Olympic crown bellerive.., p.19
Olympic Crown (Bellerive Royals #1), page 19
“You saw it?” Her gaze flies to mine.
I’m probably half of the views on the damn thing. Every time I could sneak a view in around Jaxon today, I did it. “You think there’s someone on campus who hasn’t?”
Color drains from her face, and I realize that was not the right thing to say. “I’ve been afraid to look. How many views does it have now? Did you see how many people tagged Val?”
I shake my head. Everyone knows you don’t read the comments, no matter how great or terrible a video looks. A cesspool of shitty people. “Good. Maybe now she’ll finally admit we’re done.”
“Brent—”
“It’ll die down. People will realize Val and I were done long before you and I got together, and it’ll die down.” Long before may only be a few hours, but it’s long enough. There was no cheating or whatever else people are implying. Checking or responding isn’t worth my time.
“What are we doing?” She scans my face.
In every situation I’ve seen Posey in, she’s been bold and brazen. She’s neither right now, and it makes me unsure how to answer her. We’re together. You’re my girlfriend. “One more week,” I say. “It’s almost the holidays. After this week, it’ll be clear to everyone Val and I are done for good.”
She takes a sip of her drink, and the vulnerability she’s showing makes me want to ramble, tell her whatever she wants to hear. But I don’t have a clue what the right response is.
“I don’t think this is going to go the way you think it is,” she says, and she takes a long drink of her latte.
My heart thuds in my chest. The video that I love so much seems to have sliced into the fabric of the easy routine we’ve developed. The cut is jagged, and I don’t know how to sew it back together, make us whole again. A touch of panic lights my chest on fire.
She rises from the couch to go to the kitchen, and I follow her. There’s only one thing that’s guaranteed to make us close again. A reminder that what she saw in the video, what other people are seeing and dissecting, isn’t something either of us can run from. We’re not fake, and I’m not sure we ever have been.
She finishes the last of the latte and opens the garbage can to drop it in. When she turns, I’m behind her. I stare down at her as I ease my hand along her hip to the small of her back. She arches into me, and I lean down to nuzzle underneath her ear.
“Everything is going to be fine, I promise.” Not a promise I should be making. While I’m sure time will quiet the social media crowd, I have no idea whether she and I will make it beyond next week. I want to. I really, really want to. “Get out of your head, Posey.”
“Because you’d rather I wrap myself around yours?” Her fingers dance along my back.
She’s not quite herself, but at least that comment hits a familiar note. “Can I stay?”
Her answer isn’t verbal, instead she takes my hand, and she leads me toward her bedroom. The sea might be choppy, but I think I can navigate this.
Posey
As long as I travel back and forth to class with my head down and my earphones in, things are indeed fine, as Brent predicted. But without my earbuds in, I hear the muttered comments from my peers. The ones that label me a slut or a boyfriend stealer or easy. Such a stupid label. It’s not like sex is hard.
I tug my winter jacket around me tighter and readjust my AirPods.
Brent has said to ignore them, but when I check my socials, a spike of anxiety strikes, and I hate my new reality. The shares haven’t stopped, and the mean comments have tripled. Val still hasn’t said anything. Her accounts are eerily silent, and I’m not sure what to think. She’s not going to take the high road, so it’s just a matter of waiting to see how low she goes.
The worst part, though, is that I’ve never been a social outcast before. I’ve had people dislike me; that’s normal. Not everyone can like everyone. But even people I’ve been friendly with in the past are avoiding me if they spot me on campus. Somehow by dating my dream guy and having the audacity to appear happy about it, I’ve become a social pariah.
I’ve tried to put myself in their shoes. If Brent had suddenly turned up splashed across social media with some other girl out of the blue, what would I have thought? Neither Brent nor Val confirmed a breakup to the world or even to campus. Maybe I would have assumed cheating happened too. A lesson in not jumping to conclusions or putting too much stock in the lives of people I don’t know. You can never really know anyone by what they post online.
Val isn’t the victim here, but her deep silence, and Brent’s insistence on ignoring what’s being said, is letting others create the narrative. In most instances, it’s that I lured him away and/or he cheated. No one, not a single person, appears to believe Brent was unhappy and he left Val willingly. I’m the mermaid in the ocean singing the sailor into the water to drown. Except, I think I might be the one drowning.
Those stupid photos on Val’s account from Bermuda make us look extra guilty. I’m in a few of them—not with Brent—so it appears as though we connected there. The comments on that post are out of control. Conspiracy theory central.
When I called Julia, my sister, for advice, she told me that those who matter know the truth, and those who don’t aren’t important anyway. Easy to say when you’re not the one being bombarded with Northern University’s warped version of events. Of course, since she’s in training to become the king’s secretary in Bellerive, she’s had to take on the never complain, never explain mentality of the royal family.
As for me? I’m getting tired of pretending to be meek when I’m not normally the one crouched in the corner hoping no one will notice me. The problem, right now, is that I’m not completely sure speaking up will do anything. Or at least not anything good.
