Tate's POV
I'm scrolling through my phone like a mindless drone when I find it.
A photo of Harley—not one I took deliberately, just a candid from the student council group chat.
Someone snapped it during a planning meeting: her standing at the whiteboard, mid-gesture, black hair pulled back, marker in hand, that expression she gets when she's explaining something she's passionate about.
Her eyes are bright. Her mouth is slightly open, caught between words. The gold chain catches the light at her throat.
I've been staring at it for forty-five seconds.
I catch myself and the irritation is immediate—sharp, visceral, directed entirely inward. I lock the phone and toss it onto the mattress like it's burned me.
This doesn't happen to me. I don't think about girls when they're not in front of me. I don't linger on photos.
But fuck, Harley’s photo isn’t just any photo.
It’s her.
I sit up, run both hands through my hair, and try to remind myself of the fundamentals. Harley Valdez is just another girl. The physical attraction is normal—she’s beautiful, hot even, objectively, and proximity breeds chemistry. Naturally.
My cock twitches in my sweatpants at the immediate of her taste on my lips, already half-hard just from the memory of her mouth that laughed at me and kissed me and made sounds I can’t forget.
I groan, low and frustrated, and lean back against the headboard.
My hand trails down my stomach, slow and deliberate and half-reluctant, before slipping beneath the waistband of my pants. My cock is hot and heavy in my palm, already leaking precome as I wrap my fingers around it.
I grab my phone again, unlock it, and pull up the photo.
Harley at the whiteboard, her lips parted, her throat exposed, her fucking body taut with purpose. Her tits aren’t massive, but they’re perfect—full, firm, just the right size to fit in my hands, to squeeze, to tease.
I imagine stripping her out of that stupid student council blazer, peeling her shirt off, unclasping her bra, watching her nipples harden under my gaze.
My hand moves faster, stroking my cock in rough, uneven tugs as I picture her kneeling in front of me, her mouth watering like it did in my room, her tongue darting out to lick the head of my cock before she takes me. Without teeth, obviously.
She takes me deep, gagging on my length but not stopping, not until she’s swallowing every fucking drop.
I groan louder, my hips bucking into my hand as I imagine fucking her for the first time.
Her legs spread wide, her dripping wet, her nails clawing at my back as I sink into her tight, fucking perfect tight pussy. She moaned, low and throaty, and I fucking lost it.
The thought alone has me on the edge, my balls tightening, my cock throbbing in my hand. I fuck my fist faster, my breaths coming in shallow gasps as I stare at her photo.
Her mouth, her throat, her beautiful dark brown eyes with amber flecks on the sunlight, and I come with a strangled groan, hot spurts of come painting my stomach and chest.
Fuck.
I drop the phone onto the mattress, panting, my cock still twitching in my hand.
Three seconds. That’s all I allowed myself with her photo. It wasn’t enough.
But I don’t let myself linger. I wipe the come off with the edge of my shirt, toss it aside, and lie back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
The fact that I've started treating Harley better is strategic, not emotional. We have a deal. She holds my brother's secret—I play the boyfriend. The improved behavior is maintaining the arrangement, nothing more.
I had reasons to hate her. Good reasons. She used Ezra's vulnerability as leverage, and no matter how gently she handled it later, the fact remains: she held my family's destruction in her hands and used it to get what she wanted.
I wanted revenge. I had a plan.
And yet the plan sits untouched, gathering dust in the back of my mind like a weapon I keep meaning to clean but never reach for.
Almost two months have passed since I built it, months of scrolling through photos of a girl from Southside like some lovesick idiot who's forgotten the basic principles of self-preservation.
I grab the phone again. Not for her photo, I need to remind myself of who I am.
What I'm capable of. The version of Tate Mercer who makes plans and keeps promises and doesn't let a pair of dark eyes and a sharp tongue dismantle eighteen years of survival instincts.
