Willow's POV
Driven by a sudden, cold burst of intuition, I bypassed the bathroom and went straight to my laptop desk. I opened the browser and navigated to Facebook. Years ago, during our sophomore year of high school, I had been the one to set up his profile, and we had never changed the password. It was a relic of an era of absolute transparency. I typed in the familiar string of characters, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs as the home screen loaded.
I bypassed the newsfeed and clicked directly on the messenger icon. The inbox that materialized before my eyes felt like a physical blow to the sternum.
There wasn't just a single message from Jessa. The archive was a catalog of betrayal. There were active chat threads from six distinct girls within our immediate geographical area. One of the most recent was from Jen—the girl from the phone call. Her messages were graphic, filled with casual references thanking him for "good times," explicitly asking when he was going to come back over to her apartment, and leaving her contact details.
I scrolled further down, my eyes burning as I opened a long, ongoing group thread between Nick and a guy named Anton—presumably the owner of the house from last night. The messages stretched back for over six months. They were an unvarnished chronicle of degradation. Every single exchange was packed with casual references to buying cocaine, doing lines in various basements, attending wild parties, and systematically hooking up with what they referred to as "hot chicks" while I was away at school.
By the time I finally forced myself to log out of the account, I was sobbing so violently I could barely see the screen. The illusion was shattered completely. He hadn't made a solitary, tragic mistake due to loneliness and alcohol. He had systematically dismantled the relationship, transforming himself into a serial cheater who treated my absence as a license for a drug-fueled playground.
Sitting there in the quiet house, a strange, cold clarity washed over the sorrow. The crying stopped. I realized, with absolute certainty, that I was done. As much as my heart tore at the realization that the Nick I loved no longer existed, the truth was that I had lost him a long, long time ago. I had just been too far away to see the rot setting in.
I stood up, walked into the bathroom, and took a long, hot shower, turning the water up until my skin was flushed red, trying to wash away the phantom filth of his choices. When I stepped out, I intentionally bypassed my casual loungewear. Instead, I selected a vibrant, beautiful yellow sundress from my closet. I spent an hour meticulously styling my hair and applying my makeup, using the cosmetics as a form of war paint. It was a purely defensive psychological maneuver; if I was going to face the executioner of my past, I wanted him to see exactly how magnificent the life was that he had so carelessly thrown away.
By the time I stepped back into the living room, the hands of the kitchen clock were approaching noon. I sat on the edge of the sofa, my hands clasped tightly in my lap, the quiet of the house amplified by the ticking of the clock.
Exactly at twelve, the silence was shattered by the violent screech of tires tearing into our gravel driveway. Within a matter of seconds, a heavy, frantic pounding rattled the front door on its hinges, accompanied by Nick ’s voice, raised in a volatile shout. “Willow! Willow, open the fucking door! Let me in!”
I stood up, smoothed down the skirt of my yellow dress, and walked toward the entryway. I threw the door open, standing firm in the frame, my expression a mask of absolute coldness. “Keep your voice down, Nick ,” I growled, stepping back to let him enter.
The moment my eyes locked onto his physical form up close, a cold shock wave went through me. He looked utterly ruined. The change wasn't subtle; he had lost an alarming amount of weight since spring break, his frame angular and skeletal beneath his clothes. His skin possessed a sickly, translucent gray pallor, and his eyes were bloodshot, surrounded by deep, purplish hollows that spoke of days without sleep.
The moment he saw me, a manic, unsettling smile spread across his features. He didn't wait for an invitation; he pushed violently past me into the narrow hallway, turning instantly to grab my shoulders. He pulled me against his thin chest, using his foot to kick the front door shut behind him with a loud slam.
“Get off of me, Nick !” I cried out, my hands immediately coming up to plant against his collarbones, pushing with all my strength to create space as he bent his head down, attempting to force his lips against mine. What the hell was wrong with him?
Did he truly believe, after everything he had confessed to, that he could simply show up on my doorstep, flash a smile, and force a physical reconciliation? I shoved him back with a vicious burst of energy, breaking his grip and leveling a lethal, uncompromising glare at his face. “Nick , stop it right now. We are here to talk. That is it.”
His expression shifted instantly, the manic smile vanishing to reveal a dark, volatile anger that flickered behind his bloodshot eyes before he managed to pull a mask of contrition back over it. “Fine. Let’s talk,” he said, his voice dropping into a tense, vibrating register. “I’ll do anything you want, Willow. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right. I just need you back. You are mine. You’ve always been mine.”
The possessive cadence of his words made a sharp knot of panic twist in my chest. He was entirely different from the boy I had known since childhood, stripped of the gentle, protective aura that had always defined him. I was starting to feel genuinely unsafe in my own living room.