It’s Thursday afternoon, and I fly home for the holidays on Sunday. A few more days, and I’ll be out of this environment, and I’ll be able to breathe again as long as I keep my phone off. Brent leaves Sunday too. Originally, I was supposed to leave Saturday morning, but I switched my flight to match his. Didn’t tell him that part.
His parents have rented a house in Utah for ski season, and that’s where he’s spending some of his break. With his training schedule, he comes back to campus a few days before me.
Not that any of that matters, because we agreed to only one more week.
Why I’m going through all this vitriol and strife for one more week of lattes and incredible sex is beyond me.
That’s not true, at least not anymore. I know exactly why I agreed to another week, and why I’m taking the abuse from my peers on campus. Despite how shitty this situation is, when I’m around Brent, it’s like I’m lit from the inside. There’s a glow, a warmth, that I’ve never experienced before, and I can’t get enough of it. I want to bask in it constantly.
I tried to shove some distance between us the night we came back from Chicago, but Brent was so tender and sweet with me when we went to bed that my resistance crumbled. My big, sex-crazed, chlorine-smelling jock is hard to resist.
But to what end? I have no idea if he truly wants something beyond this week. The thought of asking terrifies me. He’s the one who keeps extending the timeline, so I can’t help thinking there’s a chance he wants more. Is it normal for someone to go from one relationship right into another?
The whole thing feels messy, and it pisses me off. I want to go back to when we were holed up in my bedroom pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist after we came back from Bermuda. Great sex and lattes were my only priorities.
Ugh. Stupid swimmer boys who make me want things I never thought I’d want again. Perfectly happy to become a Victorian spinster and dote on Julia’s kids with whoever she eventually marries.
I do not want a boyfriend. I do not want a boyfriend. I do not want a boyfriend.
Up ahead, I catch a glimpse of a familiar black jacket, and Brent is standing in the middle of the path with other students streaming around him. He has a latte in each hand, and my heart kicks at the sight of him. I mentioned this morning how much I hate walking back from class with all the social media bullshit, and here he is. Poseidon come to life—chiseled like a Greek god in a sea of people who do not matter at all to me.
Without a word, he passes me my latte, and he falls into step beside me. I glance at him while I take out my AirPods to slip them into my pocket, and there must be something on my face that gives me away, because he grins.
“Thought you could use some company,” he says. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Since the entire campus is technically our neighborhood, it’s plausible. “I can always use coffee.”
“Your addiction to caffeine has no limits.”
My addiction to him also appears limitless, and that’s far more worrying than the amount of caffeine in my system.
Brent is at practice when Destiny and Nadiya turn up at my bedroom door. They both have their phones in their hands, and I swivel on my desk chair to face them. Their expressions are grave, but I don’t touch my device. I turned off my push notifications when it became clear getting them would kill my mental health. Knowing I’m leaving on Sunday for a while is about the only thing holding me together.
“Val just went live,” Destiny says. “Blew shit up even more.”
Nadiya bites her lip. “She said you and Brent hooked up behind her back at the wedding. Said she and Brent were together at the time.”
“She was a fucking mess in the live thing,” Destiny says “Crying. Mascara down her cheeks. Said she’s been absent from social media because the breakup has traumatized her, and she didn’t know how to handle it.”
“Should I watch it?” No part of me wants to see her dramatic lies, but she’s been quiet for weeks. I have no doubt that when she clicked the go live button she knew exactly what she was doing.
“Nope,” Nadiya says. “No. But we thought you should know.” She glances at Destiny. “We also think you should maybe change your flight and leave earlier.”
Leave earlier? Whatever Val said and did in her live stream must be really bad for Nadiya and Destiny to be on the same page. While Nadiya is only confrontational with people she knows well, Destiny has no problem telling everyone exactly what she thinks. Both of them are always straight with me, whether or not it’ll bruise my feelings.
“Look,” Destiny says. “I get that you like Faulkner, but is he worth all this? He hasn’t posted a single thing to deny all the shit takes people have come up with about you.” She holds up her phone. “I bet he’ll have zero to say about this too.”
“He won’t have been able to see it,” I say. A lame excuse. In her hundreds of thousands of followers, there will be someone who will have recorded it. Right now, it’s probably making its way from platform to platform, dragging me so hard I’ll have the burn marks for years. “Was any of what she said true?”
“Not a word,” Nadiya says. “Not a single fucking word.”
“I’m going to respond.” I grab my phone off my desk and open it.
“Don’t do that,” Destiny says. “Absolutely do not do that. You’re the other woman. Or at least that’s how you’ve been painted. The only person who can respond is Faulkner, and whatever he does has to be big enough to shut this shit down for good.”
I stare at my open phone and replay her words. The one thing Brent has been adamant about since the video of us went viral is that neither of us responds. We let people think whatever they want, and we move on with our lives. But Val has now taken an assumption people were making and declared it the truth.
“Ask him to post his own this is how it is video,” Destiny says.
He won’t. I don’t even have to ask him to know. His socials have been almost dead since he changed all his passwords so Val no longer had access. Like me, he considers his accounts a necessary evil, but he doesn’t dedicate any time to them or to the people who are interested in him.
