After he rejected my confession, I began avoiding Chase Cole like a reflex. If he was going to a party, I stayed home. If we were assigned to the same project group, I quietly swapped out before the professor even finalized the roster. We became complete strangers existing in the exact same rooms. Until his best friend posted a photo of me on the campus crush board, declaring to the entire university that he was going to take me out. And tagged Chase right beneath it. [Hey Chase, you know literally every gorgeous girl on campus. You seen her around?] 1 My roommate, Sadie, was the one who forwarded me the link. She practically threw open our dorm door, breathless with secondhand adrenaline. "Harper, look! Someone’s literally putting out an APB for you on the campus board!" I unlocked my phone. The headline stared back at me in bold letters: [Three o'clock this afternoon, outside Butler Library. Does anyone know this absolute knockout? I'm going to ask her out.] Attached was a candid shot of my profile, catching the afternoon light while I looked down at my notes. "The post had zero traction when he first dropped it," Sadie chattered, leaning over my shoulder. "Then he tagged Chase Cole. And boom—it blew up within ten minutes." At our university, there wasn't a single soul who didn't know who Chase Cole was. Old-money background, near-perfect GPA, and the kind of sharp, effortless face that belonged on a billboard. But more than that, he had a reputation that preceded him everywhere he went. In the two and a half years since freshman orientation, he had cycled through over a dozen girlfriends. Every single one of them was breathtaking. He was as brilliant as he was uncatchable. People in our department even ran private betting pools on which major’s most coveted girl would end up on his arm next. I scrolled down to the comments. Several people had already recognized me, dropping my name and our shared major into the thread. One reply read: [Pretty sure this girl is in Chase's economics seminar. He definitely knows her. OP, just beg your boy to wingman for you.] Opinions flooded the thread from every angle. Yet through it all, from the moment it was posted until now, Chase never replied. Sadie gave me a curious, lingering look. "Speaking of which... you and Chase were hanging out a ton last month. I honestly thought something was brewing between you two. Then, completely out of nowhere, he went public with Sienna." A hollow ache tightened in my chest. My mind involuntarily snapped back to that quiet, dim stairwell just a few weeks ago. The way he casually took the letter from my trembling fingers, lifting his dark eyes to look at me, his voice carrying that familiar, lazy drawl. "Sorry, Harper." "Did being around each other so much give you the wrong idea?" "I don't feel that way about you." It was entirely my own fault. I had deluded myself into believing that him helping me through complex problem sets and picking up iced coffee for me meant something more than casual convenience. Yet a quiet, humiliating question had lingered in the back of my mind ever since: Why? Am I really that lacking? You've dated so many girls, yet when it came to me, you couldn't spare even the slightest glimmer of hope. I never got the chance to ask. Because the very next afternoon, a picture of him and his new girlfriend was pinned to the top of his feed. I dug my fingernails into my palm, forcing my breathing to steady. "No," I told Sadie, keeping my voice flat. "We're not close at all." 2 By midnight, the post had vanished from the board. A new notification lit up my phone screen—a friend request. The message attached read: [The guy looking for you outside the library today.] I stared at it for a long beat, then swiped it away without accepting. Ever since the stairwell, Chase and I hadn't exchanged a single word in two weeks. I had already made up my mind to keep my distance; the last thing I needed was to get entangled with his inner circle. I tossed and turned until well past two in the morning. When my alarm went off, I was running late. By the time I rushed into the lecture hall, only a few empty seats remained in the very front row. I slipped into a desk and pulled my textbook from my bag. Seconds later, someone sat down directly beside me. Almost instantly, a faint trace of perfume reached me—subtle, expensive, and undeniably lovely. The girl turned her head, offering me an effortless, warm smile. "Hi! I'm just sitting in on the lecture with my boyfriend," she said pleasantly. "He went to grab us some water. Do you mind if I borrow a pen? I totally forgot my pencil case." My body froze. She didn't know who I was, but I knew her. Sienna Bailey. An English major, stunning in a classical, radiant way, and Chase Cole's current girlfriend. Over the past two weeks, I had seen them eating together in the campus dining hall. She ate slowly, and he would wait patiently across from her, occasionally lifting his phone to take a photo of her laughing. Before her, Chase had never once set foot in the dining hall. I had seen them crossing the boutique district downtown. If she paused to look at something in a window display, he would buy it without a second thought. They looked like a scene from a magazine. Afraid she would sense the tension radiating off me, I quickly dug a pen out of my bag and handed it over. "Here." "Thanks so much," she smiled, lowering her head to write on the corner of her notebook. Two minutes later, Chase walked through the side door. His gaze swept across the front row, his dark brows drawing together in a faint, barely perceptible furrow when he caught sight of me. He