He squeezes my shoulder once, then steps back. I watch him walk away—steady, reliable, exactly the kind of person I thought I wanted before Kieran O’Connor sat down beside me in Engineering 204 and rewrote my definitionof want.
My phone buzzes.
AUBREY
OMG BABE WHERE ARE YOU
I turn it off.
Inside my room, I lock the door. Slide down against it.
My phone stays dark in my pocket. I don’t need to look to know what’s happening out there; the posts multiplying, the comments dissecting every moment, the think-pieces about consent and manipulation and whether what he did even counts as wrong when I technically agreed.
On my desk, folded carefully, is the shirt he gave me. His practice jersey, the one he asked me to wear.“I like seeing you in my clothes,”he’d said, voice rough with want.
Everything was a lie.
Even the things that felt most true.
I take the jersey—number seventy-one, the name O’CONNOR stretched across the shoulders. The fabric still smells of him. Soap and cold air and something uniquely his that I’ll probably never forget.
I should burn it. Throw it away. Destroy it like he destroyed me.
Instead, I bury my face in it and let myself break.
Because hating him would be easier if I didn’t love him.
If my body didn’t remember his hands, his mouth, the way he looked at me in the cabin like I was the only thing that mattered.
If my first time could somehow become not my first time. If I could take it back, give it to someone whoactually?—
But that’s not how it works.
You can’t unfuck someone.
You can’t unknow what their hands feel like.
You can’t unlove someone just because they never meant what they said.
That’s the cruelest part of the bet Kieran won.
He gets to walk away.
I have to figure out how to stop being in love with someone who only existed in my head. Someone who took my firsts and turned them into a game I didn’t know I was playing.
The colors don’t come back.
Everything bleaches to flat white—soundless, airless, empty. The gold is gone. The blue hum is gone. Just a blank pane of light where my world used to live. Even my heartbeat is muted, drained of hue. Not absent. Just empty. I tug my hoodie tighter and wait—for anger, for hate, for anything that sounds like more than this terrible, colorless quiet.
All that’s left is the absence of him.
And the steady, relentless thud that says I’m still here.
31
NO ICE UNDERFOOT (KIERAN)
Idon’t move when she walks away.
