because I knew with every single fiber of my being that only you were allowed to kiss me.
"I pushed him off. I got on my feet, somehow, yelling at him to stop. He told me that I knew I wanted it. He threw me back down, he was grinding against me, and that was when the others ran in."
"It took them long enough."
"It probably wasn't as long as it seemed to me. Stephanie was screaming the house down and when he grabbed her to shut her up, I ran. I tried to get up the stairs but I was so confused and dizzy, and he chased me. He pinned me on the stairs, he had his arms around my waist, and I guess that's when the drug finally kicked in for him, because when I pushed him he fell.
"That was it. He died right there on our Alpha Chi Theta rug. It was premeditated- the whole school knew I was out to get him- we were sure we were all going to get the electric chair. So we swore each other to secrecy and the body went into the water heater in the basement, and… well, you know the rest. Max found out and helped us move the body, but otherwise it stayed a secret until I told you.
"And I stick by what I told you. I'm not sorry he's dead and I don't lie awake at night feeling guilty that I was the one who knocked him down those stairs or that I was the reason he was there in the first place.
"And if the monster who hurt you were still alive, I would be happy to throw him down a flight of stairs and stick his body in a water heater too."
"It's not the same," Nick muttered, displeased that the conversation had circled back to him.
"Why not? Cause you're a guy?"
"That's one thing," he said, almost against his will.
"No," said Chelsea ferociously. "It's not. The piece of garbage who attacked Cordy and Stephanie and Morgan and me-"
The alarm on Nick's door gave the telltale chirp of being unlocked from the outside. Chelsea jumped off the bed and grabbed her chart; she had broken about fifty rules in the past ten minutes, not that rule breaking was exactly something new to her.
It was Chelsea's supervisor who entered, wanting to know why Chelsea was late for her next appointment and what had gone wrong with Nick. Chelsea hastened to make up a lie about how they had missed a few sessions and that had made this one drag out just a bit longer than expected. She rushed off to her next appointment, and Nick assured the supervisor that everything was fine.
Fine was a wonderful word for covering a myriad of sins and triumphs.
Chelsea wanted to check up on Nick again before she left at the end of the day, but when she peeked around the corner she saw telltale signs that Josh and Jessica were visiting. Anything she had to say to Nick would be better said in private.
On her way home, she stopped at the liquor store and bought, for the very first time in her life, a bottle of bourbon.
"Bourbon on the rocks," she said aloud when she got home, hearing the echo of Ford's voice in her own.
She pulled out her phone and scanned quickly through her Facebook friends as she drank. Sloan and Carmen had unfriended her long ago, although, to their credit, not for at least a year after Ford's death. There were plenty of updates from Morgan; no one could have ever doubted that Morgan Hollingsworth would be a success in every aspect of her life and that she would not be shy about sharing. Cordy, like Chelsea herself, posted little and mainly used her account to read what her friends had written. Stephanie seemed to be online, engaged in a bizarre debate with their cousin Jeannie, who for whatever reason was calling herself Theresa.
Chelsea closed out Facebook and texted Stephanie. Do you have time to talk?
As she had expected, her phone lit almost immediately with Stephanie's number. "What's up?" asked Stephanie.
Chelsea swirled the bourbon around the ice cubes. She hadn't been missing much by not drinking it, she decided. It was probably an acquired taste. "If you don't want to talk about this, it's totally okay. Tell me to stop, please. I'll be very mad at you if you don't."
"Sounds serious," said Stephanie.
"It is." Chelsea drifted again into her memories- Cordy crying on the floor, Cordy talking about leaving school, Cordy on the verge of suicide. Cordy had always been far closer to Stephanie than to Chelsea. Aunt Kayla had practically adopted Cordy when she'd realized how alone Cordy was. "Do you ever talk to Cordy Han?"
"We email sometimes. The last time was a few weeks ago. Why?"
"No reason. I was just thinking about her. Is she okay?"
"Why wouldn't she be?"
"No reason."
"And why would you tell me it's okay not to talk about Cordy if I don't want to- oh!" Embarrassedly, Chelsea took another drink as the lightbulb went off over Stephanie's head. "Because of what Ford did to her back in college?"
"Yeah," admitted Chelsea. "She didn't have the kind of support system you did and she didn't have the kind of personality to bounce back. I would never, never minimize what you went through, but you were never the one lying on the floor of the ladies' room talking about killing yourself."
"She's fine," Stephanie repeated. "She's getting married next spring. Her parents are friends with the guy's parents and they ended up hitting it off- not an arranged marriage or anything, but definitely parental recommendation went a long way. Can you imagine if my parents picked a guy for me?"
"They probably would have picked Max," said Chelsea, her tongue loosened by the long day and the alcohol.
"Maybe," said Stephanie neutrally. "Your mom would have picked Nick for you."
