Loving Her Shadow

Two years I talked to him. He had never once seen my face.

So when he finally wore me down, I sent him my graduation photo. The whole class in one frame.

Me: [I'm somewhere in this shot. Guess which one on your first try, and I'll meet you.]

Thirty seconds.

Him: [This is you, right?]

A little red heart, drawn around the girl standing dead center.

He'd circled my sister.

Something in my chest dropped straight through the floor.

Of course he had. It's always my sister. She walks into a room and every set of eyes just settles on her, like she's the only thing worth looking at.

I closed my eyes.

I didn't give him a second guess.

I blocked him. Two years, wiped clean, gone.

Freshman move-in day.

I dragged my bags through the front gates behind my sister. Her in heels, not a strand out of place. Me sweating through my shirt, a duffel strap sawing into my neck.

We didn't get ten feet.

A guy stepped straight into her path. Tall. Expensive-looking. The kind of face that had never once heard the word no.

He lifted an arm and cut her off, staring her down like she owed him something.

"We need to talk," he said. "About how you blocked me without a single word."

Chapter 1

The Lamborghini sat across the front entrance like the gate belonged to him. Deep electric blue.

Nobody asked him to move it.

Move-in day. The gate was a mess of new students and their parents, and he had parked like none of them existed.

He stood there facing my sister, waiting.

She just crossed her arms and gave him a bored little frown.

"Who are you?"

He had one of those rare, genuinely cold-handsome faces. And when she asked, he actually laughed, low and mean.

"Caught you red-handed, and now you want to play strangers?"

Here's the thing about my sister's face. She'd had a line of guys chasing her since we were kids. So she just looked him over, unbothered.

"Is this some new pickup line?" she asked. "Sorry. I've got a boyfriend."

His expression locked up.

She was already walking. Two steps later she glanced back at me.

"You coming, or?"

I grabbed my bags and hurried after her.

Maybe it was the noise of it. Whatever it was, the guy who'd frozen in place finally looked over.

For one second my whole body went tight.

But his eyes slid across me, flat, and went right back to my sister.

She was already halfway across the courtyard.

He stayed where he was, watching her walk away like it cost him something.

By day two, my sister's face was all over the campus pages.

The only person trending harder was the guy who'd cut us off at the gate.

That's how I learned his name. Adrian Ashford.

As in Ashford Group. As in one of the biggest names in the state.

Which explained how he could leave a car like that across the front entrance and dare anyone to say a word about it.

He'd always been like that. Ran the world like the rules were written for other people.

And that dragged up the memory I'd been shoving down since the second I saw his face.

Because I knew exactly how I'd met the boy I talked to online.

We met the way you meet a car crash.

A comment section. Some post neither of us even remembered by the end. He said something wrong. I told him he was wrong. He dug in.

A hundred-something replies later, the person who'd made the post actually climbed into their own comments to beg us to stop.

We didn't. We took it to DMs.

Two more days of it. Neither of us blinking. Until he broke first.

Him: [Aren't you exhausted yet?]

Me: [Apologize and I'll think about forgiving you.]

I hit send.

And the fight we'd just barely let cool roared right back to life.

That was us. That was how the whole thing started. Two people who'd sooner burn the house down than let the other one win.

Behind a screen, I had teeth. I was quick, I was loud, I gave back everything I got.

In real life, I was the girl carrying my sister's bags.

The boy I'd fought with for two years. The one I'd never let see my face.

He was standing at my school now, in the flesh, next to a car worth more than my parents made in a year.

Chasing the wrong girl.

And I was the only person alive who knew it.

Chapter 2

She shut him down without blinking. He only came after her harder.

I didn't find out they were actually together until a week later, when she texted me to go grab her takeout.

I carried the bag up to her dorm. Something fancy, expensive packaging. She was propped against her headboard, admiring a fresh set of nails.

She tipped her chin at the bag. "There's two cakes in there. Adrian bought them." A pause. "Take the mango one."

I stopped. "...Adrian?"

She hummed, glancing over. "My new boyfriend. The one who cornered us at the gate."

Something heavy settled over me and wouldn't lift.

Love came easy to my sister. It always had. Our parents. Her friends. Any random person who met her exactly once.

And now, apparently, the boy I'd spent two years talking to online.

I kept my eyes on the floor. "Weren't you seeing that lawyer guy, like, last month?"

"Ended it." She said it the way you'd report the weather. "Adrian's generous. Chases hard. Corners me at school every single day, keeps feeding me this line about how we already know each other from somewhere."

"Probably some new move," she added.

Then she leaned in close and held up a number for me to see.

"One week," she said. "He's already dropped this much on me."

A hundred grand.

My mouth pulled into something like a smile. "Yeah. That's generous."

Like all the times my guy used to send me money. Happy, he sent money. Angry, he sent money. Never less than five figures.

