13
1252 Words
Jasmine
The photo at the top stopped me cold. Davin, his arm around a striking blonde woman, both of them laughing like the camera had caught them mid-joke. I barely let myself look before I scrolled past it.
Then I saw the headline, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Award-Winning Artist Davin Jackson Accused of Abuse and s****l Misconduct.
I blinked. Read it again, certain I’d gotten it wrong.
I hadn’t.
My thumb kept moving almost without me. Article after article unfolded beneath it—former models, former assistants, anonymous sources who wouldn’t give their names but had plenty to say anyway. The further I scrolled, the drier my mouth got.
One article had a video buried near the bottom. I stared at the play button for a long second before I pressed it.
The footage was dark and shaky, shot by someone who seemed to be hiding. A woman cried out somewhere off-screen. Something crashed.
The camera jerked hard to one side, and for half a second, a man’s shape filled the frame—tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in dark clothes—before the image blurred again, swallowed by shadow.
A voice cut through the recording. Low and angry. The audio was too distorted to be sure of anything, but the caption underneath swore it was him.
My grip on the phone tightened until my fingers ached.
The clip ended. Another loaded after it—shorter, a woman pressed back against a wall while someone shouted just out of frame. Blurry again.
And again, the article stated his name as though the video showed him. I kept scrolling, because stopping felt worse than not knowing.
Sponsors had pulled out. Galleries had cancelled his shows. In a matter of months, a career that must have taken years to build had come apart at the seams. And running through every single article was the same name.
Victoria Hale.
His fiancée.
The woman from the photo.
The one who’d leaked the footage.
The one who’d gone public first.
I clicked through piece after piece, hunting for the version that actually made sense—the one true account hiding under all the noise.
I never found it.
Some articles called him abusive outright. Others said he’d used his influence to manipulate the women around him, to keep them quiet. None of them agreed on the details.
All of them agreed on how it ended—whatever had happened, it had wrecked him.
I lowered the phone slowly, the screen still glowing in my lap.
Someone coughed two tables over—ordinary sounds, an ordinary afternoon. But when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the man who’d stood at the front of my classroom that morning. Still. Controlled. Unreadable.
And then the other one—the man in the old photograph, laughing, easy, lit up like he had nothing in the world to hide.
The two of them refused to sit together in my head. Every time I tried to line them up, they slid apart again.
I looked back down at the screen, at the headlines still glowing in front of me, and felt a question settle into my chest like something cold and heavy taking root.
Who exactly was Professor Davin Jackson?
And if even half of it was true—what had I just walked into?
*
Davin POV
From the moment she walked into the studio, I knew something was wrong.
Not because Jasmine had ever been particularly cheerful around me. She hadn’t.
But she had gotten comfortable.
Comfortable enough to argue. Comfortable enough to roll her eyes when I annoyed her. Comfortable enough to meet my gaze without immediately looking away.
Tonight, none of that comfort was anywhere in the room.
Every time our eyes met, she looked away instantly. Every time I adjusted her pose, she would go stiff under my hands, like she was bracing for something.
And no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t capture her expression.
My charcoal stopped halfway through a line.
I looked up.
She looked down.
Something in my chest tightened.
I set the charcoal on the easel ledge.
“Okay. What’s the problem?”
Her head snapped up. “What?”
“You’ve been acting strange since you got here.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
I gestured toward the easel. “It’s making it impossible to paint you.”
A sigh escaped her. For a second, she seemed to debate whether to say it at all.
Then her shoulders dropped.
“I looked you up.”
Those four words landed like a punch to my gut.
Everything in me went very still—the studio, the half-finished sketch, the girl standing in front of me, all of it sliding out of focus as something older rushed in to take its place.
Headlines.
The camera flashes.
Lawyers in grey suits.
Questions I’d stopped trying to answer a long time ago.
Victoria.
I stared at Jasmine and said nothing.
She shifted her weight, uneasy under the silence.
“It was a lot,” she said quietly. “I just wanted to—”
“Get out.”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“Get your things and leave.”
The confusion on her face should have softened something in me.
Instead, it did the opposite—twisted whatever I was feeling and made it worse.
“Davin—”
“This session is over.”
She blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“You heard me.” I stepped back from the easel like the distance might help. “The arrangement is over.”
For a moment, she just looked at me, like she was waiting for the sentence to make sense.
Then she took a step closer instead of away.
“I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
“I don’t care.”
My voice came out colder than I intended.
“I heard rumors and wanted to know the truth,” she said. “That’s all.”
A sharp laugh escaped me.
“The truth?” I spat. “What on earth made you think that I owe you an explanation?”
“You read the articles, right?” I gritted out. “Then you already know what everyone else thinks.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Get dressed, Jasmine.”
Hurt flashed across her eyes, but she pushed it away quickly.
“Davin, if you would just let me explain—”
“And don’t worry about your scholarship.”
That stopped her.
I looked away, my jaw tightening.
“You’ll keep it,” I said. “I know that’s what you’re worried about.”
The silence that followed was palpable.
When I finally glanced back, her jaw had gone tight, her whole expression hardening into something that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
“You know what? Fine.”
She turned for her things. I heard the rustle of fabric behind me as she dressed.
“If you want me gone, I’m gone.”
I kept my eyes on the wall in front of me, on nothing.
“Not like I wanted to do this anyway,” she said.
The lie was obvious. The worst part was that I wanted to turn around. Wanted to hear what she had been trying to say.
Instead, I clenched my jaw.
“Shut the door on your way out.”
- Writer
