Chapter 3
650 Words
Tristan never once waited for me. Every time I bent down to tie my shoelace and looked up again, he was already about thirty feet ahead of me. Yet for Seraphina, a single phone call over something trivial was enough to make him walk straight to her without hesitation.
The murmuring around me rang in my ears until everything blurred, and I curled in on myself by reflex. It was just like before.
In college, I was running a race on sports day when my makeup sweated off. My eyebrows and lashes faded back to white. At the awards ceremony, my classmates recoiled, their startled looks and ugly words pinning me in place on the podium.
It was Tristan who walked up, placed the trophy in my hands, and, without a word, simply stood beside me as he announced that I had won first place in the sprint. After that, whenever anyone gossiped about me, he stepped forward to defend me. That was when I fell in love with him.
So when, exactly, had everything changed?
I carried that question back to the office, and noticed at once that my coworkers were sizing me up and edging away from me. When I sat down at my desk, I realized that everything that had happened downstairs had been filmed. The video had spread through the entire building. They were calling me a white-haired freak, abnormal.
It was summer, but cold sweat broke out down my back. I felt like I'd been thrown back into the shadows of my childhood, when the neighbors used to call me a strange child, a sick child. Everyone who saw me either kept their distance or whispered behind my back.
Then Seraphina appeared in front of me, her face full of anguish.
"Marina, I never imagined you'd be the kind of person who'd come between us. And to think I wanted to be your friend."
She slapped Tristan's phone down in front of me. "All this time you've been harassing my husband, throwing yourself at him."
The screen showed messages between Tristan and me. At a glance, it really did look like I had been chasing him, sending suggestive things.
Tristan had once told me that a secret romance required leaving no trace, even on a phone. So he rarely replied. When he did, it was usually just "1" or "got it."
He'd told me, "'1' means I love you. 'Got it' means I hear you, baby."
Only I knew what those replies meant. To anyone else, the thread looked like a one-sided pursuit, me throwing myself at him.
I tried to explain. "I wasn't throwing myself at him. He's my boyfriend."
A short laugh burst out of Seraphina. "Stop dreaming. How could Tris ever fall for you?"
The coworkers who had been listening laughed too.
"Has the crush actually driven her mad? She's claiming he's her boyfriend."
"Manager Merrick's wife is gorgeous, and she's an heiress. There's no way he'd look twice at someone that abnormal."
"Exactly. I just saw the video. God, it was horrifying. The white-haired freak couldn't even hold a tray of desserts. There went our afternoon tea. Useless."
"Well, she only comes to work for Manager Merrick anyway. Her mind's always on the man."
I couldn't believe these were the coworkers I'd worked beside for years. For six years, every award-winning proposal and every department milestone had come out of countless overtime hours of mine. When they made mistakes, I cleaned up after them. When they didn't know how to do something, I sat down and taught them. And now, with a few cruel sentences, I had become the freak whose head was full of nothing but Tristan, the woman trying to break up a marriage.
The weight of being denied, slandered, and lied about nearly broke me. I looked at Tristan.
"Say something!"
'Say one thing for me. Just one.'
- Writer
