Jade
My boot hit the edge of the campus sidewalk, and I froze.
Wind stirred the trees overhead, brushing brittle leaves against one another like whispers. Whispers that remembered. That knew.
The buildings looked the same—clean brick walls, tall windows, glass doors that groaned the same way when they swung open. Students moved in their usual hurried rhythm, heads down, earbuds in, coffee cups gripped like lifelines.
But for me?
Every crack in the pavement felt familiar beneath my feet.
There. That one—where I had once tripped and Zade caught me with a laugh and a kiss on the temple.
There. That tree—where we’d sat once, just to be close in the fall air.
Even the air felt like it carried ghosts.
I adjusted the strap of my bag, rolled my shoulders back, and kept walking. Step after step. Heavy. Reluctant.
I’m fine, I told myself. This is just a place. Just a school.
But the dull throb beneath my skin said otherwise. The bond—quiet now, distant—still pulsed like a faded bruise that hadn’t quite healed.
The first few days passed in fragments.
Lectures I barely heard. Coffee that went cold before I could drink it. Classmates offering half-smiles, half-recognition. No one asked why I was gone. No one asked why I was back. They just looked, then looked away.
I avoided the café. The one where Zade used to wait for me, always with that knowing look and a second cup already in hand. I skipped the library’s back corner, the one we’d claimed like it was ours.
Instead, I walked new paths.
I sat in different seats. Took longer routes between buildings. Created new rituals to pretend I wasn’t unraveling inside.
I thought if I kept moving forward, I could outrun the past.
Until I turned a corner—and ran straight into him.
Not Zade.
Luca.
The air around me went still.
I jolted, nearly dropping my coffee, fumbling with my notebook as it slipped halfway from under my arm. My breath caught before I even looked up.
And when I did—
His eyes were waiting for me.
Sharp. Cold. Familiar in the worst way.
Luca didn’t speak.
Didn’t smile.
Didn’t ask how I was or why I looked like I hadn’t slept in weeks.
He just looked. Like he was dissecting me with his stare, peeling back layers I didn’t even know I was still trying to protect.
His silence weighed more than words ever could.
I stood there, frozen in place, students brushing past on either side of us like we weren’t even there. But I couldn’t move. Not with him watching me like that.
Like I was still broken. Like he saw it. Like he liked that he saw it.
My fingers tightened around the coffee cup. The lid creaked under the pressure.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Luca said finally, his voice low and cutting. “Being with him was never safe. It still isn’t.”
I stiffened, my fingers tightening around my coffee cup until the paper crumpled. “I’m not with him,” I said, forcing the words past the lump in my throat. “I’m not anything to him.”
Luca’s mouth twisted, something almost like pity flickering across his features before it was buried beneath disdain. “Doesn’t change what you are,” he said. “Doesn’t change the target on your back.”
Before I could demand an explanation, before I could ask him what the hell he meant, he turned and disappeared into the crowd, leaving me standing there with my heart hammering and my stomach twisted into knots. I wanted to chase him down, to scream that he was wrong, that none of it mattered anymore. But deep down, I knew it did. It always had.
I stumbled into my next lecture late, sliding into a seat near the back of the auditorium, my hands shaking as I fumbled with my notes. I forced myself to breathe, to focus on the droning voice of the professor, to pretend that Luca’s words hadn’t lodged themselves like splinters under my skin.
And then I felt it.
The air shifted, thickened, the way it always had when he was near.
I didn’t want to look. I knew what I would find. But my body betrayed me, my eyes lifting against my will, scanning the rows of seats until they landed on him.
Zade.