I never once took it.

That was the difference between me and my sister. Online, behind the screen, I could play bold. I could act like I had nothing to lose.

In real life, standing in her shadow, I was small, and I knew it.

Two years, and I never let myself keep a cent of his.

"I moved a few thousand into your account," she said suddenly.

I looked at her face. The face that stopped people mid-sentence.

The whole world handed her their love for free. But the realest thing in her went to me. She loved me, in her way. Anything good, half of it came to me on reflex.

Which is why I couldn't even manage to hate her.

On my way down I grabbed her trash to take out.

I tossed it, turned around, and nearly jumped out of my skin.

Adrian. Right there.

"...Did you need something?" I got out.

His eyes dropped, slow, to the cake box in my hand. The chocolate one my sister had also decided she didn't want, the one she'd told me to take and split with my roommates.

Under his gaze I shifted the box behind my leg like an idiot.

He just tipped up one corner of his mouth, like it couldn't matter less to him.

"Eat it," he said.

Then, "You went to see her?"

I gave a small nod.

He muttered it, half to himself. "No wonder she never texted back."

I dropped my eyes.

He held the whole world at arm's length. Ice in a good coat.

And here I was. The person he'd stayed up two years talking to. Standing close enough to touch.

Handing him nothing.

While he stood there, aching over a girl who couldn't be bothered to answer his texts.

Chapter 3

The guy in front of me was, for the record, unbelievably clingy.

Senior year of high school, I used to smuggle my phone into class just to answer him between periods.

I asked him once if he had some kind of separation anxiety.

Him: [?]

Him: [You're my girlfriend. Who else am I supposed to be clingy with.]

Him: [And once we finally meet in person, I'm keeping you where I can see you. All the time.]

Well. Now I was right where he could see me.

And he looked at me with nothing but polite, total distance.

I finally lifted my head to tell him I was leaving.

His eyes snagged on the student ID hanging around my neck.

He raised an eyebrow, almost amused. "You're in my college?"

College of Engineering.

I actually thought about slapping a hand over the lanyard.

One slip. That's all it takes.

He'd hounded me for months about what I was going to major in. I couldn't outlast him. And maybe, underneath, I wanted him to know.

So I told him.

It never once crossed my mind that he'd turn around and pick the same college.

But the second the thought formed, he clicked his tongue.

Something like disappointment moved behind his eyes. "Can't believe she lied about this too," he said, low.

And just like that, every nervous flutter I hadn't asked for drained straight out of me.

Everything in me went cold and level.

I looked away. "I'm leaving."

He shifted, opening a path for me.

"You and your sister really are nothing alike," he said.

I'd already taken a step. Then I turned back around.

"What's my sister like. What am I."

It came out colder than anything I recognized as mine.

He just smiled. Leaned back against the railing behind him, loose and easy.

And when he got to my sister, his voice dropped, went warm without asking. "Your sister's got a rebel streak. All thorns."

"You, though." He looked at me. "You don't seem to have a temper at all."

He meant soft. Spineless.

It's the version of me everyone gets handed.

My parents sighed over it. My sister gave up on it. Back in school, nobody wanted to sit with me. I was the girl who ate alone.

That one reply I typed at Adrian in a comment section, freshman year of high school, was the bravest thing I had ever done in my life.

I stayed quiet for half a minute. Then I looked up at him.

"My sister is gorgeous and she is brilliant," I said. "Her temper could be twice as bad and people would still line up for her. That's not a flaw in her. That's just the baseline."

I didn't explain myself after that.

I turned and walked off.

I think he called after me.

I didn't stop. If anything, I moved faster.

After that came orientation week.

Adrian and I landed in the same group. Not that I saw much of him.

He was the freshman everyone was watching. His thing with my sister was the story of the week.

I didn't need her to tell me anything. The chatter around me was plenty. Every day, the second the day's sessions let out, he'd cut straight across camp to my sister's group over at the art school.

My sister runs hot. Hates the heat.

And the way people told it, this silver-spoon heir, this boy who'd never lifted a finger for anyone, had turned himself into her personal errand boy.

He'd picked this whole college for a girl he had never once seen.

Now he was carrying my sister's sunscreen.

Chapter 4

Adrian carried a backpack everywhere he went.

Inside it: bug spray, sunscreen, even a little emergency kit. Every bit of it for my sister.

A girl sidled up next to me. "I went to high school with him. Back then? Girls threw themselves at him and he wouldn't even blink. Like that wire just wasn't connected in him."

"Everybody said he had some precious girlfriend he only ever talked to online. We all figured she was a story. An excuse to turn people down." She grinned. "Turns out she's real. Turns out she's your sister."

I held onto my water bottle and gave her a flat, "Huh."

"I don't really know their business," I said.

