He Hates Me In Real Life

chapter 7

Dorian’s knees buckled.

He didn’t just stumble. His legs gave out entirely. He hit the hardwood floor with a heavy, bone-jarring thud, hands planting themselves against the baseboards, breaths tearing from his lungs in ragged, animalistic gasps.

“No,” he whimpered, the sound scraping from the bottom of his chest. “No, no, no. God, please no.”

I looked down at him from the counter.

“Wolf,” I said softly, my voice cool and mocking. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say, Dorian?”

The silence that followed was suffocating.

He remained on his knees, hands flat on the floor, staring up at me as if the sky had split open and crushed him under the weight of his own sins. His chest heaved in violent, uneven spasms. His hoodie rode up, revealing the golden links of the collar still locked tightly around his throat.

“Quinn.”

It wasn’t a word. It was a sob—broken and shredded. He scrambled forward on his knees, not bothering to stand. His palms slapped against the floor until he reached my feet. He reached out, long elegant fingers trembling violently as they hovered an inch above the hem of my sweatpants, terrified that touching me would make me vanish into smoke.

“It’s you,” he wept. Tears finally spilled over his thick lashes, carving pale tracks down his face. “It was you the whole time. Two years—two years and you were right here.”

“I was,” I said, looking down at him without moving.

“I left you.” He choked on the words and fell forward until his forehead pressed directly against the tops of my canvas slippers. The heat of his skin burned through the thin fabric. “You were bleeding. You were on the floor calling for help and I walked past you. Jesus Christ, I walked past my girl.”

His hands gripped my ankles, desperate and clawing, like a drowning man clutching driftwood in a hurricane.

“Hit me,” he begged, voice muffled against my shoes. “Quinn, please. Hit me. Take the clicker and hit me with it. Break my jaw. Just don’t look at me like that. Please, God. Don’t look at me like I’m a stranger.”

“Why would I hit you?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mr. Blake. You were just protecting your boundaries from a desperate, obsessive stalker who couldn’t take a hint.”

Dorian flinched as if I had thrown boiling water on his back. A low, keening wail tore from his throat—a sound so raw, so utterly stripped of human pride, that it barely sounded human at all.

“I didn’t know,” he cried, lifting his face. His eyes were red and wide with sheer madness. “I thought you were in another city. I thought Aiden was trying to set me up. I’ve never looked at another woman, Quinn. Never. I wore this collar every single day. I slept with your letters under my pillow. When you blocked me I felt like my heart was being ripped out through my ribs.”

He reached up with a frantic, trembling hand and seized the chain around his neck, pulling at it hard enough to bruise his own skin.

“Look at it. It’s yours. It’s your name, Quinn. I was so blind. I thought you were just a random person bearing the same name as my girlfriend. God, I’m such an i***t. Everything I have is yours. I’ll drop out of school. I’ll transfer. I’ll scrub your floors on my hands and knees every day for the rest of my life. Just tell me what to do to make you look at me again. Tell me. Tell me.”

I looked at the gold collar—the same one I had given him. I remembered the afternoon I mailed it. How I had laughed on the post-office steps, imagining the faceless boy across the country blushing as he opened the box. I remembered the hundreds of nights we spent whispering through our headphones until three in the morning. How he had confessed his deepest insecurities. How he had promised that if we ever met he would spend the rest of his life making sure I never had to shed a single tear.

Then I touched the stiff gauze on my forehead.

“Don’t be dramatic,” I said. “Take it off.”

Dorian froze. His tears hung suspended on his jaw.

“What?”

“The collar,” I said, my voice flat as slate. “Take it off, Dorian. You don’t get to wear my name on you like you own me.”

His face drained of every last atom of colour. His chest hitched as if he couldn’t pull oxygen into his lungs.

“No,” he whispered. His fingers tightened around the steel links, clutching them against his throat as if they were his only lifeline. “Please don’t take it back. Don’t take it away from me, Quinn. It’s the only thing I have left of you. Please.”

“Take it off.”

Every syllable felt like an iron weight.

Slowly, with fingers that shook so badly he dropped the clasp twice, he unbuckled the steel latch. The heavy chain parted with a dull metallic chime. He held it out in his open palms, offering it to me like a severed limb, head bowed, shoulders shaking with silent, racking sobs.

I reached out, took the cold metal from his hands, and walked over to the kitchen trash can. I stepped on the pedal. The lid swung open. I dropped the collar inside. It hit the plastic with a hollow, sickening thud.

Behind me Dorian let out a sound that didn’t sound human at all. He fell, curling into a ball against the kitchen cabinet, hands clapped over his ears as if trying to shut out the sound of his own life ending.

“Hey.”

Aiden’s voice boomed cheerfully into the foyer, carrying the scent of fresh bagels.

