Show Me Where it Hurts

Inside our car, the ride to Simon’s office was dead silent. Compared to the outside of it, where I’d never seen so many photographers. Tripping over their own feet to run after us. Fans came “in support” of Harry, waiting at bay behind the black gates, ready to throw every kind of insult at me they could.

Harry was starting to sober up from the furiousness. He started by sighing whilst side-eyeing me, before reaching over and rubbing the back of my knuckles with his hand. Assuring me that he didn’t believe it.

Simon was obviously finding it difficult to look at me and I wondered if he’d seen the video the whole way through. Then I remembered that Harry, at the end of it all, was his main priority. Of course he had.

He tried to be nice, but we all knew what Simon was like. In a way, we loved him for his brutal honesty but today all I could do was cry. I just wanted to grab hold of our two children and hold them in my arms and cuddle them. Then when I realised that when they grew up, they’d know that tape, they’d see it. They’d think of me as a terrible mother, just like everyone else in the room did.

Harry and Simon had been talking for so long while another trusted employee took notes and did very important looking things on her laptop. I couldn’t help but be short tempered. This was my life and here I had a team of PR people trying to piece it back together.

“Annie, sweetheart, I’d like to just run through this with you. I know SYCO doesn’t represent you in any way, but you’re a good friend of mine. I’ve watched you both grow up. You’re all very important to me, you, the band, your children.” Simon leaned back onto his chair with a leg propped over his knee, biting down on his pen. “The video, it’s incriminating..”
“It’s not me.” I cut him off, my eyes stony and I didn’t care that sat there, was Harry’s boss and the most important person in the room. He widened his eyes, but nodded like he could believe me.
“I do believe it’s edited.” He shrugged. “I trust that you’re being truthful."

I side-eyed at Harry who just looked like all he needed in the world was his mind erased and a good nights sleep. He hadn’t changed from the t-shirt he’d had on in the morning and he hadn’t showered. He looked a hungover, disgruntled, disenchanted mess.

“Well can you fix it?” I said, sitting up with a lot of unnecessary attitude, but I was heartbroken. I had gone from being the sweetheart of Harry and the boys’ fandom, to the blistering slut who’d broken his heart. “Because incase you hadn’t noticed, my face is all over the news. Twitter. Facebook. People do believe I’ve done it. And here you are worried about Harry.”
“Annie, for Gods sake.” Harry snarled and looked out of the window on his other side, away from me.
“Please help me prove that that’s not recent.” I looked Simon in the eye. I’d asked him for a lot of things on a personal basis throughout my time with Harry. A lot of things he didn’t even know about. Coming to Simon's office when Ivy was six months old and begging for a month off for Harry from recording because I was dying without him to help at home. Simon had always been respectful, and he’d adhered to my requests. He was protective of all of us, the band and all of its hang-ups.
“It can be done. Easily. Ben’s in New York so there’s a bit of a delay, but he’s sure he can go through the file. He swears he recognises the software he’s used on it.” Simon noticed my horror at the fact Ben Winston would be seeing me naked on a thirty-minute long tape. “I’m sorry, Annie. But the whole world has seen it. All we can do is fix this mess. Rather him than another stranger.”

We sat in silence and Simon took some notes and another phone call while my head swam with all different thoughts. I looked over at Harry and I knew he could feel my eyes boring into his skull, but he didn’t raise his stare from the floor.

All I wanted was for him to start reassuring me and holding me and promising me that it would be fine. For better or for worse. To drive the three hours up to Holmes Chapel with our babies and hide out there for months on end. Maybe never move back. But his trust, his mind, was shaken. Who could blame him. Whether I had done it or not, he’d still had to watch another man have sex with his wife. The way he’d hovered over me, pulled my face to look at his, my drunken eyes not even focusing. It was clear in the video I was hardly coherent. Whenever we had made it, I must have been smashed to agree to it.

My head left my body at that moment as a very cold, tingling feeling ran over my arms, up my neck, into my brain. I don’t know why I didn’t recognise that room sooner. I don’t know how I’d lost that minor detail. I couldn’t understand how I couldn’t have thought of this before.

“Stop,” I suddenly croaked, and everyone looked at me. “I remember it, I-I.. know when that video was."

Harry’s head rose from the floor and he narrowed his eyes.

“It’s recent?”
“No!” I jumped to face him, pulling my chair closer to him. “That room I was in.. It’s from the whole thing with Kendall and him.” I shuddered. “Do you remember when you went on that first arena tour? When I went out with Eleanor for the first time since we got together, and you were so nervous about it. When he drugged me. That whole fiasco.” I felt tears fill my eyes. “He told me he didn’t. That we didn’t.. I don’t understand.”
“You’re not making sense,” Harry shook his head, like he was getting half of the story but lost in the rest. “He told you he didn’t sleep with you."

Simon knew what I was talking about, but Will had sworn to me that we didn’t sleep together. Now I realised why. So he could keep that tape while I lived my life with Harry perfectly oblivious. He’d always have one over on me. He’d always know what happened that night, while I thought completely different.