“If he won’t respond,” Nadiya says, “then I think that says a lot about him, don’t you? Your reputation is being slaughtered.”
“Change your flight,” Destiny says. “There’s one that leaves in four hours, and I think you should be on it. Campus will be a cesspool of hot takes tomorrow. Whether Brent comes out guns blazing or not—which I doubt, dude needed a fake girlfriend to hold his balls for him—it’ll take a while to put out this fire. Better if you’re not here to feel the burn.”
I bite my lip and catch Nadiya’s gaze. She’s the more cautious one, less prone to rash choices. “Is that what you think too?”
“I know you like him. That’s very clear, but I can’t believe he’s worth all this.” She wiggles her phone at me. “This isn’t the kind of attention you like.”
No one likes this kind of attention. Public shaming is not for the faint of heart. “I’ll change my flight.” I’ve been looking forward to going home, so maybe this isn’t all bad. For the next week and a half, I just can’t open a single one of my socials.
Since Brent and I agreed to this arrangement, I knew Val would come for me at some point. But I have to admit, she’s got patience and impeccable timing. Just as I predicted, she’s found a way to kick me when I was already down.
Brent
When I leave the athletics complex, Posey is waiting for me with a bag at her feet. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, and I zip my coat to my chin as I approach. The rest of my teammates call out goodbyes and say they’ll see me at practice tomorrow, but I’m laser focused on my girlfriend. There’s something about her posture that’s kicked my heart into gear, and a cool sweat has broken out in my armpits. She’s never waited for me outside a practice, and her closed-off expression isn’t helping my anxiety.
“What’s up?” I ask. “I thought I was coming to yours.”
“I changed my flight. I’m going home early.”
The coolness under my arms migrates through the rest of my body, and I shove my hands in my pockets. “Is everything okay at home?”
“Have you checked your socials?” She tugs her winter hat lower.
“No. I barely used them before you and I went viral. Even less interested now. Why?”
“Val made a video about us. She’s telling everyone we cheated and she’s devastated.”
“Okay.” At some point Val was going to say something. I’d hoped it would be the truth, but deep down I knew it wouldn’t be. She’s clung too hard to let the video of me and Posey go without some sort of response. “She can say whatever she wants. We know the truth.”
“But lots of people don’t. Her reach is huge.”
“Fuck ’em. What do we care what they think?”
“I don’t like how she’s making me look,” Posey says. “But if I respond, people will come after me because I seem like the other woman right now. People believe I’m the reason you and Val broke up.”
“I’m not the keeper of other peoples’ thoughts and opinions,” I say. “This will die down eventually. Just gotta ride it out.” The last time I received so much negative attention, I was fourteen, and my parents were right to lay low. It did disappear eventually. Even when the attention has been positive after my Olympic appearances, the intense interest always dies.
“I don’t want to ride it out anymore or ignore it or pretend she isn’t dragging me through the mud.” She takes a deep breath. “I want you to do something.”
Do something? Other than telling Val to cut the shit, I’m not sure what she thinks I can do.
“I want you to respond to her or do your own post about all this or something.”
“What?” I give a laugh of disbelief. “No. I’m not feeding the trolls and gossips. The more you give, the more they want.”
“A consistent diet of Val’s lies is currently filling them up.” Her tone is sharper than I’ve ever heard it. “You know what? Fucking forget it.” She waves her hand and takes out her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Ordering an Uber to take me to the airport.”
“You don’t need an Uber. I can drive you.” I step forward to take her bag, and she kicks it behind her without looking up. Somewhat impressive. I would have thought her bag was heavy. The one she took to Bermuda was small but mighty.
She clicks her phone closed, and when her gaze meets mine, the other shoe drops. This wasn’t just a conversation about whatever shit Val’s been talking. I’ve missed some subtext here, but I’m still too dense to get it. My gut twists, and it’s so fierce, I can feel it in my chest too.
“Am I going to see you after the break?” I ask.
“You mean around campus?” She crosses her arms and checks over her shoulder. Ubers never take long.
My heart dips into my feet like I’m on a rollercoaster. I stare at her, and I search for whatever wording won’t scare her off. Each version I prep in my head doesn’t quite strike the right note between caring and indifferent. They’re all fucking desperate.
“I think our fake relationship has run its course, don’t you?” she says. “Something has to stop. I guess it’s us.”
A black SUV approaches from the end of the parking lot, and it inches along. Whoever is inside is clearly scanning the complex for their pickup.
“Posey,” I say, and I try to reach for her just as the car draws flush with the curb.
She jerks her arm out of my reach and opens the rear door to toss her bag in. When she makes eye contact with me, there are tears in her eyes.
There’s a vise around my chest, and I don’t know what to say to fix whatever I’ve fucked up.
“This is why I don’t do relationships,” she says. “One way or another, a guy always lets me down.” She ducks into the SUV, and she tugs the door shut behind her before I can get a word out in response.
I throw up my arms at the retreating vehicle, and then I draw them over my head in frustration. She changed her flight, and she came here to break up with me. Wouldn’t have mattered what I said. But the idea of just letting her go makes my stomach flip, and I take my phone out of my pocket.
