He Called Me His

Chapter Four: Jealousy Has a Name.

Sasha didn't waste time. By Monday morning, a new rumor had replaced the old one — this time uglier, sharper, dressed up as concern instead of gossip. Did you hear? Ivy and Xavier aren't just stepsiblings pretending to be normal — they're actually together. Behind their parents' backs. Gross, right?

The word "gross" followed me through every hallway that day, whispered just loud enough to make sure I heard it. I understood immediately what Sasha had done — she hadn't invented anything. She'd simply said the truth out loud, dressed in enough disgust to turn the whole school against us before either of us could control the narrative.

"She's trying to isolate us," Xavier said grimly, finding me at lunch, his jaw tight with barely controlled anger. "Make it so uncomfortable that we back away from each other just to survive the social fallout."

"Is it working?" I asked quietly, hating how small my voice sounded.

Something fierce flickered across his face. "No," he said. "Not on me. I meant what I said in the hallway, Ivy. I'm not backing away from this because Sasha decided to weaponize the truth."

But it was working, in smaller, crueler ways I didn't tell him about — the girls who suddenly stopped sitting near me, the teacher who gave me a strange, assessing look during roll call, the constant, exhausting awareness that every single interaction between Xavier and me was now being watched, catalogued, twisted into something scandalous by people who had no idea what they were actually witnessing.

That evening, my mother came home from work with an unusually serious expression, settling across from me at the kitchen table with the particular carefulness of someone about to broach an uncomfortable topic.

"Ivy, honey," she said slowly. "I got a call today. From another parent. She said there are... rumors, at school. About you and Xavier."

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "Mom, it's not—"

"I know it's probably nothing," she said quickly, though something uncertain flickered behind her eyes. "Teenagers gossip, I remember how it was. I just need you to be honest with me. Is there anything happening that I should know about? Because this marriage, this family — it means everything to me right now, and I need to know we're not building it on something that could fall apart."

I looked at my mother's hopeful, frightened face and understood, with sudden and total clarity, exactly how much was actually at stake — not just my own reputation, not just some fleeting teenage drama, but the entire fragile new life she'd fought so hard to build for both of us.

"It's nothing, Mom," I lied, the words tasting like ash. "Just rumors. Xavier and I barely talk."

She exhaled, visibly relieved, and the conversation moved on to safer topics. I excused myself soon after, retreating to my room with a familiar, hollow feeling settling into my chest — the specific ache of protecting something precious by lying about something that felt, more and more each day, like it might actually be real.

I found Xavier on the porch again that night, exactly where I'd found him that very first evening, though everything between us felt entirely different now.

"My mom asked me tonight," I told him, sitting down beside him without waiting for an invitation. "If something was happening between us. I lied to her face."

He was quiet for a long moment. "I would have lied too," he admitted. "Doesn't make it feel any better, does it?"

"No," I said honestly. "It doesn't."

"Ivy." He turned to face me fully, something raw and unguarded in his expression that I'd only glimpsed in fragments before now. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think about it before you answer. Is this worth it? Whatever this is between us — is it worth risking everything for? Because I'm falling for you, harder every single day, and I don't know how to stop it even if I wanted to. But I also don't want to be the reason your whole world falls apart."

The question hung heavy in the space between us, more honest and more frightening than anything either of us had said aloud before.

"I don't know," I whispered, and it was the truest thing I'd said all day. "I don't know if it's worth it. I just know that every time I try to convince myself to stop feeling this, I fail within about five minutes of being near you."

Something in his expression eased, relief and fear tangled together in equal measure. He reached over, slowly, and took my hand — the first deliberate touch either of us had allowed ourselves since the storm.

"Then we figure it out together," he said quietly. "Whatever that means. However careful we have to be."

I laced my fingers through his, the gesture small and enormous all at once, and for a moment, sitting there in the dark with Sasha's cruelty and my mother's fragile hope both hanging over us, it felt like maybe, somehow, we could actually find a way through this.

I didn't yet know that Sasha, humiliated by Xavier's public dismissal of her days earlier, had already decided that rumors alone weren't enough — and that the photo she was about to take of this exact moment, from the shadows at the edge of the yard, was about to change absolutely everything.