But I couldn't stop it from surfacing.

The summer after sophomore year. A solid year of talking every single day, and by then we knew each other down to the bone. He kept floating the idea of coming to see me over break.

Me: [I'm scared I'll take one look at the real me and regret the whole thing. So I'd rather we just stopped.]

Him: [?]

I could feel the anger coming off the screen.

Him: [My grandmother was a movie star. Old Hollywood. You have one hundred percent seen her films.]

Him: [Girls have been slipping me love notes since I was nine.]

He followed it up with one of those smug little sunglasses guys.

Him: [Come find me and you'll just like me more. You'll want to talk to me more.]

Online, Adrian ran hot and never once shut up.

I gave him a single cool line about regretting it.

His messages didn't stop.

Him: [I've gotten more confessions than I can count.]

We weren't even officially together yet.

Him: [Never said yes to a single one of them.]

Him: [Turned down every last one.]

I remember biting down on a smile.

Me: [k]

And right on schedule, the boy on the other end lost it a little.

Someone poked my arm.

I surfaced to a girl studying me, all curiosity.

"You're Celeste's little sister. You'd know. Did she and Adrian actually date for two years?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

I looked down. "I really don't."

That evening, my sister, right in the middle of her shiny new romance, asked me to dinner out of nowhere.

I waited for her on the second floor of the dining hall.

She showed up in orientation gear and somehow wore it like it was nothing. Still every bit as striking as always.

We took a corner table, across from each other.

She slid a paper bag toward me. "Got you sunscreen. Bug spray."

I looked at her. "Since when do you have time to come find me?"

She sat back, arms crossed, and tugged at one corner of her mouth. "What. You gonna pretend you don't know me again?"

She meant middle school.

I'd spent my whole life standing in her shade.

Those six years of elementary school, everyone asked me the same thing. Elise, are you really Celeste's sister? A hand over the mouth, a little laugh. You two look nothing alike. Did your parents pick you up somewhere?

So the year I started middle school, I started avoiding her.

Her light was blinding, and it kept me standing in the dark of my own smallness the entire time.

Until high school.

Until a boy on the other side of a screen who didn't know my face. Didn't know I had a sister. Didn't know there was a brighter version of me I was built to lose to.

For once, there was no shade to stand in.

Because he had never once seen the thing casting it.

Chapter 5

He didn't know what I actually looked like. Didn't know my sister existed.

So all he ever did was tell me how great I was. All he ever did was want more of me.

I'd started to regret it, honestly.

That I'd let him rush me. That I'd panicked and grabbed the newest photo in my camera roll, the graduation one, and sent it off.

I'd been too nervous to even clock who was standing dead center.

My sister.

I shut my eyes for a second.

Across the table, she'd already moved on to a new subject.

"Adrian's got a restless face on him," she said. "But I'll give him this. When he decides to date somebody, he takes it seriously."

She said it like it bored her. "He's actually really good to me."

My throat closed around whatever I'd been about to say.

I made myself look up. "So are you... going to take it seriously?"

She looked at me like I'd told a joke. "God, no."

"I still can't figure out why he latched onto me like a curse," she said. "My guess? The day he snaps out of it is the day we fall apart."

I go quiet around my sister. She always does more of the talking.

So I didn't expect her to start telling me the private stuff.

She said he was sweet about it. Innocent, even. "Blushes if we hold hands. Won't even try to kiss me."

My sister keeps no secrets from me. I just didn't want this one.

I turned to the window. "Celeste. Evening session. You're going to be late."

I'd barely made it downstairs before I ran into the boy we'd just been talking about.

His hair was damp, pushed up and messy. Like he'd gone back and showered.

He saw my sister and something sour crossed his face. "Dinner took you that long?"

Then his eyes moved to me.

He really was clingy.

But my sister didn't coddle him. She flicked it back, light and bored. "Do I have to run everything I do by you now?"

The words landed somewhere I knew.

Senior year. Adrian and I had just made it official, online, and he'd gotten even worse about it. Thirty minutes without an answer and he'd start.

One day I'd bombed a test and I was in a mood, and he pushed me one time too many.

I'd typed back, cold: [Do I have to run everything I do by you?]

First time I ever got angry at him.

He answered fast that day.

Him: [No. I'm the one who wants to run everything I do by you.]

In front of me now, the same boy let out a short laugh.

He leaned across from my sister, loose, every word clear. "Celeste. I'm the one who wants to run everything I do by you."

My nails went into my palm.

I still have that conversation saved. Two years old, on a phone in my pocket, three feet from where he was standing.

He'd just handed it to her, word for word, like it had never belonged to anyone.

"The evening session is starting," I told my sister. "I'm going to head out."

After that, I started cutting a wide path around anything that touched my sister and Adrian.

People came to ask me about them. I walked off every time.

