Chapter 5 Pauline #2
My savings account, carefully accumulated over four years of living frugally and picking up extra shifts and saying no to vacations and nice dinners. All the little luxuries other people took for granted, looked suddenly pathetic in comparison.
I transferred the full amount.
Every cent.
Watching the number disappear from my balance was physically painful. I actually made a sound somewhere between a whimper and a groan, as my financial security evaporated.
Months of sacrifice. Gone.
But I refused to give him the satisfaction of weakness. Of being exactly what his friends had always assumed I was: a poor girl who couldn’t keep up with their world.
There. Done. Paid in full.
Let him choke on his money.
I closed the app and sat back, staring at the ceiling with its water-stain middle finger.
The apartment felt too quiet. My brain, freed from the distraction of financial calculations, immediately circled back to Jack like a moth to a flame it knew would burn it.
I had loved him since I was sixteen years old.
It was pathetic, really. Embarrassing. The kind of thing I would never admit to anyone, not even Claudette.
I remembered the first time I saw him. I was a sophomore in high school, sleeping over at Claudette’s house for the first time, nervous and out of place in their enormous home with its high ceilings and gleaming floors.
Claudette’s parents had been polite but distant, clearly unsure what to make of the scholarship kid their daughter had befriended. And then Jack had walked in.
Tall and golden and so effortlessly confident. He barely glanced at me—I was just his little sister’s friend, a child, beneath his notice—but I couldn’t stop staring.
“Earth to Pauline.” Claudette had waved a hand in front of my face. “You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Fine,” I’d squeaked. “I’m fine. Totally fine.”
From that moment on, I was doomed.
Claudette never knew. At least, I was pretty sure she never knew.
There had been close calls—so many close calls—like the time she’d walked into her room while I was staring at a picture of Jack on my phone, and I’d fumbled so badly trying to switch screens that I accidentally liked a photo from three years ago and spent the next hour in a cold sweat praying he wouldn’t notice.
Or the time she’d been gushing about Michael Ashford, her own hopeless crush, and had asked me if I had anyone I liked, and I’d said “no one” so quickly and so loudly that she’d given me a look that said she knew I was full of shit.
“You’re a terrible liar,” she’d said.
“I’m an excellent liar. I’m lying right now and you can’t even tell.”
“You make even lying sound weird.” She’d thrown a pillow at me and let it drop. But I’d spent the rest of that night convinced she was going to figure it out, that she was going to realize her best friend had been secretly pining for her brother like some kind of lovesick cliché.
She never did. Or if she did, she never said anything.
And then college happened.
I got into the same university as Claudette—scholarship, thank God, because there was no other way I could have afforded it—and suddenly Jack wasn’t just a face in photographs or a voice drifting down from upstairs.
He was there. On campus. Walking past me in the quad. Sitting three tables away in the library.
I’d spent two years perfecting the art of pretending I didn’t notice him. Of keeping my head down and my heart locked up and my stupid, pointless feelings buried so deep that no one would ever find them.
And then the pool party happened.
It was the summer after my freshman year. Some kind of party where everyone was beautiful and wealthy. I wasn’t supposed to be there—I’d only come to drop something off for Claudette—but she’d insisted I stay, and I hadn’t been able to think of an excuse fast enough.
So there I was, hiding in a corner with a book, trying to make myself invisible, when I felt someone watching me.
I looked up.
Jack was standing by the pool, surrounded by people, but he was looking at me.
At me. Not through me, not past me, but directly at me, with an expression I couldn’t read.
Then he smiled.
And started walking toward me.
My heart nearly stopped. I actually looked behind me to see if there was someone else he could be approaching, because surely there had been a mistake, surely he wasn’t—
“What are you reading?”
He was standing right in front of me—Jack Specter, three feet away, smelling like chlorine and sunscreen. Looking at me like I was interesting enough to worth crossing a crowded party to talk to.
“Um,” I said brilliantly. “A book.”
“I can see that.” He grinned, and my stomach did something acrobatic. “What book?”
