He Called Me His

Chapter Seven: What We Can't Undo.

Homecoming arrived with all the chaos of a school-wide event, the halls of Ridgemont decorated in banners and glitter that felt almost mockingly cheerful given everything simmering beneath the surface of my own life.

Xavier and I had agreed, carefully, following every rule our parents had set, to attend separately — him with a group of friends, me reluctantly dragged along by the one genuine friend I'd managed to make since transferring, a quiet, kind girl named Priya who'd never once judged me for the rumors swirling around me.

"You keep looking at him," Priya observed, following my gaze across the gymnasium to where Xavier stood, laughing at something one of his friends said, though his eyes kept finding mine across the room with an intensity that had nothing to do with friendly small talk.

"I'm not supposed to," I admitted. "Doesn't mean I can stop."

Priya smiled knowingly but said nothing further, and I appreciated her more in that moment than I had words to express.

The night wore on, tension building with every stolen glance across the dance floor, until finally, during a rare lull when both our respective friend groups had drifted elsewhere, Xavier found his way to my side by the refreshment table.

"This is technically still following the rules," he said, a familiar smirk playing at his lips. "We're in public. Chaperoned. Completely innocent."

"Barely," I said, though I couldn't help smiling back.

"Dance with me," he said. "One dance. I'll even keep respectable distance, I promise."

I should have said no. I knew, even as I let him lead me onto the dance floor, that "respectable distance" was a promise neither of us particularly wanted him to keep. But the music was slow, the lights were low, and two months of carefully maintained restraint suddenly felt like more than either of us could bear to keep enforcing.

"I missed this," I admitted quietly, as we swayed together, closer than the rules technically allowed. "Just being near you without flinching every time someone might be watching."

"Me too," he said, his voice rough with something that mirrored exactly what I was feeling. "Ivy, I need to tell you something, and I need you to know I mean every word of it. These past weeks, trying to do this the right way, following every rule — it's been worth it, because it's proven something to me. This isn't some reckless teenage impulse. What I feel for you isn't going anywhere, no matter how much time or distance our parents put between us."

Something in his voice, in the raw sincerity behind it, made my chest ache with an emotion too big to name. "Xavier—"

He didn't let me finish. He simply leaned down, slowly enough to give me every chance to pull away, and kissed me — soft and certain, right there in the middle of the crowded gymnasium, careless for the first time of who might be watching.

The kiss lasted only a few seconds before we both pulled back, breathless, suddenly, painfully aware of exactly how public we'd just been.

"We shouldn't have—" I started.

"I don't regret it," he said immediately, firmly. "Not for a second. Do you?"

I searched my own heart for even a flicker of regret and found none. "No," I admitted. "I don't regret it either."

We should have known better than to believe no one had seen. Sasha, predictably, had been watching from across the gym the entire time, and by the time we made it home that night, our phones were already lighting up with messages, the kiss captured and circulated with even more speed and cruelty than the porch photo had been.

This time, though, something had shifted in me. Instead of panic, instead of the instinct to hide and apologize and shrink myself smaller to avoid consequences, I felt something closer to defiance.

"I'm tired of being ashamed of something that doesn't deserve shame," I told Xavier, the two of us sitting together on the porch despite the open-door rule, neither of us willing to pretend distance any longer. "Sasha wants us scared and hiding. I don't want to give her that anymore."

"What are you saying?" Xavier asked carefully.

"I'm saying I think it's time we stopped trying to manage this quietly, and actually talked to our parents honestly — not about rules or boundaries, but about how serious this actually is. Maybe they'll still say no. Maybe nothing changes. But I'd rather fight for this honestly than keep living in fear of the next photo Sasha decides to leak."

Xavier studied me for a long moment, something like pride and love mingling in his expression. "Okay," he said finally. "Then we do it together. Tomorrow. No more hiding."

We didn't yet know that Sasha, furious at losing control of the narrative once again, had already decided that public humiliation wasn't enough — and that the story she was about to tell our parents, twisted just enough to sound like something far worse than the truth, would threaten to destroy everything before we ever got the chance to explain ourselves honestly.