He Broke Me for Another Girl

Chapter 5: Soup and Lies

I stood there with my phone halfway to my ear and stared at Fiona.

"He's fighting because of me?"

"That's what people are saying." She was still catching her breath. "Someone ID'd the guy who posted the photos.

Max — I think he's in your stagecraft elective? Colt tracked him down and went after him outside the dining hall."

I lowered my phone.

My first instinct was to stay put. I was done with Colt Sterling. I had campus security on speed dial, a flight booked for next week, and exactly zero interest in getting pulled back into his orbit.

But the photos were my problem. Whatever was happening out there was happening in my name.

I grabbed my jacket and went.

* * * * * * * *

The crowd outside Harmon's dining hall had formed that particular shape crowds take when something violent is at the center — a wide, tense circle, people craning but not stepping in. When I pushed through, they let me, which told me they already knew who I was in relation to this.

I heard it before I saw it. The sound of impact. Again. Again.

Colt had Max on the ground, and he wasn't stopping.

Max's face was a mess — lip split, one eye already swelling shut, hands up in the useless way of someone who'd given up trying to block. "I'm sorry," he was saying, words coming out slurred and desperate. "I've always liked her, okay? I got jealous. I shouldn't have done it, I know — please, just stop—"

Colt hit him again like he hadn't heard a word.

I've known since last fall that Colt Sterling plays hard on the field. I'd watched enough of his games, standing in the

student section, cheering like an i***t. But this was different. His face was something I hadn't seen before — jaw set, eyes flat with a cold fury that had nothing performative about it.

For one unguarded second, something shifted in my chest.

Then I shut it down and pushed through the last two people between me and the front of the circle.

"Colt." Nothing. "Colt, stop."

I grabbed his arm with both hands.

He finally went still.

Max wasn't unconscious, but he wasn't far off. Security showed up about ninety seconds later, which was ninety

seconds too late to matter much.

* * * * * * * *

The fallout moved fast, the way things do when one person involved has the last name Sterling attached to them.

Max's family made noise about pressing charges for about four hours before someone apparently explained the full picture — what Max had done, what the photos were, and who exactly they were dealing with. By evening, there was a private settlement conversation happening that I wasn't invited to and didn't need to be.

The school administration handled Colt with the particular gentleness reserved for star athletes whose fathers had donated a building. A formal warning. Parental notification. Disciplinary review that would almost certainly go nowhere.

I wasn't surprised by any of it. That's just how Harmon worked.

What I didn't expect was to end up sitting in the campus infirmary next to Colt while a nurse cleaned the cuts on his

knuckles.

I'm not entirely sure how that happened. One minute I was giving my statement to a security officer, and the next I was following Colt down the hall because nobody else seemed to be going with him and it felt wrong to just walk away. Old habit, maybe. Eight months of being his person.

I watched the nurse apply antiseptic and tried to figure out what I was feeling.

"Why did you do that?" I asked. Genuine question. No edge to it.

He looked up. The fury from outside was gone — he just looked tired. "Because you're my girlfriend. And what that

guy did could follow you for years. Your name, your career." He paused. "Nobody gets to do that."

His voice was level. Sincere in a way that made it harder to dismiss than I wanted it to be.

Your career. The career he'd spent eight months quietly trying to derail.

I didn't say that out loud. I just nodded once and looked at the floor.

Part of me — the part I was actively trying to argue down — wanted to believe him. I've read enough scripts, watched enough real and performed emotion to know that what I'd seen outside wasn't manufactured. That wasn't a man putting on a show. Whatever Colt felt when he saw those photos, it was real.

But real feelings and honest intentions aren't the same thing. People can care about you and still use you. That's

maybe the worst version of being used — when you can't even call them a monster because they're not entirely one.

I left the infirmary when the nurse finished and I had a class to get to.

* * * * * * * *

I sat in the back of my Dramatic Literature seminar for the next hour and absorbed approximately nothing.

My mind kept running the same sequence: Colt's face when he thought I was pregnant. The flash of want before he covered it. Then the same face outside the dining hall — unguarded, furious, protecting something.

I'd read enough plays to know this kind of setup. Two people, wrong beginning, real feelings that develop anyway, messy and inconvenient and eventually — in the story — worth it.

But I wasn't a character in one of those plays. I was a person with a flight booked and a program waiting and a life that existed before Colt Sterling walked up to a fountain and shouted my name in front of a hundred people.

A relationship built on a lie doesn't get to become something real just because the feelings showed up late.

I wrote that in the margin of my notes and then crossed it out so nobody would ever read it.

* * * * * * * *

After class, I took the long way back to the dorm and stopped at the campus deli on Mercer Street.

I bought a container of chicken soup, a bottle of water, and a pack of the pain relievers I knew he kept running out of because he was terrible about restocking his medicine cabinet. I knew that because I'd refilled it twice in the last four months.

Standing at the register, I was fully aware of how this looked. How it felt. Stupid, mostly. Unnecessary, definitely.

But I'd already decided: this was it. The last thing. A clean ending to whatever the last eight months had actually been — real or manufactured or something broken in between. After this, I was gone and he was going to figure out, probably very soon, that I was never in his game to begin with.

I paid for the soup and headed for his dorm.

One last gesture. One closed door.

That was the plan.