CHAPTER THREE : JAMES WHITNEY
1117 Words
She returned to her desk, and settled her mind to work when her phone buzzed again.
This time, it was a text. From James.
“James Whitney [4:17 PM]: Hey babe. Dinner tonight? Can’t wait to see you.”
Paulina’s stomach turned.
She hadn’t seen this version of him in a long time. Young, charming, the version she fell for. But he is a wolf in a designer suit and she knew what lay beneath. She knew what he would become.
She tapped out a reply.
“Paulina [4:18 PM]: Can’t tonight. Something came up.”
She stared at the message for a long moment before hitting send.
This was the beginning.
The first domino.
She won't be that girl again, always on his beck and call; wouldn’t walk into his arms again.
After the close of work, she searched the phone in her hand for her campus address and hailed a cab.
Back at her tiny student apartment that evening, Paulina sat by the window, hugging her knees. The city glowed outside, all her memories from her past and present and back to her past again resurfaced.
She met James Whitney during her first year at college during a rainstorm.
It had started to drizzle just after her late literature class. She didn’t have an umbrella and had been running across campus, soaked halfway through, when a sleek black car pulled up beside her. The window rolled down.
“You’ll drown out here,” a deep voice said with a faint chuckle. “Get in.”
She had hesitated.
Then she saw the face.
He looked like he belonged on a billboard. Hair slick from the rain, a chiseled jaw, a crooked smile that made her heart hiccup.
He was magnetic.
Tall, confident, and already walking like he owned the world. And maybe he did, or at least, she thought he did.
“It’s okay,” he said, as if sensing her doubt. “I’m James. We have economics together.”
That voice. Smooth like velvet, sharp like glass. She’d smiled then. Small. Careful.
She got in the car.
That night, he dropped her off at her dorm and handed her a silk handkerchief. She hadn’t known men like him existed in real life. Confident. Assertive. Rich. Dangerous, though she didn’t know it yet.
They met again at a campus charity gala. She had worn a simple red dress borrowed from her roommate. He had worn a black suit that looked custom tailored, even though it probably wasn’t back then. She’d spill wine on her dress. He handed her a napkin and said, “Red suits you better when it’s not soaked in Merlot.”
She laughed. That laugh had been her first mistake.
From that moment, he pursued her, brought her coffee after class. Left notes in her locker with cryptic quotes. Showed up at her poetry readings with flowers. He listened to her, or at least he pretended to. And she, nineteen and tender-hearted, believed every word. The way he’d stroke her cheek and tell her she was unlike anyone he’d ever met. The flowers. The notes in her dorm mailbox.
Paulina had never been in love before him. She was naïve, inexperienced, still finding her place in the world.
It hadn’t taken long before she fell. Hard.
He was three years older, a business major with a mind for profit and a smile that could sell poison as perfume. Paulina had been a literature student then, a little shy, carrying poetry books in her arms and dreams in her eyes.
By the end of her sophomore year, she was his. She remembered the way her heart raced when he’d first kissed her under the old oak tree near the art building. The way he whispered, “You’re too good for this world, Paulina.”
Oh, how those words turned to acid in the years that followed. She saw all the red flags she had once ignored. The possessiveness masked as protection. The way he always made her feel guilty for saying no. The charm he turned off and on like a switch.
The way he’d talk down to her in public, then buy her something expensive to make up for it.
Back then, she had called it love. Now, she knew better.
She wasn’t going to fall for that again.
She remembered the first time Alexis met him. The way she stared a beat too long. The faint smirk. Paulina thought nothing of it then. Just a friend being curious. She had no idea it was the beginning of something monstrous.
Sitting in her tiny apartment with the buzz of the radiator in the background and the muffled sound of sirens far below, she rose from the window seat and walked to the bed, her tiny room dimly lit by the glow of city lights filtering through sheer curtains. The same poster hung above her bed Virginia Woolf’s quote in swirling script: “I am rooted, but I flow.”
How fitting. She was rooted in pain. But she would flow with vengeance.
Paulina finally pulled away from the window, dropped her phone on the bedside table, and climbed beneath the sheets. The bed creaked beneath her weight, thin mattress, stiff pillows, and yet, it felt more honest than the silk-covered bed in James’s penthouse ever had.
Paulina laid down, tossing beneath the covers, her mind restless. Sleep eluded her. Her fingers curled around the edge of the pillow, and her body trembled not from fear, but from the weight of everything.
She didn’t cry often, not anymore. But tonight, as memories wrapped themselves around her like thorns, tears slid silently down her cheeks.
Why me? She thought. Why was I given this second chance? What if I fail again?
She remembered James’s betrayal, Alexis’s smirk as she wrapped herself around her husband. Evelyn’s cold words to her. And Paulina had believed them.
Why did I fall for him? Why didn’t I see it?
Her chest ached not from sadness, but from rage. So much rage. She wanted to scream into the night.
But instead, she whispered into the silence.
“I won’t be that girl again.”
The words felt like an oath. A promise to herself.
The air in the room felt heavy. Her breathing slowed. The exhaustion finally won. Her eyes fluttered closed, the pillow damp beneath her cheek.
Sleep found her slowly, dragging her under like a tide, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.
She knew she was given a chance and she wouldn't flop it.
...................................................................
The chills
The room was quiet.
Too quiet.
Paulina stirred.
A loud scream was heard in the sweet silence of the night.
- Writer
