Page 2

Adrian

I hated her.

I hated how she sat in the student lounge, her dark hair falling over one shoulder in that braid she always wore, her blue eyes cast down at some book while she waited for us, utterly detached from the world. From me. From Troy. From anything that made her human. She had this way of making herself invisible to the world, of slipping into the background as if she wasn’t meant to be seen in the same space as the rest of us. And maybe she wasn’t.

But I noticed her.

I always noticed her.

The way her lips parted when she read, like whispering the words into the world, made whatever story she was reading real. The way her fingers traced the spine of her book absentmindedly. She never looked up or reacted to anyone, even when they whispered about her behind her back, even when the guys catcalled her or said nasty shit about her on campus.

She was an enigma, an irritation, a constant reminder of everything I’d lost and would never have.

And yet, the moment she left us in the student center, I felt hollow.

Like I’d been sucked dry, left to exist in the nothing around me .

It pissed me off.

I slumped back against the leather couch in my apartment, dragging a hand through my hair as the memory clung to me like a stain I couldn’t scrub from my mind. I hated her presence, but I hated her absence more.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

Elena had always been like this. Always quiet, constantly alone, always fucking untouchable. She never tried. She never wanted. And maybe that was what I hated most about her—that she acted as if none of it mattered. As if we didn’t matter.

I remembered the first time I saw her.

I was twelve. She was eleven.

Dad had brought Lacey and Elena over to the house for the first time, and I’d been standing in the kitchen, gripping the counter’s edge so hard my knuckles had gone white. My mom had been gone for six months by then, and I still woke up every morning thinking she’d be back.

But she never came back.

Instead, they showed up.

Elena had been small, her arms wrapped around a book like it could protect her from the world around her. Her dark hair was too long, brushing the backs of her skinny arms, and she had big, unnervingly blue eyes that flickered around the room like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be there.

I’d hated her then, too.

I'd hated the way she stayed quiet when Troy and I asked her questions and watched us like we were wild animals she didn’t know how to approach. I’d hated how my dad looked at Lacey, like he’d already decided she belonged there.

And I’d hated the way Elena never changed.

She was still that same quiet, nerdy girl. She just looked different now—infuriatingly beautiful, full breasts I caught myself staring guiltily at more than I cared to admit, and that air of nothing goddamn mattering. It drove me insane how my friends had wanted her. They’d all whispered about her at parties, commenting on the way she looked in those oversized sweaters and leggings like she had no fucking idea what she did to people.

But she ignored them just like she ignored me.

And maybe I hated that about her most of all. Nothing Troy or I did ever got her attention. She’d duck her head further and keep going.

I shoved the thoughts away and grabbed my keys. I needed a distraction. Anything to drown out the way my thoughts kept circling back to her, her, her .

The party was already in full swing by the time I got there. Troy’s frat always threw the best parties. Troy himself was a party animal, so it made sense. I was more reserved and studious than he was. Music pounded from inside the frat house, bass heavy enough to shake the walls. People spilled onto the lawn, red Solo cups in their hands, voices loud and slurred.

This was what I needed.

A fucking reset.

I went inside, slipping through the bodies pressed together in the hallway. Someone handed me a beer, and I took it without question, tilting it back and letting the cold rush burn away the last remnants of Elena’s face in my mind.

Halfway through my drink, a girl pressed against me, her arms looping around my neck. Rachel. My guaranteed lay. We went way back—all the way to freshman year in high school. We’d been hooking up since I was able to grow hair on my balls. She was accepted at Lakewood like I was. I knew it had to do more with it being her old man’s alma mater rather than her intelligence because she was simply average in that department.

“You finally decided to show up,” she purred, pressing her lips against my jaw.

I smirked, letting my hands settle on her waist. “You waiting for me or something?”

“Maybe.”

She pulled me closer, her mouth finding mine, and I let her. I let her pull me into the dark, her hands roaming and her body distracting me.

But even as I kissed her and her fingers tangled in my hair, I wasn’t thinking about her .

I was thinking about Elena. She kept popping into my damn head.

