13. A Most Unwelcome Blast From The Past #3
Kingston sighs and flops back deeper into his chair.
“Dad arranged it. Her dad is one of his business partners, and our ability to get along the way he wants us to is being monitored. If I don’t play the part, he’ll know something’s up, and he’ll hurt you if he finds out about you, baby.
I’m not fucking her, but I have to convince her just as well as him. ”
I swallow hard at that and nod. Not cheating, not yet, but it’s coming, and I’ll be the mistress, not her.
I don’t know if I can do that. To be kept as the dirty secret, especially if his dad pushes for a more permanent relationship between them.
Tears well in my eyes because no matter how much I want him, I don’t think I can be that person.
“I love you so much, Kingston, and I really want this to work between us, but how is there any future for us like this?”
Kingston’s eyes fly to mine, and he leans forward to pull me against him. His arms wrap around me, and I curl into the crook of his neck. His steady heartbeat keeps me from breaking apart.
“I just need time to get things in order, and then I can get out from under his thumb, and we can be together, baby. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I don’t deserve you at all–”
His voice was warm and soothing in my ear until I heard the last bit. He’s always downplaying his worth, and he should never doubt that.
“No, don’t say that. We’ll figure it out. I can wait for you.”
His eyes light up with hope, and he gives me a dazzling smile. “You won’t have to wait forever, just a little longer, and we’ll be free,” he promises before kissing my doubts away.
Shock and utter disbelief course through my veins. I want to run. To hide. To bury my head in the sand or simply cease to exist. I've never been so humiliated and stripped bare like I am now.
The campus courtyard is filled with students. The gathering place before the first bell rings, and everyone heads to class. This is when it’s the most crowded during the school day, and it's at this moment that a projector is showing a very lewd video on a screen hanging on the gym building's wall.
A porn shot of a man's cock thrusting down someone's throat. The one taking it is enthusiastically enjoying it, begging for harder, deeper thrusts, begging for the other’s cum like they’re dying for it. The exact kind of porno that I would have saved on my PC if I'd come across it.
But not this particular one. At first glance, I thought it was a prank.
A bunch of football jocks standing around and laughing at it.
Something right up their alley that would earn them nothing more than half a detention and a slap on the wrist once the teachers see it.
I'd roll my eyes, chuckle disdainfully, and just walk away if I weren't so completely horrified.
Because the one in the video taking it–the one who’s begging so desperately for more in between the gagging thrusts down their throat–is me.
Kingston, whose cock is down my throat in the video.
Kingston, with whom I went on the sweetest date last night.
Dinner, roses, sweet smiles, and laughter that ended with the sizzling brush of skin against skin.
There was no hint of anything that would lead me to expect to wake up to something like this.
I thought we meant so much more than this.
His eyes meet mine, and for the barest second, I see something akin to guilt pass his face before a mask of cold cruelty and complete disdain takes over.
Realization sets in with horrifying devastation. He did this on purpose. He outed me in a way that protects his anonymity because his face and his voice are nowhere in the video. Just me. Just the part of me that I've kept hidden from everyone except my family and Kingston.
It’s not like people weren't already suspicious that I was queer. But I'd never said, and now, I'll never need to say. The choice being ripped out of my hands right in front of me and displayed for the whole school to see on a projector.
And if that was all of it, if that was even the worst of it, I think I’d somehow be able to swallow it all down and hold my head up high.
But it’s not. Not by a long shot, because while I’m spiraling from the cruelty, from the sheer robbery of my identity and how I share it, I’m also spiraling from the knowledge that I trusted him, that I love him.
I don’t see how there’s any way for him to explain this away, and the look on his face tells me he’s not going to try.
The man laughing at the damage he’s caused is not the man I love.
He’s chosen to be what’s expected of him, which leaves no room for whatever it was that we had, if we ever had it at all.
I don’t know if we did, or if I was abysmally had because I’m struggling to reconcile my Kingston with this Kingston.
