Broken First (Never Again)

Episode Six

It been three days since Chris meet Katherine at the cafeteria, and yet the memory of her still sat in the back of his mind like a splinter he could not quite pull out. This was not because she had done anything spectacular, not because she had smiled at him in some way that rearranged his world, but because she had not fallen. This was not his regular way of getting girls, no girl has ever walkout on him, even on his bad day, let alone on a day he dressed so smart just so he could get her real attention, but yet he got was just a handshake not even a proper introduction.

For Chris, this was new.

Although he had gotten what he wanted out of the cafeteria encounter, or so he told himself. A first look. A brief exchange. A confirmation that she existed in the same world he moved through. That was a start. That was enough. He was not the kind of guy who rushed. He was the kind of guy who set a trap and waited for the animal to walk into it. Patience was his weapon, charm was his bait, and his track record in college spoke for itself. No girl had ever successfully held him off for long. Not really. He knew this wasn’t going to be an easy one and he was down for whatever the outcome maybe. The bet wasn’t about the money, it was about his ability to tell the ladies that he was their daddy and he could get them at anytime. You know that aura you have as a guy when you know that the whole girls on campus are falling for you. That was it, Chris didn’t care if the girl was a year one , year two or final year as long as you don’t cross his part, because when you do and he see you and want you he will get you. So this was far from just the bet it was about control, it was about been in charge and been ahead of every other guys on campus who want to be soft and cute guy like.

So for Chris this wasn't his regular style. He had to admit that much, even if only to himself in the quiet of his room. His regular style was effortless. He would show up somewhere looking like himself, catch a girl staring, smile at the right moment, and by the end of the week the whole thing would already be decided. Katherine had disrupted that rhythm. She had introduced friction into a process he had always thought was frictionless, and instead of frustrating him, it fascinated him. It made him understand something he had never really stopped to consider: all girls in college were not the same.

Katherine was that one girl he wanted to explore.

He wasn’t going as a lover boy or as a serious guy but as a player who just want to win a bet and prove to his guys that he was still the bad boy.

From the very beginning he made it very clear that he was no longer a lover boy. So overtime he just needed to be clear about that, if only in his own head. His mind was not occupied with love or soft feelings or whatever language people used when they talked about those things. His mind was on the bet. On winning. On being able to look Tucker in the eye and say without blinking, without hesitation, I told you so. On being able to sit with his boys and let that quiet confidence settles over the table like a crown being placed on his head. Nobody beat Chris at his own game. Nobody. That was the truth and it was not arrogance; it was history. In the whole college no one has confidently beat Chris when it comes to been a the girls guy, this was one of the reason he was giving a nickname by a group of girls “The girls daddy” it was some final year students that gave him that name, according to Kita who was a final year, there was this girl in their class her name was Alex who was proving hard to get and all the guys in finals tried all they could they couldn’t get her, she was a virgin all thought-out until she meet Chris who was her junior in class and Chris dis-virgin her and since then even the senior students always see Chris and the over all best guy when it come to girls in Riverside College.

There were a lot of history, for Chris.

There was even another girl called Eva, in Riverside college Chris had a lot of memories with girls but Eva was the one that he had the best with and it was short-lived.

He didn't think about her often. He had trained himself not to. But whenever a girl gave him that particular kind of resistance, whenever something felt slightly harder than usual, Eva’s name surfaced somewhere deep in his chest like a name carved into stone at the bottom of a lake. You couldn't always see it, but it was always there.

Eva was a first-year student; just like Katherine. They had met during one of those chaotic early-semester weeks when campus felt like a carnival and everyone was still figuring out where they belonged. He had not been looking for anything with her. That was what made it different from everything that came before and everything that came after. He had not chosen her the way he chose girls now, strategically, deliberately, with an endgame already mapped out in his head. He had simply seen her, and something about the way she laughed, the way she moved through a room like she owned it without knowing she owned it, had pulled him in before he could think to stop it.

Their relationship had been intense in the way only young love could be. The kind of intense that made everything else feel irrelevant. Classes felt like interruptions. Sleep felt like a waste of time. His friends joked that he had gone soft, that Eva had taken something out of him and replaced it with something unrecognizable, and Chris would just smile because he didn't care. He was happy. He, Chris, the guy who ran through girls like pages in a magazine, was genuinely, embarrassingly happy.

Then one morning, the phone rang.

Eva's voice on the other end was carefully steady, the way someone speaks when they are trying very hard not to cry and mostly failing. It was her parents, they were moving. They were relocating out of town, transferring her to another school. The news had reached them somehow, the way news always reached parents about things they were not supposed to know. They had found out about the rough night parties, the mornings she spent at his place instead of in class, the slow and steady way her grades had begun to decline and this was really true because Chris and Eva where so much into each other and they will always party , get drunks and miss classes. These was not good for a first year student like Eva. So her father who was an engineer and her mother an accountant had no choice than to relocate her and move her far away from Chris. They had not sacrificed everything they had sacrificed to watch their daughter's future dissolve into late nights and a college boyfriend, no matter how charming that boyfriend was.

They cut everything off. No forwarding address. No phone number to call. No way in. Her absence arrived suddenly and completely, like a door slammed shut and deadbolted from the other side, and Chris was left standing in front of it with his fist raised and nothing to knock against.

These really hurt him in ways he was not prepared for. Not because he had done anything wrong, not technically, but because the decision to end what they had was made without him, above him, as if he were a variable in someone else's equation and not the main character of his own story. Her parents had taken her away and in doing so had taken something from him too, something he had not even known he was giving away. And that was the part that stayed with him. Not the loss of Eva exactly, but the feeling of powerlessness that came with it. You know that moment when you are powerless in your own fight, that was the situation Chris was.

So he made a promise to himself. Never again. Never again would he give anyone that kind of access. Never again would he let himself become the kind of man who waited by a phone that would not ring.

After Eva, there had been Mira.

Mira was a different kind of story entirely, and Chris did not think about her with sadness the way he thought about Eva. He thought about her the way you think about a lesson you had to learn the hard way, except in Mira's case, he was not the one who learned it.

She had a reputation on campus. Not a bad one exactly, but a loud one. She was strikingly beautiful in the kind of way that made conversations stop, and she knew it, and she moved through Riverside College with the confidence of someone who had decided early on that nobody was going to use her and get away with it. Guys like Jofa, Arthur, Jay, and Lucas had all tried in their different ways, and she had turned every single one of them down without ceremony, without apology. The story spread across campus the way stories always spread when they involve a beautiful girl and a string of embarrassed men. Mira had become a symbol of something. Untouchable. Unachievable.