Orientation week wasn't even over before the verdict came in. Antisocial. Hard to get along with. It ran through the whole college.

There were never many girls in engineering to start with. They decided I was a loner and stopped trying.

And I was on my own again.

But I'd been on my own my whole life. It was easier this way. That's what I told myself.

Once classes started, I took the corner seat.

Adrian was the most-watched freshman in the college, so I didn't have to go looking to know his attendance was a joke. Late constantly. Gone early.

I'd made myself invisible again.

Funny, then, that I always knew exactly how many empty seats sat between me and the one he never bothered to fill.

Chapter 6

He treated rules like they were written for other people. He had the money to back it up.

Not just here. Back in high school he used to tell me, through the screen, how much he hated the morning and evening study halls.

He'd just leave. No heads-up, no permission.

His dad had given his high school a building, then a whole set of lab equipment. That was the only reason they never pushed him out.

But the skipping now had nothing to do with hating class.

A guy in the row ahead of me was snickering. "Adrian's off with the girlfriend again, huh. Art school lectures. Think he follows a single word?"

Someone laughed. "Following the lecture was never the point."

He and my sister were the campus love story of the season.

In private, though, the reports out of my sister weren't good.

She said he kept asking her strange questions.

"He's dead sure I've got some secret account stashed somewhere." She frowned, worn thin with it. "We've got nothing in common. Not one thing."

"The bands he likes, the games he plays, I've never heard of any of it. I get sick of it, then he gets moody."

"These days," she said, "we barely talk when we're in the same room."

On my way back to the dorm that evening, I cut past the basketball courts.

And there he was.

My sister had gone off to paint with one of her professors. This time he hadn't trailed after her.

It was too hot out. The open court was nearly empty.

A few guys hung around him. But he played cold and alone and vicious, like he was burning something off.

The ball cracked against the concrete, again and again.

Nobody near him said a word. Nobody dared.

I watched him through the fence for half a minute. Then I turned and left.

That night, for the first time in two months, I logged back into the alt account.

The one I'd built for exactly one reason. To add him.

I'd blocked him, so the message column sat dead quiet.

But the friend-request badge down in the corner read 99+.

I opened it.

Two months of Adrian, cycling through one account after another, sending request after request.

I scrolled up through all of it.

At the start, right after I blocked him, he was just confused.

New handle, new request, a note asking why. Why. Why would you do that.

Then came the anger.

That he had a hundred ways to find me. That he'd used every one of them. That none of them worked.

I kept scrolling and watched the dates.

Then I hit it. The week my sister and I started school. The week he cornered her at the front gate on day one.

For that half a month, nothing. Not one new request.

Until two weeks ago.

When they started up again.

Except now there were no notes. No angry questions. Nothing.

Just clean, blank requests, one after the other after the other.

My finger hovered at the top of the screen, about to back out.

The phone chimed.

A new request dropped in.

Black avatar. A username that was pure garbled nonsense.

The note on this one was three words long.

Three words with something like desperation bleeding through them.

[Where are you?]

My heart jumped, hard.

I fumbled to kill the screen and caught accept by accident.

First, a single question mark came through from the other side.

Then everything did.

Chapter 7

New messages stacked up across the top of my screen, one after another.

I didn't dare open a single one.

I just steadied myself and did the one thing I knew how to do.

I blocked the account. Again.

Then I logged out.

Next morning, early class, I took my usual seat in the very back row, alone.

The bell rang. The professor stepped up with his notes.

And the back door swung open.

Engineering runs big. The hall was packed wall to wall.

Whoever it was gave the room a lazy once-over, then carried his bag straight over and sat down next to me.

Adrian.

I didn't have to turn and look. I could feel it. The pressure coming off him was low, thundercloud low.

He didn't say a word. Just sat, and then went completely still.

Brooding about something, I figured. So I did nothing. I treated him like empty air and listened to the lecture.

But when the break came and the room went loud, the boy beside me spoke.

"...Did your sister text you last night?"

His voice was as cold as the rest of him.

My hand stalled mid-equation. I turned and looked at him.

"No," I said.

Nothing moved in his face. Not disappointment. Not relief.

He just leaned back into his chair.

I looked away, and my elbow knocked the scratch paper off my desk.

Before I could bend for it, Adrian already had it in his hand.

I reached to take it back. Started to say thanks.

He didn't let go.

I looked up on reflex.

His eyes were down, fixed on my scratch paper like it was the only thing in the room.

The light from the window fell across half of his sharp face.

His brows were pulled tight, severe, and it made him look almost cruel.

The bell had already gone. I had to say something.

"That's my scratch paper."

That finally reached him.

His gaze lifted off the page. Slow. Inch by inch, climbing, until it landed on my face.

And met my eyes.

While he was still somewhere far off, I pulled the paper out of his hand