I couldn’t take it anymore.
Not the silence. Not the way he moved around me like I was some wild animal he was trying not to spook. And especially not the damn kindness.
He was halfway out the door—headed to some study groupor maybe his newboyfriend’sdorm—when I grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it shut.
“Hey.” He turned, startled. “What the hell?”
“You really think you can just…fixme?” My voice shook with something bigger than anger. “With your little edits on my paper? Sneak your way into my head like I’m some kind of fuckingcharity case?”
Tru blinked. “I wasn’t trying to fix you.”
“Bullshit,” I hissed. “You went behind my back. Touched my stuff. What the hell gave you the right?”
He took a breath. “You were gonna fail. You’ve been distracted, and I thought?—”
“You thought what? That I’m too fuckingstupidto do it myself? That you’d save me so you could feel better about yourself?”
“No.” His voice dropped. “I just didn’t want you to lose your scholarship. I was trying to help?—”
“I never asked for your help.”
“Yeah,” he snapped. “Well, I never asked to fall in love with someone who hates me, but here we are.”
The words hit like a brick to the chest, stealing my next breath. We faced off against each other in silence, each fuming, our breaths ragged and heavy. His eyes were shining.
Shit. No. Not that. Not tears. Not now.
“Fuck you,” I muttered. “You don’t get to say shit like that.”
“Why?” he asked, voice shaking. “Because it’s true?”
I shook my head. “Because I can’t keep pretending I didn’t hear it.”
He stepped closer. Just one step.
I backed away like the floor burned.
Tru nodded like he understood. “That’s what I thought.”
And then he walked out, shutting the door behind him so gently, it made me hurt all over. I stood there, fists clenched, chest heaving. The air felt different. Denser. Like he’d taken all the oxygen with him when he left.
"Shit," I breathed. I ran a hand through my hair, pacing, feeling caged.
That line—“I never asked to fall in love with someone who hates me.”
It echoed. Pounded. Lingered like smoke in a locked room.
He said it so plainly. It was a fact. As if he’d rehearsed it in front of a mirror, or scribbled it in his journal a hundred times before finally saying it to my face.
And me? What the fuck did I do?
I lashed out. Bit him like a wounded dog. Because that's what I was around him, wounded. Unraveling. And the worst part was he’s the only one who’d ever been able to touch the wound.
I stared at Tru’s bed, at the corner of the pillow where the edge of the journal stuck out again. I shouldn’t, but I already did once, and I couldn’t stop myself again.
My ass sank into his mattress. My fingers hovered just an inch from the journal before curling into a fist. But I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to. I’d already seen enough to know the truth. Tru never stopped caring when I gave him every reason to.
Even now, I could still feel the warmth of his words. The way he wrote to me as if I was still in there, somewhere beneath the bitterness and the bile.
