Unloved: Chapter 21

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My entire body feels like an open wound, my arms tightly wrapped around my waist the only thing keeping me from tearing open and bleeding out on the scratchy fabric seat of the Waterfell hockey team charter bus.

Freddy isn’t even looking at me. Part of me believes he’s giving me privacy, but the frayed edges of my heart are screaming out how annoying, how childish and embarrassing I must be to him.

I turn to speak to him, to say what, I’m not sure. Perhaps beg him to let me call an Uber or offer to study with him on the ride, to make myself useful, needed somehow. But I pause at the tense set of his shoulders.

Freddy grows in size, like a living human shield over me. I look up to see what caused this reaction in him, only to be greeted by the same terrifying gold eyes of the man from earlier.

Maybe not greeted, but startled by, frightened.

Even armed with the knowledge that this man defended me, nearly fought Tyler, I find myself petrified at the sight of him. Freddy’s obvious reaction to him only validates my feelings.

He flicks his eyes over me briefly, whether to assess me as a friend or enemy, I’m unsure. But there is no malice, only cool indifference as he lumbers to the back of the bus to sit alone.

The overhead lights flick off, comforting darkness swathing over me as the rumbling of the bus smooths out. Subdued conversations float from somewhere in the back, muffled music playing in different pairs of headphones.

“Are you okay?” Freddy asks.

I force myself to meet his gaze now.

Tyler’s voice echoes in my ear like a continuously pounding drum, the backing track to the collapsing of my chest.

Every time it happens, I wait for it to hurt less. I wait for the moment people talk about, the numbness. He’s done it so many times that eventually I’ll ignore it and move on. But it never comes. I feel everything like a frayed nerve, open and throbbing with the pain of it all.

Freddy puts his hand on my knee and squeezes, a smile smoothing the worry lines on his cheeks, but his brow stays furrowed.

I try to smile back, to reassure him that I’m fine, but my stomach somersaults again and I hiccup a sob instead, ducking my head.

“Shit,” he says under his breath, looping an arm around my neck and burying my face into his chest, giving me a private dark space to quietly break down. “Go ahead, Ro. Let it out.”

I shake my head against him, but he presses a surprising kiss to my hair and only holds me harder.

“It’s okay. The lights are off—everyone’s sleeping or got headphones in. You’re fine, cry if you need to. I’ve got you.”

I believe him.

Freddy, as I really know him now, is someone I am learning I can trust. I can rely on him.

Matt Fredderic has been a thousand different things in my head. After meeting him freshman year, I romanticized him endlessly. In my dreams, he was the cool, popular boy who took off my metaphorical glasses and fell in love with me. A knight come to save me in my tall ivory tower. The gentle lover who took my virginity with quiets whispers of “

” or “

,” and then confessed his devotion to me in an epic, movie-worthy “

” moment.

And then, after I met Tyler, I abandoned those fantasies of Matt Fredderic in favor of what I thought was a real chance at a love story. What I can now see as me begging him for even a modicum of something romantic.

Something he deemed unrealistic.

But it wasn’t even the romance I’d wanted. It was my desperation for wanting to feel something real. Something overwhelming, but worth it.

I spent my life safely at home, close to my parents because it was comfortable, and their love was a warm and tangible thing. Then, after my dad’s stroke, I spent every waking moment with them out of fear. I didn’t want to miss a second—just in case.

But I’d lived entire lives, thousands of them, in books. And part of me always imagined what falling in love would feel like.

I’d longed for it.

Maybe Tyler is right.

Maybe I am ridiculous and naive, but even admitting that in the safety of my own head is embarrassing. How could I possibly ever admit to anyone else that I spent a year of my life begging to have sex with someone who called me desperate when I told him I loved him?

That I spent continuously seeking validation from a guy who consistently measured me against another girl to show me my flaws.

As if just being better—more serious and sophisticated, smarter, more competitive—as if would earn me his love. Shine brighter, Ro, but not too bright; not brighter than him.

And now?

I feel… disgusted with myself.

Why did I do that? What made me so desperate to be enough for him that I continued to bend and shrink myself into the box he wanted to put me in?

The realization is somehow worse than anything Tyler spewed at me tonight.

So many of my pieces, the things that make me , are gone, chipped away so that I don’t know who I am anymore.

I feel lost. Floating without a tether.

I rest my head against Freddy’s warm, solid chest and he holds me, whispering soothing nonsensical words so calming I find my tears drying up, a numbness slowly seeping into my bones, and I feel safer, so I lean into it.