I thought about how she always sat alone, lost in her books. I was thinking about the sadness in her eyes, the way she never laughed, never tried to belong. I liked that she was sad. She deserved to be unhappy.

Because she was the reason my mother never came back.

It didn’t matter that it had been years. It didn’t matter that my mom had stopped calling, stopped caring. In my head, I told myself that if Lacey had never come into the picture, my mom wouldn’t have left us behind like we were nothing.

And Elena was a product of Lacey.

A reminder of everything I lost.

I gripped Rachel’s waist tighter, dragging her toward the nearest empty room. She giggled against my mouth, pressing herself against me, but even as I backed her into the bed, all I could see was Elena’s fucking face.

Her quiet sadness. Her sweet beauty. The soft allure of her voice. The way her body moved. She was grace personified.

I forced the thoughts out of my head, drowning myself in Rachel, in the alcohol, in the need to forget.

I just needed the weekend to be over.

Our clothes were off in moments. Rachel moved against me, but it felt like nothing. Just a warm body in a cold bed with no purpose other than to get me off so I could be lost for a small fraction of time. It was a cheap imitation of what love and desire were supposed to be.

I kept my hands on her hips, but my grip was slack. I wasn’t really touching her—I was somewhere else.

Somewhere where blue eyes burned into mine like they saw everything I didn’t want to admit.

I bit back a curse and squeezed my eyes shut. No. Not her. Not fucking now.

Rachel dragged her lips down my neck, sucking at the skin there and surely leaving her mark, but my body didn’t react the way it should have. I was still trapped in my fucking head, in the past, with a ghost who haunted every fucking facet of my life and wouldn’t just leave me be.

Elena .

I saw her at thirteen, sitting on the front porch, curled up with a book, completely ignoring the rest of the world.

I saw her at sixteen, standing in the kitchen in one of those oversized sweatshirts. Her hair was a mess from sleep, and her voice barely rang above a whisper when she spoke.

I saw her at eighteen, walking through campus, earbuds in, eyes down, as if she wasn’t real, as if she wasn’t right fucking there, ruining my life with her presence.

Every memory of her clawed through me like a predator toying with its prey.

I wanted to scrap her out of my head. She was a fucking virus infecting me every part of my twisted soul.

Rachel’s nails scratched down my chest, her breath heavy against my lips.

“Adrian,” she moaned, her hips grinding against me as her pussy squeezed my cock. “What’s wrong?”

Every-fucking-thing.

I tightened my hands on her waist and thrust upward as a way to put in effort. I forced a smirk onto my lips and made myself give her some version of the guy she thought she was with. It wasn’t like I was new to her. We hooked up way too often, and she usually got pissed when I was fucking someone who wasn’t her.

“Nothing.”

She kissed me again, but my mind drifted once more.

Because the thing was, I liked Elena being sad.

I liked the way her eyes carried her ghosts, her demons. I liked how she never really smiled, never let herself belong to anyone, and was untouched, untainted—because it meant she felt it, too.

She felt the same wreckage I did.

She had to.

Because she and her mother had ruined everything.

Before they came into the picture, my mom was still in it. Before them, I could still pretend she was coming back.

But then Lacey walked in with her quiet, bookworm daughter, and suddenly, it was over .

My dad stopped waiting for my mom. Mom never called again. And now, years later, I was still stuck in this fucking loop.

Rachel kissed me harder, but my hands loosened on her hips once more, and she stilled.

I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t have to

She rolled off of me with a sigh, sitting up and brushing her fingers through her hair.

“You’re a real dick, you know that?”

I smirked and reached for my beer, still not feeling any emotion regarding her.

“I never said I wasn’t, Rach. You know me.”

She huffed but didn’t push it; she grabbed her top from the floor and yanked it over her head before she put her skirt and panties back on.

As she stood, she shot me a look. “You should probably figure out how to push whatever bitch you were thinking about out of your head before you try this again.”

The words shouldn’t have hit as hard as they did.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I took a slow drink of my beer as she left, the door clicking shut behind her.

The music from the party thumped through the walls, and voices slurred and laughed outside the room, but I felt disconnected from it all.

I dropped my head against the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

The weekend couldn’t end fast enough.