I should have listened to Qi. He said again and again that Kingston gave off bad vibes, but aside from Kingston being a little naggy when it comes to sex, I hadn’t seen anything.
There were red flags, such as the dating to keep his dad pacified, and similar issues.
But he never tried to hide those things; he showed them, and explained them, and I accepted them.
But maybe Qi was right all along, and Kingston’s biggest play was to showcase his true colors and hoodwink me into believing they weren’t what they seemed.
“Qiang, we need you to come with us,” the principal’s voice inevitably barks next to me.
I didn’t even hear him come up, and now that he has, the million other fallouts from this are starting to set in. My scholarship, graduation, everything I’ve worked for, everything my parents worked for to get me this far. What have I cost them with my sheer, naive stupidity?
“I’m not talking to anyone without my parents here,” I respond in a voice so emotionless, I’d wonder if it was even mine if I didn’t feel the words punch out of my body with the breath that feels foreign in this moment.
Everything feels foreign. It’s all happening to me, but it’s like I’m outside of myself, feeling it from another perspective, and numb to the realness of it all that I should be feeling.
I don't actually want my parents anywhere near here or this, but there's no way they won't be called and told about it anyway.
They need to know, and they need to be here because I know who is in that video, and whether anyone suspects Kingston is the other one doesn't matter.
No one will say anything against him, but they're going to burn me alive for it.
The principal says a lot of things about reputation and decency and propriety, like I'm the one who projected that video. Like it was my prank and my desire to showcase my fellatio skills for the entire school to see.
He talks about all the fears that ran through my head when I demanded that my parents be here.
Expulsion. Losing the scholarship I'd been awarded for university next year.
My senior honors that I busted my ass for.
Everything I've worked for is crumbling at my feet because the man I thought was the love of my life turned out to be something completely different.
Every sweet word, every loving caress, every late-evening whimsical murmur of what we wanted our futures to look like with each other by our sides. Every bit of it was a lie.
“The reality is that everyone saw his face. If he walks the halls of our school, then that makes a statement that we condone such deplorable–”
My mom squeezes my hand when the principal starts getting nasty, and I know she’s trying to be soothing in a situation where everyone is angry.
“There is no need for descriptors, especially if the descriptors are abhorrent,” my dad interrupts whatever horrible things the principal was going to say about me.
“You'll punish my child even though they are the victim to save your reputation.
However, we both know that if Qiang were a wealthier student, then this discussion wouldn't be happening at all.
There's enough proof to show that not only are you failing to protect my child from on-campus bullying, but you are also punishing them for the bullying as well. Is that correct?” he points angrily.
The principal purses his lips as he sizes my dad up, probably trying to see if the fight against him is worth it or not. “You do not understand the position that I'm in.”
“I do actually understand the position that you are in.
You're worried about your reputation and funding in a place where money rules over morality. So let's make a deal. You get yours, and we get ours. You don’t have to put up with the scandal of me going public with your unfair ways, and my child will be free to realize their fullest potential,” my dad points out, and I can see the conflict in his eyes.
I know my dad’s belief system and that he’d rather take this all the way to the top, to blast their unfair ways for all the world to see, but there’s no winning for me in that scenario, and he knows it.
He’s setting his moral compass aside to ensure my future, and I didn’t think I could hate myself even more than I do right now, knowing I don’t deserve that much consideration.
The principal raises his eyebrows and looks at my dad with interest. “What do you propose?”
“Simply this, I have no desire to allow my child to set foot in these halls again.
But them getting expelled this close to graduation will be detrimental to the university placement they worked so hard for.
So let them finish out the year and graduate from home.
They won't be here to send the wrong message, and they'll be able to finish what they started with the same honors and scholarships already in place. And this incident will neither precede nor follow them into university,” he reasons out, cool as a cucumber even though I’m sweating bricks.
The principal frowns, and he opens his mouth with an expression that screams he’s about to argue, but before he can, my dad interjects.