“It’s—” I held it up, realized it was a true-crime book about a serial killer in the 1970s, and wanted to die. “It’s stupid. You wouldn’t—”
“The Stranger Beside Me?” His eyebrows rose. “Ted Bundy?”
“You know it?”
“I know of it. Claudette says you’re obsessed with true crime.”
My face went hot. “I’m not obsessed. I just—I find it interesting. The psychology of it. Why people do terrible things. It’s—” I was rambling. I was absolutely rambling. “Never mind. It’s weird. I know it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird.” He sat on the lounge chair next to mine, casual as anything, like this was something we did.
“I think it’s fascinating, actually. Most people don’t want to look at the dark stuff. They want to pretend it doesn’t exist. But you can’t understand the world if you don’t understand the parts of it that make you uncomfortable.”
I stared at him.
He’d said the exact right thing. The thing no one else ever said. Everyone else looked at me like I was morbid, disturbed, a little girl with strange interests who should be reading romance novels instead of books about murder. But Jack looked at me like I made sense.
That was the moment I realized I was in real trouble.
We talked for an hour. Then two. He
told me about his classes, his plans, the pressure of being the Specter heir and how sometimes he wanted to disappear and become someone else entirely.
“You could,” I said. “Disappear. Start over. Be whoever you wanted.”
“Could I?”
“Anyone can. That’s the beautiful thing about being human. You’re not locked in. You can always change.”
He looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable in his eyes. “You really believe that.”
“I have to,” I said. “Otherwise what’s the point?”
That was when things changed between us. The wanting became something more, something that pulled us together despite all the reasons we should have stayed apart.
But I should have known better. I should have remembered that boys like Jack Specter didn’t end up with girls like me. That I was a fun distraction, a secret to be kept, never something to be claimed.
He proved it the night of the party.
I heard voices through an open window—Jack’s voice, and his friends, laughing about something.
“—seen you with that girl,” one of his friends was saying. “The one with the curly hair. Claudette’s friend. What’s her name?”
“Pauline.” Jack’s voice, and my heart lifted for just a second, waiting for him to say something—anything—that proved I meant something to him.
“You hitting that?”
Laughter. Crude, casual laughter.
And then Jack’s voice, light and dismissive: “Pauline? Nah. She’s just Claudette’s best friend. She’s always had a crush on me.”
More laughter. Jack’s joining in.
The world dropped down on me. I pressed my hand against the wall to keep from falling.
She’s always had a crush on me.
Like I was pathetic. A joke. Everything we had shared meant nothing at all.
I walked away before I could hear anything else. What else was there to hear?
That night, I sat in my dorm room and scrolled through Instagram, torturing myself the way you do when you’re young and your heart has just been ripped out of your chest.
And there it was: a photo posted by Madison Glover, the most beautiful girl in my major, all long dark hair and perfect skin and the kind of confidence I would never have.
She was at the party, smiling at the camera.
And there, in the background, clear as day, was Jack.
I cried myself to sleep that night.
Jack had chosen someone else—I’d always known he would, eventually. Boys like him didn’t end up with girls like me. I wasn’t beautiful enough, rich enough, polished enough to fit into his world.
But I had let myself hope anyway. I had let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, I was different. Special. Worth something.
He had made it clear I wasn’t.
The next day, he came to my room. Asked me to be his girlfriend.
I looked at him—this golden boy who was probably playing a prank to laugh about with his friends—and I said no.
I never told him what I’d overheard. My pride wouldn’t allow it. He’d already taken enough from me. He didn’t get to have my humiliation too.
And now here I was, seven years later, having just transferred my entire savings to a man who had never loved me the way I loved him.
He had never said it. Not once. I was the one who fell. I was the one who broke.
He had just watched me shatter and then wondered why I wouldn’t let him pick up the pieces.
My phone buzzed. A notification from my banking app.
Transfer complete.
I stared at the words and I did not cry, because crying would mean he still had power over me.
And I refused to give him that.
I refused.