Chapter Nine: The Picture & the Past
620 Words
The envelope was still on the bed.
Open. Innocent. Deadly.
Emery stared at the photo like it might blink and disappear.
Luca, shirtless, smirking, a girl wrapped around him like a second skin.
A party in the background. Loud lighting. Familiar apartment walls.
The date? Four months ago.
The timestamp hurt more than the image.
It was recent.
Right before he started looking at her differently. Right before the protectiveness turned into something else.
She didn’t cry.
Not yet.
She just stood there in her dorm, frozen, her hands shaking slightly as she turned the photo over.
On the back, a phone number. Scribbled. Sloppy. And beneath it, a single word:
“Ask her what happened. Or don’t. Maybe you’d rather not know.”
⸻
She didn’t text the number.
She didn’t need to.
Because that night, Luca was waiting outside her building in his truck, head leaning against the seat, one hand running through his hair like he already knew.
She climbed into the passenger side without a word. Held the photo up.
He stared at it for a long time.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t deny it.
“Who is she?” Emery asked, voice steady, even as her heart cracked with every syllable.
Luca swallowed hard. “Her name’s Liv. She was nothing. Just—stupid party, bad night. That was… months before you and me.”
“You said you’d been watching me since freshman year.”
“I have,” he said quickly. “But I didn’t think I’d ever get close. You were—off-limits. Out of reach.”
“So you hooked up with someone else while falling for me.”
Luca’s jaw tightened. “I wasn’t falling. Not yet. Not until that night in the library. You know that.”
“No. I don’t.”
Silence pulsed between them.
She turned her face toward the window, blinking back tears. “You let me believe I was the only one.”
“You are,” he said. “Since the second we started, Emery, it’s only been you. You changed everything.”
“But that doesn’t erase what you did.”
“I’m not trying to erase it.” His voice was low, raw. “I’m trying to tell you it didn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe it didn’t to you. But now it’s in my hands. My head. And my heart.”
Her voice cracked.
And that broke him.
“I should’ve told you,” he said, running a hand through his hair again. “I wanted to. But everything between us happened so fast, and I didn’t want to screw it up.”
“Then why does it feel like you just did?”
He reached for her hand, but she pulled away.
And that was the part that hurt the most.
Not the photo. Not the past.
The distance between them now—after everything.
⸻
Later that night, Emery sat alone in her room, staring at her ceiling, the photo torn in half on her desk.
The worst part wasn’t that someone wanted to break them.
It was that it almost worked.
She could feel it happening—walls rebuilding, trust unraveling.
But then her phone buzzed.
Luca:
There’s something I didn’t say.
I didn’t fall in love with you after the library.
I fell in love with you before I even knew what love was.
I just didn’t know what to do with it until now.
And I’ll wait. As long as it takes.
Her chest tightened.
She turned over in bed, pulled the sheets over her head, and let herself cry—not because she was broken…
But because maybe—just maybe—she still believed in them.
- Writer