slid into the seat next to Sienna and asked casually, "Why did you pick the front?" "It was the only spot left when I got here," Sienna murmured sweetly, sliding her notebook toward him. "I got bored waiting, so I wrote down a line from a poem for you. Want to see?" I couldn't help the slight turn of my eyes, catching the elegant script written across the margin. It was an old romantic verse about spending countless sunrises and sunsets side by side, cleverly weaving both of their names into the lines. A sweet, innocent gesture on an ordinary morning, meant entirely to make the boy she loved smile. It was the kind of effortless romantic ease that made something twist painfully in my stomach. Sure enough, I heard Chase let out a low, quiet chuckle. "Look at that," he murmured softly. "We really are made for each other, Sienna." For the rest of the ninety-minute lecture, I sat on pins and needles. Fortunately, Chase stayed focused on the lecture slides, and the two of them didn't engage in any further whispers. When the professor dismissed class, they gathered their things and walked out together. I lingered behind until the lecture hall had completely emptied. The lack of sleep from the night before was catching up with me, making my temples throb with a dull ache. Instead of getting up, I folded my arms over the desk, rested my forehead against them, and closed my eyes. In the haze between waking and sleeping, the sound of knuckles rapping lightly against the wooden desk jolted me. A voice cut through the quiet, cool and distinct. "Harper." "What's wrong with you?" 3 I lifted my head. Chase was standing right in front of me, looking down with a shadowed expression. In his hand, he was holding Sienna's shoulder bag—a delicate pastel designer piece I had seen online with a four-figure price tag. I pulled my gaze away, schooling my features into complete neutrality. "Nothing. Just didn't sleep well last night." He looked at me for several seconds, his eyes dark and unreadable. "Oh? Is that so?" A beat of silence hung between us. "Did you see that post?" He meant the campus crush board. He was asking if I had lost sleep over it. I didn't give him an answer. Instead, I looked up and said calmly, "I don't think that's any of your business." Without waiting for his reaction, I shoved my notebook into my bag, stood up, and brushed past him toward the exit. Right as I reached the door, Sienna came bustling back in, nearly bumping into my shoulder. I heard her ask him from behind me, "What took you so long to grab my bag?" Then her voice softened with recognition. "Wait, were you just talking to that girl? Do you know her? She was super sweet—she lent me a pen earlier." Chase’s reply was clipped, stripped of all inflection. "Her? ...No. We're not close." I pushed through the heavy double doors of the building and stepped into the brisk midday air. Back at the dorm, the room was empty; Sadie and the others were out grabbing lunch. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, turning the faucet on to splash cold water against my face. Outside, the spring sun was bright and clear. But looking at my dripping reflection in the glass, my eyes welled up, and the tears finally spilled over. 4 I had known who Chase Cole was long before he ever realized I existed. Our high schools had been separated by only a single crosswalk. Every afternoon after the final bell, my walk home took me right past his campus gate. During freshman year, I had been cornered on a desolate street corner by a group of neighborhood troublemakers. In the middle of my rising panic, Chase had stepped out of nowhere and intervened, effortlessly getting me out of the situation. It was a cliché. The kind of generic hero-saves-the-girl scenario I had always scoffed at in movies and books. Yet despite myself, that was the exact moment I fell for him. For three years of high school, I memorized his schedule, looked for him in crowds, and quietly listened to every piece of news about him. I knew how brilliantly he shone, how easily everything came to him. I studied until late into the night, earning top marks, all so I could walk into the same university and sit in the exact same economics lecture hall as him. For the first two years of college, I kept my distance. I stayed an invisible bystander, watching him move seamlessly from one relationship to the next. Until a month ago. During a casual basketball game on the outdoor courts, an errant pass struck my arm. We exchanged numbers so he could check in on the bruise. To make it up to me, he brought me breakfast and iced lattes a few times. I gathered the courage to ask him for help with class material. Sometimes, as we leaned over a table, our fingers would brush against one another, electric and lingering. He would look at me in silence, let out a soft, lazy laugh, and say my name. "Harper." "Stop staring at me. Look at the problem set." During those weeks, he didn't date anyone. A few guys in our major started teasing him, asking outright if he was finally making a move on me. He never confirmed it, but he never denied it either. He would just kick back the chair of whoever was talking and scoff, "Don't you have better things to do?" Looking back now, it was nothing more than my own wishful thinking. His temporary pause in dating wasn't because of me; he simply hadn't run into someone who caught his eye yet. Whatever it was, that fragile illusion was gone. We had crossed back into being strangers, and there was no going back. 5 Pulling myself out of the memory, I patted my cheeks dry with a towel, grabbed my tote bag, and prepared to head to the library. Just