Page 32 of Creeping Lily

LILY

B entley Walker doesn’t leave.

Two days later, he’s still here.

The sight of him on campus hits me like a slap. I’m walking out of English, the afternoon sun in my eyes, Bethany beside me complaining about her professor, when I catch movement across the quad.

It’s him.

Bentley Walker.

It’s hard not to notice him with his long legs eating up the distance between us, expensive slacks pulling taut over his thighs, hands shoved casually into the pockets of a tailored coat that doesn’t belong in the middle of a student campus.

He looks like he’s walking out of a glossy magazine spread, not a lecture hall.

Bethany stops mid-step, eyes going wide.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispers, her voice sharp with warning.

I don’t stop walking. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

But of course, he falls into step beside me.

“I thought you’d left,” I say, my frown sharp enough to cut through him .

“You didn’t call,” he says, like that explains anything.

“There’s a reason for that,” I bite back.

He tilts his head. “Can we walk and talk?”

Bethany shoots him a glare, then mutters under her breath, “Don’t mind me,” before peeling off toward the library. Smart girl.

I stop dead in the middle of the walkway. “Why are you still here, Bentley?”

He halts too, studying me like he’s choosing his next words with surgical precision. I can’t stand it—the way he stares, like I’m a puzzle he’s still entitled to solve.

“Unfinished business,” he says.

I bark out a laugh—ugly, humorless. “Unfinished business? The last time we met, you didn’t just hurt me, Bentley. You destroyed me. You reached into my chest, ripped my heart out, and ground it into the dirt. You left me bleeding. Tell me—what the hell could be unfinished after that?”

His eyes drop to the pavement. For a second—just a second—he looks almost human. Then he lifts his gaze, locking onto mine, and I hate that his stare still carries weight.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened,” he says, slow like each word is deliberate. “I ruined you that night. But you took something from me too. And I’ve been chasing that piece of myself ever since.”

“How?” My voice sharpens, my anger finally pushing through the cracks. “What exactly did I take from you? Because last I checked, you walked away with everything.”

“Not a day goes by I don’t think about you, Lily. About us. About how I was a coward.”

I feel it—his words trying to crawl under my skin. But I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t let him in. Not now.

“You want to talk about cowardice?” I take a step toward him, heat building in my chest until it’s almost choking me.

“ Cowardice is leaving me to pick up the pieces while you got to disappear and reinvent yourself. Cowardice is pretending you’re here for closure when you just want to poke at old wounds to see if I’ll still bleed for you. ”

A muscle in his jaw jumps, but he doesn’t look away.

“You don’t get to waltz back into my life and act like the last few years didn’t happen,” I continue, my voice rising despite the steady stream of students passing us, some slowing to watch. “You don’t get to say my name like it still means anything to you.”

For the first time since he stepped onto campus, Bentley looks like I’ve hit something raw.

“I don’t trust you,” I say finally, every syllable like broken glass. “I don’t trust your lousy timing. I don’t trust your motives. But if you want to talk, I’ll give you twenty minutes. That’s all you get. Then you leave, and I never want to see you again.”

Relief flickers across his face, but I don’t miss the shadow underneath it—the one that says this isn’t about closure at all.

“That’s all I ask,” he murmurs.

But we both know it’s a lie.

My rapist greets me with a smile.

I don’t use that word often. Rapist.

It’s an ugly, jagged word that sticks in the throat and leaves splinters in the mouth.

But right now, it’s the only word that fits.

I don’t care that he was the boy I spent every summer with.

I don’t care that we once shared secrets under starlight.

That boy died the night he committed that one stupid, life-altering act.

And the man in front of me? He’s the ghost that’s been haunting me ever since.

Seeing him here drags it all back—every sound, every smell, every inch of skin I wanted to peel off afterward.

I’ve never spoken about that day to anyone except my therapist. She says it’s normal to feel a connection to your attacker if you had a relationship before it happened.

That some part of the brain can’t reconcile the before and after.

