“It wasn’t a show,” she said with the kind of even tone that meant she’d rehearsed this conversation. “It was time someone stepped forward and called him out.”
“Bullshit.” My voice was shaking with fury I didn’t know I was capable of. “If I wasn’t involved, you never would’ve done shit. Would you?”
Vaughn went quiet, which was basically a confession wrapped in academic silence.
“Say it,” I demanded, stepping closer. “If I hadn’t gotten close to him, if I hadn’t been kneeling where you used to kneel, you would’ve let him keep going. You would’ve let it all slide like it was just another Tuesday.”
“That’s not true.”
“You didn’t give a fuck when it was other girls. You only cared when you saw yourself in me.”
Her jaw tightened like I’d hit a nerve with surgical precision. “You’re wrong.”
“You watched me burn and waited until you couldn’t stand not being the only one scarred by Adrian fucking Lewis.”
“You’re a child, Sophie,” she hissed, mask slipping to reveal something ugly underneath. “You don’t understand the damage he’s capable of.”
“No,” I snapped back. “You don’t understand that this isn’t about him anymore. It’s about you.”
She blinked like I’d just spoken in ancient Greek.
“You couldn’t stand seeing him with someone else,” I said, voice sharp enough to draw blood. “You couldn’t handle the fact that you were replaceable. You thought you were the one girl he’d never move on from, the one who’d haunt his dreams forever.”
“Stop.”
“But he did, didn’t he?” I continued, because apparently I’d decided to go for the psychological jugular. “He moved on. From you. To me. And that’s what’s eating you alive from the inside out.”
Her face went red enough to power Christmas lights. “This isn’t about jealousy-“
“Then what the fuck is it?” I yelled, volume control officially offline. “Because you sure as hell didn’t file a police report when it was you kneeling for him. When you were letting him control every aspect of your existence. This-what you did today-this wasn’t about protecting anyone. It was punishment.”
“You think I wanted this?” she shouted back, composure finally cracking. “I lost everything when I left him! My reputation, my research, my entire identity. I almost destroyed myself trying to recover from what he did to me. And now I’m watching another girl fall into the exact same black hole and you want me to just stand by and let it happen?”
“No,” I said, voice going cold as arctic wind. “You didn’t want to watch it happen. You wanted to be the one to end it. You wanted to be the one with the power this time.”
Vaughn’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “He broke me, Sophie.”
“And I still chose him,” I said, each word hitting like a hammer. “Because maybe, just maybe, I wanted something he gave me that no one else could. Maybe I wanted to be broken in exactly that way.”
She shook her head like she couldn’t process what she was hearing. “You don’t know what love is.”
“I never said it was love,” I snapped. “But it was mine. It was my choice, my disaster, my beautiful fucking catastrophe. And you took it from me.”
“It wasn’t real.”
“It is real. It felt real.”
“That doesn’t make it safe.”
I looked her straight in the eyes, seeing her clearly for the first time. “I never asked for safe.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Just silence and the weight of everything we’d both lost.
I couldn’t look at her anymore. This woman who thought she was saving me. This woman who only acted when her pride got wounded.
This woman who’d destroyed everything because she couldn’t stand not being the center of Adrian Lewis’s psychological warfare.
I took a shaky step back toward the door. And whispered the only truth I had left: “I hate you.”
*Five months later*
Summer went by like a fever dream designed by someone who hated me personally. A hot, dragging, absolutely miserable blur of existing instead of living.
I didn’t hear anything from Adrian. Not a text. Not a letter. Not even a whisper of campus gossip. Nothing.
Radio silence was so complete it made me question whether he’d ever existed at all, or if I’d just had the world’s most elaborate psychological breakdown disguised as a semester.
No one knew where he went. No updates from the administration. No news from the investigation.
Like he’d been erased from reality with bureaucratic efficiency.
Like the entire thing-his class, the red room, the masked man I’d knelt for-was just some fucked-up fever dream I’d had during a particularly brutal heatwave.
But it wasn’t a dream. I had the emotional scars to prove it.
I had the worst summer of my life, and that’s saying something considering my family’s talent for creating memorable disasters. I barely left my childhood bedroom, which still had glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling like I was twelve.
I slept fourteen hours a day and ate like a bird with an eating disorder. I stared at the same four walls and wondered if I’d imagined the entire psychological clusterfuck.
The passion. The danger. The obsession that felt more real than anything I’d ever experienced.
The way he looked at me like I was simultaneously precious and breakable. The way he systematically dismantled every defense I’d spent twenty-one years building.
And the fucked-up part? I missed it. I missed being broken in exactly that way.
My parents kept asking if I was okay. My mom suggested therapy approximately forty-seven times. My dad just looked worried and bought more ice cream, like frozen dairy products could fix whatever was clearly wrong with me.
But now it has fallen again. New semester, new classes, new books. Same heartache, just with better weather and the crushing weight of academic expectations.
At least Cleo was back.
I spotted her the moment I dragged my suitcase onto campus. She was literally glowing like she’d been dipped in liquid sunshine.
Sun-kissed skin, coral pink nails that probably cost more than my textbooks, oversized sunglasses perched on her head like a crown, and a giant iced coffee that looked like it had its own Instagram account.
“You look like a walking vacation advertisement,” I said, because subtlety has never been my strong suit.
She squealed and pulled me into a hug that smelled like expensive sunscreen and happiness. “Sophie! Oh my God, I missed you, you sad, pale little hermit.”
“I missed you too, you glowing goddess of summer privilege.”
She laughed, the kind of genuine sound I’d forgotten existed. “That’s what ten days in Antalya will do to a girl.”
“Ten days?” I blinked. “You were gone for a month.”
“Yeah, okay,” she grinned, not even pretending to be embarrassed. “But ten days were actual paradise. The rest was me trying to stop Ayden from flirting with every girl in a bikini like some kind of hormonal golden retriever.”
“You two are finally official?” I raised an eyebrow, because apparently I’d missed major relationship developments while spiraling into my summer depression.
“Define ‘official.’”
I gasped. “Cleo!”
She wiggled her eyebrows with the kind of shameless pride that made me remember why I loved her. “Let’s just say we’re exclusive. He makes me exclusively wet.”
“I regret asking. I regret knowing you. I regret the English language.”
“You love it,” she smirked, slinging her arm around me as we headed toward the dorm. “Besides, you needed distraction this summer. You should’ve come with us.”
I didn’t say anything because what was I supposed to say? That I’d been too busy having a psychological breakdown over a professor who’d disappeared into thin air? That I’d spent three months wondering if I’d ever feel alive again?
She squeezed my shoulder. “Still no word from Mystery Daddy?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s so weird. You’d think there’d be, like, news or something. A trial, gossip, literally anything.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “You’d think.”