WILLOW’S POV
“Let’s just sit down,” I said, keeping my voice as level as possible as I moved toward the couch. “And then you can start explaining things.” I already knew the breadth of his lies, thanks to the Facebook logs, but some desperate, lingering part of my soul still wanted to see if he possessed enough human decency to tell me the truth face-to-face.
He followed me closely, sinking onto the cushions right next to me, his proximity suffocating. “Willow baby, I already told you everything that happened at Jessa’s house,” he said, his hands twitching against his denim jeans. “Do you really need to hear the details again?”
“No,” I replied, turning my head to look him directly in his bloodshot eyes. “I don't need to hear about Jessa. I want to know about the rest of them. I want to know exactly how many women you’ve been sleeping with behind my back.”
His face drained of what little color it possessed, his jaw dropping slightly as the realization hit him that his cover was gone. But the vulnerability lasted only a second before his expression hardened into a defensive, ugly sneer.
“I told you it was only her!” he lied, his voice rising in volume. “I was completely fucked up that night, Willow! I’ve been going through a really dark time this year, alright? I got into some heavy shit earlier this year. Drugs. That’s what I was doing Friday night. I did a bunch of lines of coke, and my mind just went completely blank.
It happens sometimes when you do that much.” He shrugged his shoulders carelessly, as if a cocaine addiction was a routine, trivial excuse for infidelity.
The admission was a physical shock. “You’re… you’re using coke?” I stammered, my architectural mind struggling to process the collapse of his moral framework. “Are you high right now, Nick ?” I didn't even give him the opportunity to manufacture another lie. “I can’t believe what you’ve turned into. And to think I actually came here hoping for the truth.” I stood up quickly, turning away from him, my hands shaking with a combination of rage and profound disgust.
“I logged into your Facebook account this morning, Nick ,” I said, turning back to face him, pointing an accusatory finger at his chest. “I saw every single message. I saw Jen. I saw the other five girls. I saw everything you and Anton have been doing for the last six months. I hope every single one of those hits was worth losing the life we built, because we are finished. Now, get the hell out of my house. I don’t want to be anywhere near you when you’re like this.” I gestured sharply toward the front door.
Nick didn't move toward the exit. Instead, he stood up slowly, his thin, skeletal frame unfolding from the couch until he was towering over me. The contrition was gone completely, replaced by a raw, unadulterated venom that deformed his facial features. For the first time in the twelve years since he had sat next to me on the school bus, a deep, primal terror paralyzed my limbs. I was genuinely afraid of him.
“You don’t get to just decide this is over, Willow,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying growl. He lunged forward, his fingers clamping around my forearm with a bruising, vice-like pressure, twisting my body back toward him. “You. Are. Mine.”
He roared the final words directly into my face.
“Nick , stop it! You’re hurting me!” I screamed, the pain in my arm sharp and immediate. But it was like speaking to a brick wall; his eyes were wide, glassy, and entirely devoid of human recognition. He was operating in a state of drug-induced psychosis or pure entitlement.
I summoned every ounce of physical strength I possessed and wrenched my arm out of his grasp, stepping backward into the narrow hallway to escape. But he was faster. Before I could take a second step, his hand flew out, catching my shoulder and shoving me violently forward.
My body flew through the air, my face slamming directly into the drywall of the hallway. The impact was horrific; it knocked the breath out of my lungs in a sickening gasp, and my forehead struck the hard surface with a dull thud that sent a blinding explosion of pain through my skull. My head began to throb with a sickening, rhythmic intensity.
Before I could even register the disorientation, he was behind me. He gathered both of my wrists into the iron grip of his single left hand, jerking my arms high above my head and pinning them against the wall, effectively trapping my body against the surface.
“You just need to calm down and remember what we had,” he whispered hoarsely, his hot, alcohol-and-chemical-tinged breath brushing against the sensitive skin of my earlobe. “You need to remember how incredible we are together.”
“Nick , please, stop this,” I begged, the tears breaking through my defenses, spilling onto the drywall. I was entirely helpless, my face pressed against the paint, my arms losing circulation. “Just leave the house. Please.”
“I can't do that, baby,” he murmured, his voice shifting into a terrifying imitation of tenderness. “You’ve been away too long. You’ve forgotten. We were great together.”
A wave of pure, unadulterated panic swept through my consciousness as I felt his free hand move down to the hem of my yellow sundress, the fabric rustling as he began to lift it. I realized with absolute horror what his intentions were. The boy from the bus was gone; this was a predator inside my home.
“Stop it, Nick ! Please, don’t do this to me!” I screamed, twisting my torso violently from side to side, kicking my legs backward in a desperate attempt to break his leverage. He braced his weight harder against my spine, crushing the air from my lungs, but the thrashing gave me a split-second window of opportunity. I managed to free my right leg, lifted my knee, and drove the heel of my shoe down onto the bridge of his foot with every single ounce of desperate strength I had left.
“Shit!” he roared, the pain causing his grip to falter for a fraction of a second.
