Maybe she was right to try.
Maybe I deserve the way Zero treated me. Maybe that's all I'm good for. All I'll ever be good for.
The entry keeps going. Page after page. Max's handwriting loosening as the words pour out faster.
But here's the thing I can't stop thinking about:
For those few minutes in the basement, I felt ALIVE.
Not invisible. Not nothing. Not the quiet kid who doesn't matter.
Zero looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered. Like he was losing his mind over me. Like my body, my scent, my very existence was driving him crazy.
He couldn't control himself around me.
ME.
He said he was mad at me. That I made him want things he shouldn't want. That I was ruining him.
Good.
Because maybe it means I'm not nothing.
Maybe it means I matter.
Even if it's twisted. Even if it's wrong. Even if the only way I matter is as something he wants to destroy.
At least I'm SOMETHING to him.
I'm hard.
I'm crying and I'm hard and the two things exist in the same body at the same time and I don't know what to do with either of them.
The tears track down my cheeks—hot, silent, the kind I haven't cried since my mother died. Not the performance of grief. The real thing. The bone-deep recognition that I am the villain of someone's story and the evidence is written in shaking handwriting in his own diary.
He bent me over a weight bench and took my virginity.
His virginity. I took it on a basement bench and didn't know. Didn't ask. Didn't look at him afterward. Saidclean yourself upand walked away like he was nothing.
Maybe I deserve the way Zero treated me. Maybe that's all I'm good for.
The words gut me. This boy—this person who wants to be chosen, who's spent his whole life being discarded—sat on his bedroom floor bleeding and crying and wrotemaybe I deserve it. Because of me. Because of what I did.
But my cock is straining against my jeans because Max wroteI went down to that basement knowing and when he kissed me, I kissed back and I wanted him to. Because he wrote I felt ALIVE and he couldn't control himself around me and then—
Good.
One word. Underlined. The most defiant thing in the entire entry. Max Carter—broken, bleeding, degraded—looking at what I did to him and finding power in it.
Finding proof that he matters. That he's not invisible.
At least I'm SOMETHING to him.
I undo my belt. Shove my jeans down. Wrap my hand around myself and it's wrong, everything about this is wrong—I'm sitting on his bed reading his private thoughts with tears on my face and his scent in my lungs and I can't stop.
I'm not thinking about the basement. Not exactly. I'm thinking about what it would be like to do it right. To pin him against a wall and growl his name and take what I want—but ask first. To be brutal and real and honest and sayI want you, tell me you want me back, say the word and I'll give you everything the dark part of me has to offer and I'll stay. I'll stay afterward. I'll hold you. I'll look at you.
My hand moves faster. Rough. Punishing. Max's scent everywhere—the pillow, the sheets, the t-shirt I'm still holding balled in my other fist.