“I think he lied. That bedroom. The wallpaper. It’s his flat in Shoreditch. When we made a tape back when we were seventeen, eighteen, he still lived at home. He moved into that flat when he was twenty-one, the year we got together. The year of the tour. That’s where it’s filmed. He raped me."

The horror knocked the air out of my lungs. I had lived ignorant for five years, not knowing the trauma of that night. When I’d woken with bruises, aches. I knew he had drugged me and he convinced me that all of my ailments were from my own recklessness. Falling down from the drug. The aches a part of the side-effects.

“You’re completely sure that this is his room from the apartment he lives in now.” Simon said, his voice cold from shock. I nodded solemnly. Harry nodded too, obviously recognising it from when he paid him a visit the other day. “And he told you nothing happened?”
“Yes- well, no, sort of.” I tried to clear my throat and speak loud enough for everyone to hear. “He told me we did in the beginning but then I ran into him in a coffee shop in Kensington months later, after Harry had broken up with me.. and he just looked so sincere, so apologetic. He told me he got into it through a dodgy management bribe and that he was asked to sleep with me so that Harry would leave me. The drugs were just to get me home and in his bed because he knew there was no fucking way I’d come there of my own will. I guess he did his job but he couldn’t go through with it. He must be psycho. He must be borderline."

Simon looked at Harry carefully who just looked beyond repair, now. Finding a sex-tape that actually involved the rape of his wife and not just her and another man. He probably wished that he hadn’t just beaten the shit out of him. He probably wished he had killed him.

I couldn’t even think. Thank God I would never have to live with the memories of that night, but it would be there forever on tape. I suddenly wished it was just a stupid, nineteen year-olds sex tape. That would be way more innocent and less damaging to our marriage than what it really was.

“Then it’s sexual assault, and we’ll get him prosecuted immediately. The tape will come off everywhere, it’s not gossip, it’s a crime. It’s not something salacious to talk about. Katie, could you call the police, please.” Simon flicked his pen against his mouth like he’d figured everything out.

I sobbed quietly into my fist but stopped when I heard Harry speak up. His voice was croaky, raspy, exhausted.

“You can’t call the police.” Harry said. “They’ll take me too.”
“What?” His mentor looked at him like he was crazy, too.
“I went to his apartment the other day and-“ Harry tousled his hair away from his face, stuck up all over from sleep. “I hit him, a lot. If you call the police on him they’ll just take me down too for assault and she’ll have no-one. He knows that. He knows he can get away with it."

Simon took a deep breath and stared at Harry in disbelief.

“A very stupid move, Harry.” He shook his head. “Really fucking stupid. Understandable, more than necessary, but really stupid.”

‘Katie’ was still paused with her iPhone half way to her ear, waiting for the all-clear to dial 999. Simon skimmed his eyes over her, and another bout of silence hit. He was thinking, hard. Maybe this was the biggest challenge of his music-industry career. I don’t think he ever saw himself having a sexual assault case on one hand and a bodily-harm on the other.

“No, we’ve got to call them. Will will have a dying chance. The lawyers we can get will have you bailed easily. Since there’s not much evidence. Your knuckles have healed. His wounds probably have if he was well enough to create this video and deliver it around the country.” He stared at Harry, and back at me, his eyes turning more sympathetic and paternal, eyeing us for what we really were. I felt like we were his two children that caused a fuss over and over again, leaving him to fix. Harry staring ashamed at the floor, me crying like I’d been caught out.

But I had to remind myself, that this was neither of our faults. Harry and I had done nothing but fall in love with each other and have two beautiful children together and cherished every moment with them. I couldn’t help who I fell for before. I couldn’t help that he was visibly ill. All I had to concentrate on was that I had Harry, who saved me from it all in the first place, and gave me this life I could never have dreamed of. I’d never repay him for everything my past life dragged him through.

“I’m sorry.” I whispered to him, while Simon ran over his details with his assistant. Harry lazily brought his dull green eyes to meet mine, looking up at me like they were disorientated. He sighed.
“I’ll kill him for what he did to you.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be by my side helping me get over it and we’ll get through it.”
“I can’t ever look at your beautiful body,” his eyes welled up with teary fluid and he frustratedly swiped at them. “All of the parts of you that I love without remembering that he violated all of it. I hate him, Annie.” He croaked.
“And he hates you, but look what we have.” I sniffed. “So much more than he could have ever dreamed of with me. I’m just, I’m sorry that I’ve done all of this. Brought this horrible person into our future."

Simon interrupted us with a strong clearing of his throat, brushing his hand through his raven strands of hair.

“The injunction is out. If that video isn’t taken off of every website on the net, they’ll be prosecuted.” He bit his lip. He looked at Harry, who had dazed out again. I could see he was worried about him. His relationship almost paternal. A guidance in all of this circus behaviour. “You should both go home and take care of each other. You look like you’re about to break. Telephone Anne, Harry. You need her - and you, Annie. You need as many people that love you around you as possible, right now."

Notes

I know it’s really depressing, but things can only get better..right?
Thanks for reading! x