as my hand touched the doorknob, Sadie walked back in. The moment she saw me, her eyes lit up as if remembering something crucial. She bounded over, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Harper! Do you know who the guy from the crush board actually is?" I shook my head. "No idea." I hadn't accepted his request, after all. I didn't even know his first name. Sadie tapped my arm excitedly. "I did some digging through friends. Apparently, he's Chase Cole's childhood best friend. They're super tight. He goes to NYU, not here." She added, "Total golden-boy type, crazy wealthy, and ridiculously hot." I stood still, feeling entirely indifferent. "I'm not really looking to date right now." Sadie looked at me in disbelief. "Why on earth not?" "I just want to focus on internships until graduation," I deflected casually. Later that evening, my phone buzzed with two consecutive notifications from the same pending friend request. [Still not accepting?] [I'm in Chicago this week for an intercollegiate finance case competition. How about I come find you when I'm back in town? Let's get coffee face-to-face before you decide whether to block me.] I stared down at the screen, my thumbs hovering to decline it once and for all. Before I could tap the screen, another message popped up. [You don't even have to reply to this. We'll talk when I see you. Goodnight, Harper.] I stared at the letters glowing in the dark for a long time. In the end, I locked the phone and set it facedown on the nightstand. 6 Over the next two weeks, Sienna appeared in our lecture hall frequently. Whenever she did, I made sure to take a seat on the opposite side of the room, as far away from them as possible. Whispers floated through the aisles around me. "Is this the longest Chase has ever dated one girl?" "Honestly, yeah. Do you think the serial bachelor is actually settling down?" "Ugh, my friend is going to be devastated. She's been crushing on him forever, just waiting for them to break up." I kept my eyes glued to the whiteboard, copying notes, but my focus drifted with every sentence. Toward the end of the month, our department organized an interactive outdoor workshop for extra seminar credits. Attendance was mandatory, and students were paired up randomly by the teaching assistant. By some cruel twist of fate, my assigned partner was Chase. In the past, whenever we had paired assignments, I had spent hours secretly hoping our names would end up next to each other. It had never happened. Now that I was doing everything in my power to avoid him, our names had collided twice in a row. The first time had been a large study group of seven people, making it easy for me to switch out without drawing attention or raising suspicion. This time, it was strictly pairs. I looked up at the tall figure standing before me and spoke slowly, keeping my tone carefully polite. "I'll ask Sadie if she's willing to swap partners with me." His expression darkened slightly, a cold, humorless smile touching the corner of his lips. "Oh?" I caught myself. Given how inseparable he and Sienna were, he probably didn't want to be paired with another girl either. But since I wasn't particularly close with any of the other guys in our cohort, I added, "Or I can just trade with one of your friends if that's easier." 7 The midday sun beat down warmly over the athletic quad. A crowd of students surged past us, and someone jostled my shoulder from behind, throwing me off balance. My foot caught, and I stumbled. Before I could hit the turf, Chase reached out, his fingers wrapping firmly around my wrist to steady me. Skin against skin. A shock of heat traveled up my arm. I pulled my arm back immediately, taking a deliberate step backward. "Let's just figure out who to swap with. The activity is starting in five minutes." Chase’s empty hand curled slowly into a loose fist at his side. After a tense silence, he answered, his voice dropping several degrees. "Whatever you want." I scanned the field, quickly spotted one of his fraternity brothers, walked over, explained that we needed to rebalance the groups, and finalized the trade on the spot. When I headed back to the dorm late that afternoon, I ran into Sienna on the landing of our floor. She was wearing a cream knit dress, her skin glowing under the hallway lights. She was on the phone, holding a brown paper bag full of imported snacks. When she spotted me, her face brightened. "Hey! It's you!" She hadn't hung up the call yet. Through the speaker, I could clearly hear Chase's voice—low, relaxed, and gentle. "Who'd you run into?" Sienna replied into the mic, "Your classmate... the girl Mason was looking for all over the crush board." She laughed lightly. "I only connected the dots a couple of days ago that it was her. Seriously, you should've told me earlier." I paused. Mason. So that was his name. Mason Price. On the other end of the line, Chase's tone instantly flattened into ice. "I forgot." Sienna ignored his sudden chill, turning to me with genuine warmth as she pulled two artisan chocolate bars from her bag and offered them to me. "These are amazing, try them!" I looked down at the dark, gold-foil packaging. It was a boutique Swiss brand that Chase loved. Back when things between us had been at their closest, he had casually tossed an unopened box of the exact same chocolates onto my desk. I had kept them carefully tucked in my drawer, never bearing to open them. Seeing them now felt like looking at an artifact from a past life. I shook my head gently. "Thanks, but I'm watching what I eat lately. I appreciate it, though."
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