I’ve never understood that. My connection to Bentley Walker is made of barbed wire and broken glass. Even in his absence, I’ve fought to burn him out of my head and stitch myself back together.

And now here we are.

We meet at a local pizzeria because I chose the most casual, unromantic place I could think of.

Bright lights, paper napkins, cheap checkered tablecloths—nothing that could ever be mistaken for intimacy.

I’m not here to reminisce. I’m here to cauterize this wound once and for all.

After tonight, there’ll be no reason for Bentley Walker to linger in my life.

When I told Justin I’d be meeting Bentley, he lost it . And by “lost it,” I mean a full-blown, vein-in-his-neck, pacing-the-room meltdown.

I’d never seen him like that. And yeah, I’ll admit it—his jealousy wrapped around me like a warm coat on a cold day. But Justin doesn’t know the half of it. Bentley is my cross to bear. My mountain to climb. My ghost to exorcise.

I slide into the seat opposite him without a word.

Bentley looks up and smiles like we’re old friends catching up. “Thanks for meeting me.”

I shrug, pretending my stomach isn’t trying to twist itself into knots. He signals the waiter for drinks, and while we wait, the silence between us stretches taut. The guilt gnaws—Justin’s anger, Bethany’s cold shoulder—but I shove it down. I’m here for one thing: answers.

“So,” Bentley says finally, “I never got to ask how you’ve been. ”

I let the pause hang, forcing myself to meet his gaze. “I’ve made peace with my past,” I say, my voice harder than I expect. “But your being here… I don’t know how to unpack that.”

His eyes soften, his head tilting like he’s listening to something only he can hear. “I didn’t mean to crash into your life. I wasn’t trying to stir things up with your boyfriend.”

The way he says the word boyfriend has edges—like it’s bait, like he wants me to correct him.

I don’t. I don’t owe him the truth.

He reaches across the table, his fingers brushing mine, and I pull back so fast the chair squeals against the floor. My skin burns where he touched me. It feels like a betrayal to our past, sure, but mostly it feels like a betrayal to myself.

“It’s been too long,” he says softly. Nostalgia drips off his voice like it’s supposed to mean something to me.

“How’s your family?” I ask, my tone deliberately flat.

His lips twitch. “I’m surprised you’d want to know. After what we did to you.”

The rage spikes hot and fast, catching me off guard. “ We? You mean you . Don’t spread the blame to make it easier to swallow, Bentley.”

His jaw flexes. “Can we not talk about that?”

“Oh, we’re talking about it,” I snap, leaning forward. “Because you don’t get to rewrite history to make yourself sleep better at night.”

He looks away. For a moment, he almost seems smaller. “That night… it destroyed more than just you.”

I laugh—sharp, bitter. “You think I give a damn about your collateral damage?”

Silence. I don’t fill it.

Finally, he says, “My father started drinking again. My mother… her guilt over that night ate her alive. She couldn’t come back from it. ”

I lean in, voice low and venomous. “Good.”

His eyes flick up, startled. I don’t let him speak.

“You all exiled me like I was the disease. I mourned a year of my life for people who left me to bleed alone. I tried to end my life because of what you did to me. You don’t get to tell me about your parents’ guilt like it’s some kind of shared tragedy. ”

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Linc leaving was the final blow for her. She?—”

“Don’t say his name.” My voice is ice.

We sit there, the pizza between us untouched. He tries to steer us to safer ground, but I’m not done.

“You know what the worst part is, Bentley?” I ask, my hands curling into fists under the table.

“That you get to walk around in your tailored suit, sipping overpriced coffee, acting like a respectable man. And the only reason you’re not rotting in a cell is because I stayed quiet. I kept your secrets. You’re welcome.”

His gaze darkens, but he doesn’t deny it.

I push my chair back. The legs scrape loud against the floor, and a few heads turn our way. “Your twenty minutes are over.”

“Lily—”

“No.” I stand, every inch of me vibrating with fury. “You wanted your twenty minutes. You got it. Now get the hell out of my life.”

And before he can answer, I walk out, my heart pounding so hard it drowns out the noise of the street.