Chelsea almost choked. The bourbon burned unpleasantly as she coughed.
"Are you okay?" Stephanie asked. "Should I hang up and call 911?"
"No," Chelsea managed before coughing some more.
"I'm sorry," said Stephanie sincerely. "I shouldn't have said that."
"It's fine. It's true. Mom liked Nick a little too much back then."
"Your whole family thought Nick was the best thing that ever happened to you."
"Not you. You never liked him. You wanted me with Jett, or with Daniel."
"It wasn't that I didn't like Nick," Stephanie corrected. "I just thought that he was a little too ordinary for you. I thought you needed someone who could stick with you when you had adventures and did exciting things. Now, I don't know. If he had stayed that same person instead of things going the way they went, maybe. Probably. You appreciate the nice guys more when you're older."
"What do you know about how things went with Nick?"
"The same stuff everyone knows. He was horrible to Will and Sonny, just a homophobic jackass, and then he blamed it on being raped in prison-"
"Everybody knew about that?" Chelsea injected, outraged.
"You didn't?"
"Not until today."
"What happened?"
Chelsea paused. She wasn't sure how far word of Nick's miraculous resurrection had spread or whether Stephanie was supposed to be in the loop.
"You saw him, didn't you," said Stephanie. Statement, not question.
"You knew that too? About him being alive?"
"My mom is Chief of Staff at the hospital," Stephanie reminded. "When there's a question of whether a patient died, and there's a conflict in the hospital records, and the patient turns out to be someone my family knows, someone who practically was part of our family, yes, it gets mentioned."
"I saw him," Chelsea admitted.
"How's he doing?"
"I don't know."
"How are you doing?"
"I don't know. I thought I was doing fine, but today we talked and we talked about…"
"Rape, Chelsea. You're allowed to say the word."
"I kept thinking about how you were, how you'd be so quiet and confused and teary and then you'd scream. But you had your parents and you had Max."
"And I had you," said Stephanie, but Chelsea ignored her.
"Then there was Cordy. She didn't feel like she could tell her parents. She didn't feel like she could tell anyone. We practically had to pry it out of her with a crowbar and she was still convinced that she was alone. I hate the thought of Nick feeling like that. I don't care what he did- I mean, of course I care what he did to Will and Sonny. But when I remember him like he was, the idea of him being alone in some prison cell day after day with no way of defending himself, it makes me so angry that I don't even know what to do."
"Drinking's a good start," said Stephanie, not entirely joking. She was Steve Johnson's daughter, and Steve had certain feelings about the use of alcohol in difficult times. "What was that you choked on?"
"Bourbon. Ford's drink of choice. Want to toast him with me?"
"Not even a little bit."
"Were you ever angry with me?" Chelsea asked, and now she knew why she had really called Stephanie. "For the way I handled the thing with Ford. The way I went on a crusade and dragged everyone else along with me."
"No," said Stephanie, sounding surprised. "Is that what you think? Don't ever think that. You made me feel loved. That's what you made me feel. Loved and protected and strong. The way you took charge was amazing. I mean, you made a whole string of really bad decisions, let's not whitewash that, but you were such a force of nature. I was in awe of you. You're my cousin because you are. My mom is your dad's sister and there's no way around it. But you're one of my best friends in the whole world because you're awesome and I love you."
"I love you, too," said Chelsea, tears springing to her eyes.
"Now let's talk about something stupid so you don't brood all night."
But whatever small talk Stephanie might have made about fast racecars and handsome actors and whether their cousin Eric was ever going to forgive Nicole slipped out of Chelsea's head as soon as she ended the call and saw a voicemail from Hope.
"Chelsea! Hi, Honey. It's Hope. Ciara and I are taking a little vacation to New Orleans and we're bringing Lucas' daughter Allie along. We'd like to take a side trip to Washington to see you. We also want to make arrangements to see Nick. I think it would be good for the girls to see him. Call me when you get a chance."
Somehow that made her cry again.
TBC
Author's Note: This chapter wasn't supposed to exist. All Chelsea was supposed to do was tell Nick that she'd gotten a call from Hope and that she was coming to visit with the little girls. That's it. Instead it morphed into almost 6000 words about that time in 2007 when Chelsea was awesome. Granted, Chelsea was usually awesome but especially during the Alpha Chi Theta storyline. And I did particularly like the look on her face when she told Ford that she dumped Nick over his enthusiasm for the Human Genome project.
Also, since this used to be my OLTL account, how is that both OLTL and Days had college-dwelling rapists named Ford who came to brutal ends? Weird. I almost wrote "Bobby Ford" instead of "Ford Decker" about five times. Hopefully nothing slipped through my sloppy editing process.
Anyway. Maybe I'll be back on track next chapter.
Please consider reviewing if you made it this far. :)