“Quinn, I got those cinnamon rolls you like— What the f**k is happening in here?”

He dropped the paper bag on the entryway bench. His jaw went slack as he took in the scene.

Dorian Blake—the undisputed academic god of the biochemistry department, the man who had turned down six different corporate sponsorships and regularly treated the dean with polite indifference—was curled up on the linoleum floor in a fetal position, face buried in his knees, entire frame shuddering with silent tears. Beside him stood his twenty-one-year-old sister, calmly rinsing a ceramic mug under the tap.

“Dorian?” Aiden took three cautious steps into the kitchen, looking back and forth between us as if expecting to find a dead body. “Dramatic much, bro. Did you have an aneurysm? Are you having a panic attack? What’s going on?”

Dorian didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He just curled tighter, fingers digging into his scalp through his dark hair.

“He’s fine,” I said, almost bored, as I turned off the faucet and dried my hands on a paper towel. “He just dropped something.”

“Dropped what?” Aiden looked at the spotless floor, then glanced at the open trash can. His eyes landed on the heavy steel links of the collar with my initials sitting on top of an empty coffee filter. He blinked and leaned closer.

“Wait… isn’t that the weird necklace you’ve been wearing under your shirt for six months? And it has Quinn’s name on it, but you said it was for your girlfriend.” Aiden’s brows furrowed into a knot of utter bewilderment. “Why is it in the trash can? Did you throw it out because your ex dumped you?”

Dorian’s shoulders seized. A strangled, muffled groan escaped his chest.

“Aiden,” I said, picking up my iPad from the counter. “My head is throbbing again. Can you drive me back to my dorm? I’m tired of staying here.”

“Yeah… yeah, of course,” Aiden muttered, clearly spooked by the aura radiating from his roommate. He reached out and tentatively tapped Dorian’s shoulder with the toe of his sneaker. “Hey, man. I’m gonna take Quinn home. There are bagels on the counter. Don’t—don’t do anything weird, okay?”

Dorian didn’t answer.

As Aiden went to grab his keys, I walked toward the front door. When I passed the trash can, Dorian’s hands suddenly shot out from the floor. His long fingers caught the hem of my coat, grip so desperate and crushing that the seams groaned under the tension. His face remained pressed against his knees.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, so quietly that Aiden didn’t even hear it over the jingling of his car keys. “Please, Quinn. Don’t leave me here.”

I didn’t stop. I reached down, peeled his fingers off my coat one by one, feeling the frantic heat of his skin against my cold fingertips, and let them fall back to the floor.

“Goodbye, Dorian.”

The heavy oak door clicked shut behind us.

For three days the campus was quiet. Too quiet.

I spent seventy-two hours holed up in my dorm room, sleeping off the concussion, eating takeout delivered by my sorority sisters while Aiden and Iris constantly breathed down my neck. I ignored the campus group chats. My head stopped throbbing. The cut on my temple healed into a faint pink line that was easily hidden by my bangs.

On Thursday afternoon Iris burst through the door, eyes round as saucers, and dropped her heavy leather tote bag onto her desk.

“You’re being loud,” I groaned, glaring at her.

“Shut up,” she shot back, voice dropping into an urgent, conspiratorial whisper. “Something is seriously wrong with Dorian Blake.”

My fingers paused on my laptop keyboard at the sound of that familiar name.

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t been to class in three days,” Iris said, pulling up her phone. “Professor Miller had to halt the advanced phytochemical screening seminar because Dorian wasn’t there to present his section on the antioxidant potential of ethanol extracts. Aiden said he won’t leave their room. He hasn’t eaten. Hasn’t slept. He just sits on the floor staring at a dead phone.”

My stomach gave a tiny, involuntary twist, but I forced my face to remain flat.

“He’s an adult. He can handle his own drama.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Iris leaned closer, eyes gleaming with morbid excitement. She clearly didn’t know about me and Dorian—because I hadn’t told her. I wondered, briefly, what her reaction would be if I ever did.

“Yesterday someone saw him walking across the quad at three in the morning in the freezing rain. No coat. Just a t-shirt and sweatpants. He was walking around the theater ruins where the grease fire happened, looking down like he was searching for something in the mud.”

The theater. The alleyway where my phone had fallen.

“People are saying he finally had a mental break from studying too much,” Iris continued, shaking her head. “It’s wild. The guy used to act like he was made of ice and now he looks like a Victorian ghost who died of consumption.”

Before I could answer, my new phone—the replacement Aiden had bought me two days ago—buzzed against the desk. An incoming call from an unknown number.

I hesitated.

I should have turned the phone face-down and continued what I was doing. Instead I swiped the screen.

“…Hello?”

A voice I knew better than my own breathed my name like a prayer and a curse at the same time.

“Quinn.”