Forbidden Mate: My Brother's Obsession

Chapter Five: The Rumor

By the time Lily made it to her locker after fourth period, she already knew something was wrong. Conversations stopped when she passed. Girls she'd never spoken to whispered behind their hands, eyes tracking her down the hallway like she was something worth gossiping about. A boy she didn't recognize actually laughed out loud as she walked by, loud enough that it was clearly meant for her to hear.

She found Dana waiting by her locker, arms crossed, expression tight with worry.

"What's going on?" Lily asked, dread pooling in her stomach even before Dana answered.

"You haven't seen it yet." It wasn't a question. Dana held up her phone, screen angled toward Lily, and there it was, a photo, grainy but unmistakable, of Lily and Ethan standing close together in the chemistry lab, her head tilted up toward him, his hand near her face. It wasn't the whole truth. It wasn't even close to the whole truth. But out of context, stripped of everything that had actually been happening in that moment, it looked exactly like what Vivian wanted it to look like.

Beneath the photo, a caption in Vivian's unmistakable dramatic font: Anyone else think Kai's new "stepsister" is a little too close for family? Just asking questions.

The post had over two hundred comments already.

"This isn't real," Lily said, though her voice came out weaker than she wanted. "I mean it's real, the photo's real, but it's not what it looks like."

"I believe you," Dana said quickly. "But I don't think that's going to matter much by the end of the day."

It didn't. By lunch, Lily had been stared at more times than she could count, had overheard her own name attached to words like weird and desperate and, worse, sick, tossed around by students who had never spoken a single word to her before today. She sat with Dana at their usual table, appetite gone, picking at food she had no intention of eating, while across the cafeteria, Ethan sat surrounded by his usual crowd, jaw tight, saying nothing, doing nothing to stop the whispers swirling around them both.

That was somehow the part that hurt the most. Not the rumor itself, but the fact that he just sat there and let it happen.

She caught him alone by his locker after school, waiting until the hallway had mostly cleared before approaching him, arms crossed tight over her chest like armor.

"You could have said something," she said, without preamble. "Denied it. Told people it wasn't what it looked like."

Ethan didn't look at her right away. When he finally did, his expression was carefully, deliberately blank. "Would it have mattered? People believe what they want to believe."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

"Ethan." Her voice cracked slightly, frustration and hurt tangled together. "This is my reputation. I just started here. I don't have anything else — no history, no friends besides Dana, nothing to fall back on if people decide I'm the school freak before I've even had a chance to prove I'm not."

Something flickered across his face guilt, maybe, or something close to it but it was gone before she could be sure. "I'm sorry," he said, and it sounded almost genuine. "But the less I say, the faster this dies down. If I make a big deal out of denying it, it just gives people more to talk about."

"Or," Lily said, voice rising, "you could just tell the truth. That nothing happened. That we're step siblings, and that's it, and Vivian's just a jealous..."

"Don't," Ethan said sharply, cutting her off. "Don't say her name like that's all this is about."

Lily blinked, thrown by the intensity in his voice. "What else would it be about?"

He didn't answer. He just looked at her for a long moment, something dark and conflicted moving behind his eyes, before he shouldered his bag and walked away without another word, leaving her standing alone in the emptying hallway with more questions than she'd started with.