Chapter 29
Brendon
Aweek is apparently all it takes to pretend nothing happened.
Seven days between a confession that slipped out of his mouth, and opening my inbox to see no new messages from him. He didn’t even have to say we were done; he just stopped, and didn’t even bother to text.
To be fair, I didn’t either.
My phone sat on my nightstand that night, face down, buzzing occasionally with group chats and TA chain emails, and I stared at it until my eyes hurt.
I could have picked it up at any point. I could have typed something simple that sounded like us.
‘You alive, Beast?’ ‘You rip any more throats out today?’ ‘You still bleeding on things you shouldn’t? ’ Anything.
Instead, I lay there, with Jericho sprawled across my chest, and convinced myself that if I started the conversation, I’d be the only one holding it up.
The next day, there was an email from the Student Support Office, reminding me to submit my updated TA schedule. The day after that, an automatic notification popped up in the system.
Student: Volkov, Dominic Viktorovich
Status: Removed from tutoring program.
Reason: Academic progress achieved / no longer required.
Three lines. Two clicks. All it takes to erase an entire part of my week.
I sat in my cramped little office, the one with the flickering overhead light and wobbly chair, and read that notification three times.
My throat felt too tight, and my chest too full.
I opened our message thread and reread the last conversation—the one where I told him I’d be at the cottage after the game, the one he didn’t answer, the one that ended with me stitching him up on my couch, instead.
That blank space underneath my name was suddenly the most accurate thing in my life.
Slipping back into my old patterns should not have been as easy as it was; that’s what makes me hate them so much.
I fall back into the good boy role like it’s muscle memory. I get up early, I make coffee exactly the way I always did before him, I pack my bag with neat files and color-coded pens. I answer emails promptly, offer office hours, smile at students who come to me in a panic over grades.
Jericho watches all of this with the unimpressed air of someone who has seen too many human disasters to be moved by one more.
He curls up on my lecture notes, smacks my pen when I get too far into my own head, and climbs onto my chest at night when I can’t shut my brain off.
He stares at me, with those unblinking yellow eyes, whenever I linger too long on the stupid leather cuff on my wrist.
It serves as a constant, solid reminder that for a chunk of my life, I belonged to someone who could kill with his bare hands, and somehow chose to hold me with them instead.
Without the sessions, I have more free time. He’s out of sight most of the time, which makes it very easy to pretend I’m out of his mind, I guess. The thing is, being out of someone else’s mind doesn’t seem to stop them from occupying mine.
One week later, the campus looks exactly the same, while I feel like someone reached inside and quietly rearranged all my organs without telling me.
The sun is out for once, bright enough that the quad is full of people.
There are blankets spread on the grass, textbooks open, speakers playing three different playlists at once.
I’m crossing from the humanities building to the law library, with a coffee in one hand and a folder of graded assignments in the other.
I’m halfway across the quad when I hear his laugh.
My body recognizes it before my brain does: my shoulders tighten, my grip on the coffee cup flexes, my heart picks up pace.
It’s that deep, warm chuckle that drops into something rough when he’s really amused.
I’ve felt it against my ribs. I’ve heard it against my neck.
Hearing it now, in the open air, mixed with other voices and other laughter, feels… wrong.
I don’t mean to look. I swear I don’t.
My head turns on its own, eyes tracking the sound to a cluster of picnic tables near the student union; the ones the athletes have unofficially claimed as their territory. They’re almost always full of people in team gear, jerseys, hoodies, and letterman jackets.
Dominic is in the middle of it all, wearing a Lakehaven hoodie and sitting on the bench backwards, facing out rather than in—long legs spread, one foot braced on the grass.
There’s a girl on his lap.
She’s perched sideways, one arm around his shoulders, the other gesturing as she adds to the conversation.
She’s pretty in that effortless, campus princess way; long hair, glossy and straight, falling over his chest. Her skirt rides up when she shifts, exposing a lot of thigh and just enough of the curve of her ass to make it obvious which part of him she’s settled over.
His hand is braced on her hip, fingers splayed and thumb moving in an absent, unconscious little stroke. He looks every inch the campus god the world believes he is—the quarterback king, holding court with his girl tucked snugly against him.
My heart gives one slow, painful twist.
Of course.
Of course it was this easy. Out of sight, out of mind. Take the TA out of your schedule, take his body out of your bed, and the space he occupied fills itself with what it was always supposed to be filled with.
Fake straight boy normalcy. Girls with long hair and public PDA. Dates to games and parties where no one has to hide. A life that photographs well, with a girl who has no idea how many bodies his hands have made quiet.
This is what loving him in secret looks like; you get your heart wrecked quietly, while you watch him be ‘normal’ for everyone else.
This hurts because I love him. That’s the truth of it: I love him.
I love the man who can be both monster and comfort, who can hold me down in one breath and hook his pinky with mine in the next.
I love the stupid way he pronounces my name when he’s half asleep.
I love the way he gets this crease between his brows when he’s concentrating on case law, even though he pretends he doesn’t care.
I love the way he talks about football like it’s the only language that has ever really made sense to him.
I love a man who told me he didn’t want to care, and then crawled into my bed anyway.
He looks up, and I tell myself there’s no reason for his gaze to track in my direction at that exact second.
He has the entire table’s attention, a pretty girl on his lap, teammates laughing, food in front of him—a whole world that doesn’t need me in it.
There is absolutely no reason for his eyes to lift and find mine across the grass.
But they do.
Blue meets green across twenty yards, and a hundred unsaid things pass between us.
His smile fades a little; not enough for anyone on his bench to notice, but I see it. He looks at me like he’s been punched and is trying not to show it.
Every instinct in my body screams to go to him, to close the distance, to grab him by the hoodie and demand answers I already know I won’t like.
‘Why did you end us with silence?’ ‘Why didn’t you text?’ ‘Why did you come to my apartment bleeding, if I’m just one more secret you can drop?’ ‘Why does it hurt you to see me, but still not enough to stop you from letting someone else sit where I used to kneel?’
Instead, I do the one thing I can control.
I look away.
Maybe one day, I’ll be able to look at Dominic across a crowded quad and feel something less than this.
Maybe one day, I’ll be able to sit through a game and cheer for Lakehaven without tracking his every move, without waiting for his eyes to find me in the stands.
Maybe one day, I’ll walk past him, with some girl on his lap, and really believe it’s none of my business.
Today is not that day.
Out of sight, out of mind was always a lie.
Turns out, loving a monster doesn’t stop just because I walk away.