The Genius's Downfall: No Going Back

I was burning up with a fever, watching my boyfriend of three years sign another girl into class.

Not me. Her.

That one signature was all that stood between me and the guaranteed grad-school spot I'd bled three years for. He knew it.

He didn't even look up.

Throw your fit if you want, he said. Flat. Bored.

So I stopped fighting. I slid our promise ring off my finger and let it drop into the trash.

I found out later what it did to him.

That neat-freak genius. The CS golden boy half of Tsinghua wanted.

He lost his mind.

Clawed through a mountain of garbage with his bare hands until dawn.

For one ring.

Chapter 1

"You're ending us because I signed her in and not you?"

The lecture hall had emptied out.

Lucian looked up, lazy, his eyes on mine. There was almost nothing in them.

I nodded.

"Yes. Let's end it here."

His gaze held for two seconds.

Only two.

Then he looked back down at the half-finished project on his laptop, and he didn't look at me again.

"Fine. Whatever you want."

Even the junior hovering beside him watched me with something close to worry.

But Lucian, my boyfriend of three years, still hadn't noticed I'd been running a fever for three days, my face flushed a wrong, sickly red.

I smiled at myself. Bitter.

I turned to go, and Iris caught my arm.

"He only signed me in because we'd been pulling all-nighters on the project all week. He knew I just ran out for breakfast and would be right back."

The words tumbled out of her.

"He even told me to bring you fried dough and soy milk. It's really not what you think, Vivienne."

I was already swaying, dizzy with the fever. The sudden pull threw me off balance, and I went down hard.

My knee caught the edge of the lecture-hall step.

Pain, fine and sharp, the kind that turns vicious when your body has nothing left in it. My eyes stung red in a heartbeat.

"Vivienne!"

Iris scrambled to help me up.

Her eyes kept darting to Lucian, hunting for some kind of reaction.

She really didn't know him.

At the sound, Lucian glanced up, flat, a small crease between his brows. "Iris. Do you have this much time to waste?"

She froze mid-sentence. "...Huh?"

"If you're that free, come finish the part you left undone."

I looked into his eyes. Still water. Dead calm.

And I finally accepted it.

He was the mountain that would never move for me. No storm, no fall, nothing that could shift him half an inch.

"It works out, honestly."

My advisor, on the phone. "Other than our school, the only program in the country that fits your research is the one at Zhejiang. If the placement's off the table, going abroad really is the better call."

I hung up and dragged my sick body over to start the application.

Like he said. My research direction is a strange one.

Stay in the country, and my only choices are my own school and Zhejiang.

Go overseas, and the list of schools suddenly blooms wide open. For a second I couldn't even decide where to go.

One thought, and the whole sky opened up.

And it hit me, standing there in that cutthroat school full of geniuses, killing myself grinding for that spot.

What had any of it been for?

Chapter 2

My phone lit up.

One notification.

The one person I'd turned alerts on for. Lucian had posted.

Lucian never posts. Not even when he agreed to be with me did he put it anywhere.

When I asked him to, his voice went cold and impatient. "My private life. Why would I put it on display?"

I said everyone does it. Everyone's happy with the person they love, everyone wants people cheering for them. Wasn't that a good thing?

I said a lot of things.

He couldn't even be bothered to look at me. "Vivienne. Professor Zhang is teaching a logic course this fall. I suggest you take it."

I shut my mouth.

It went nowhere, like everything else.

So what, exactly, was worth a post from Lucian?

I opened the app.

[Lucian: Project's done. First place.]

The photo was his whole lab at some celebration dinner.

Lucian held his phone up, careless, his face a little blurred. Like he'd been looking down the whole time and only glanced up when someone called his name.

It still couldn't hide how good-looking he was.

Brutally good-looking. The kind where every eye in the room finds his face first.

No wonder a K-pop agency came for him back in school, waving a fortune to sign him as an idol.

My eyes slid sideways.

The new junior in his lab, Iris, was in the shot too. Hard to miss. The only one not looking at the camera.

She sat right next to him, well past any normal distance.

Her eyes were fixed on him, rapt.

The want practically burst through the screen.

A few scattered comments underneath, all the same.

[Commenters: wait, Lucian has a girlfriend?? / is this a soft launch or what]

He didn't reply to a single one.

The glow of the screen dimmed. Dimmed.

Then went black.

I came back to myself. Opened the phone, turned off his alerts, dropped him in the block list.

And the question I'd asked myself finally had an answer.

Why kill myself for our school's placement?

Because of Lucian.

Of course it was Lucian. He could get that spot in his sleep. I wanted to prove I could keep standing beside him. So I ran myself into the ground.

The way I did back then.

I'd confessed to him in a line of other girls, one after another. He was so annoyed, brows drawn, his whole face saying, oh god, not another one.

Then, offhand: "I don't like people who aren't smart. Get into my school, and I'll think about it."

A boy genius with a guaranteed spot at Tsinghua already locked in. And Tsinghua's bar was high enough to send everyone who heard that line quietly backing away.

Not me.

Junior year, senior year, I studied like it might kill me. Until even my parents begged me to ease off.

I'll never forget the day I got in.

I walked right up to him. "I made it. Time to keep your promise."

He looked up.

And for once, just once, that face went blank.

I printed the study-abroad forms on campus, made it back to the rented apartment, and went under, too dizzy to do anything but sleep.

When I woke up.

Lucian was sitting beside me.

The curtains breathed in the draft. The room had gone dim and gold.

Like a dream.

Chapter 3

He reached out and touched my forehead.

Cold medicine sat on the table beside a glass of warm water.

"Why didn't you tell me you had a fever?" Lucian said. "Does it still hurt?"

Of course.

A dream.

I don't know why, but the tears came, one after another