I scroll through my camera roll with purpose now, past game footage and team photos, past screenshots of plays and texts, until I find it.
That one photo.
Harley in the hallway, mid-handoff with another student. A small wrapped bundle passing between their hands—study notes, supplies, something completely innocent. But the framing strips every shred of context.
Without explanation, without the before and after, without knowing that Harley Valdez spends her free time tutoring underclassmen and organizing charity drives and being the kind, it looks like a drug deal.
Plan B. My insurance policy. The loaded weapon I built against the girl who held my brother's secret like a blade.
One leak, one anonymous post, one concerned email to Hargrove and her academic career incinerates.
Wentworth would believe it without blinking. They've been waiting for proof that the Southside girl was exactly what they feared, and this photo would deliver it gift-wrapped.
I stare at the image, and something rises in my throat that tastes like bile.
I remember the moment I took it. The cold calculation, the steady hands, the way I framed the shot with the precision of someone building a bomb.
I saw her in that hallway and my first thought wasn't ‘she's helping someone.’
It was ‘I can use this.’
I built this weapon during the same weeks she was sitting on my brother's floor, holding his hand while he sobbed over a man who never deserved him. During the same weeks she was proving herself to be the most honest person I'd ever met.
The girl who laughed in my face when I offered her five thousand dollars. Who promised to protect Ezra and meant it. Who fought for my brother's dignity with the same ferocity she fights for her own.
She was showing me who she really was.
And I was cataloging ammunition.
The disgust is immediate and total. Not the diffuse, manageable kind—the concentrated kind, the kind that sits in your stomach like acid and burns through every excuse you've built to protect yourself from the truth.
I am disgusted with the boy who took this photo. Disgusted with the calculation behind it, the casual cruelty of reducing a person to a weapon, the ease with which I looked at Harley and saw a target instead of a human being.
The same way my father looks at everyone.
The realization hits me like a truck.
I've spent my entire life swearing I'm nothing like him. And here I sit, holding a photo designed to destroy a girl's future because she had the audacity to hold me accountable.
I am my father's son. I've been his son this whole time. And I didn't even notice because the cruelty wore a different face.
I don't hesitate.
My thumb finds the photo. I select it, hit delete, and when the confirmation prompt asks if I'm sure, ‘this action cannot be undone,’ I tap ‘yes’ with a certainty that feels like the first honest thing I've done in months.
Permanently deleted.
No recovery, no backup, no lingering reflex to hold onto leverage just in case, no whisper in the back of my head reminding me that smart people keep insurance and only fools destroy their own weapons.
That version of myself is gone.
The evidence goes with it.
I set the phone on the nightstand and sit in the silence of my room, staring at the wall where my football trophies line the shelf, thinking about the boy who gathered that dirt and the one who just erased it.
In the background, a thought surfaces—Sloane, earlier today, approaching me with unusual friendliness.
A bright smile that felt rehearsed, a casual question about weekend plans that landed a beat too late, a beat too studied, like someone following a script rather than making conversation.
"So, you and Harley seem really solid. I'm happy for you, honestly. I've been meaning to say that."
The memory prickles. Something was off—not in the words, but in the delivery. The warmth didn't match her eyes. The friendliness felt like camouflage over something sharper.
I dismiss it. Sloane's been performing since birth—every interaction is calculated, every kindness has an invoice attached.
If she's being unusually pleasant, it's probably because she's bored, or angling for something, or simply exhausted by the effort of sustained hostility.
People get tired of hating. Even Sloane.
I let the thought dissolve and my attention is elsewhere now, on the governor's event approaching like a storm I can see but can't outrun. On the election that means everything to Harley and nothing to the institution that's already decided who deserves to win.
On the version of my life I'm choosing instead of the one chosen for me—a version that includes football fields instead of courtrooms, earned respect instead of inherited power.
And a girl from Southside who taught me that the leash I thought she put around my neck was actually the first thing that made me want to stay.