Fighting For Her Love

Ace caught my eye the moment I walked into the lecture hall, he was talking to one of his many friends as the other students flooded into the room around him. He ran his hand through his dark hair as he told his friends about his conquest from the night before. I plastered a smile on my face as I walked over and took my usual seat beside him. At first, it had been hard for me to pretend that it didn’t bother me when he spoke about his conquests. Even though I knew he was way out of my league, it wasn’t nice to hear that the man that I wanted so badly was happily sleeping with everyone on campus except for me. I was more used to it now but I would be lying if I said that it didn’t still sting a bit every time I heard him speaking in this way. “Hey, Ace. I think the girl who sits next to you might have a bit of a crush on you.” Ace’s best friend Palmer said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. I may have forgotten to take my headphones out of my ears when I came into the classroom but it still seemed a little rude to discuss the person sitting beside you so obviously. Maybe being popular made you lose all respect for other human beings, I wouldn’t know for sure though, I have never been anything even close to resembling popular. “Who are you talking about?” A tingle passed down my spine as I thought about Ace looking in my direction. Since when did I become so nervous around men, anyone would think that I had never had a boyfriend before. “The girl who literally just sat down next to you. She always smiles at you, I think that she might like you.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ace glance in my direction as though he had never noticed me sitting beside him before. As though I hadn’t been sitting in the same seat for the last four and a half months. He looked me up and down a couple of times before turning back towards his friends. “I seriously hope not.” He groaned. “I know she is a little plain but that seems a little harsh,” Palmer replied. “She’s not plain man, she’s fat. We should stop trying to sugarcoat these things, that is why girls like her think it is fine to show their faces in public. I don’t want someone like her even thinking about being with me, it makes me feel sick.” Ace’s words were like a knife being stabbed through my heart. I had never expected him to want me, it was the main reason I had tried to hide the way I felt about him. This was much worse than anything I could have ever imagined though. He didn’t just reject me, he also totally ripped me apart. He was talking about me as though I was some morbidly obese woman who had trouble even walking around, and yet I was only around 5-10 lbs overweight. I had always thought that I hid my extra padding well because I was so tall. Nobody had ever called me fat or even overweight before, so hearing Ace use that word against me was a huge shock. Maybe his perception had been distorted by all of the super slim women that he had been screwing but whatever his reasons, I was so done with caring about what he thought. I had spent months daydreaming about us being together only to work out that he was a massive asshole who didn’t deserve even a moment of my time. If our professor hadn’t walked into the room at that moment then I would have probably gotten up and found another place to sit because I couldn’t even bear to look at him any more. I thought that my last ex was a d**k but he had nothing on Ace, at least he had taken the time to get to know me before deciding that I wasn’t worth his time. My anger at Ace’s attitude was so great that I was hardly able to take in any of the lecture. I wrote down all of the words on the board even though they may as well have been in another language for the amount of sense that they made to me. The only thing I could think about was Ace’s words going around and around on repeat underlined by the desperate need to be as far away from his as humanly possible. The moment the lesson was over I packed up my bag and scurried out of the room without even waiting to see if there were any extra reading assignments. It wasn’t like me to rush around like this but after the events of this morning, I couldn’t stand the thought of being around Ace for even a moment longer. Once I was out of the room I glanced behind me to make sure there was nobody following me before letting my anger and frustration rush out of me in the form of angry tears. It took me most of the walk to the cafeteria to regain control over my emotions and stem the flow of tears. It wasn’t as though I needed to put on a brave face for my friends. They knew everything about me and were always very supportive of me, I just didn’t want to talk about what had happened. The incident was already embarrassing enough without me having to relive it again so quickly. “Mel, you don’t seem like yourself today, is there something wrong?” Dawn asked as I joined my friends at our usual table. We usually liked to take the table nearest the windows. It gave a great view over the courtyard while also being one of the quieter places to sit in the crowded cafeteria. “I’m fine, I just don’t think I have had quite enough coffee to deal with psychology. That lecture was intense.” “I am sure that everything to do with psychology and nothing to do with a certain guy who just so happens to be there too.” Fallon winked at me, making me wish that I hadn’t told any of them about my crush on Ace. “I don’t know what you are talking about, there is nothing that could possibly distract me from my quest for knowledge,” I replied, causing all of my friends to burst out laughing. I should have known that they would see straight through that excuse but, I didn’t have anything better right now. “You forget that we know everything about you. Most weeks you can’t even be bothered to do your compulsory reading, do you really expect us to believe that you ignored him to pay attention to some professor for a whole hour?” As Dawn spoke she pointed across the courtyard to where Ace and his friends were walking across the grass to their next lesson. It was almost as though he felt my gaze upon him because the moment I looked in his direction he turned his head around to look at me. Our eyes met for a brief moment before his lips curled in disgust and he looked away again. As though today wasn’t already bad enough, now I was starting to look like some kind of deranged stalker. Sadie must have noticed the interaction between Ace and me because she was giving me a suspicious look while the others were all making rude comments about what they thought I had been doing for the last hour. She waited for everyone around the table to calm down again before leaning a little closer to me and asking. “Did something happen between the two of you?” “I think I should get some coffee before I have to go to my next class.” “Oh no, you aren’t getting away from us that easily. You need to tell us what happened.” A quick glance around the table told me that all of my friends were watching me, trying to work out what it was that I wasn’t telling them. I wasn’t mentally ready to go through it again but I knew that they wouldn’t give up until I told them to truth. “He told his friends that I was fat and disgusting.” I didn’t dare to look at any of their faces as I spoke, but I could hear all of them inhale sharply. “That f*****g asshole,” Sadie shouted. “Maybe we need to get some revenge on him for being such a terrible human being. Maybe we can put some itching powder in his pants and make him think that he has an STI.” Dawn suggested. “That’s stupid, how are you going to get hold of his pants?” “That’s the easy part, he is always taking them off,” Dawn said. She spoke as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, and maybe in some ways it was. He was more than willing to drop his pants for almost any woman who crossed his path as long as that woman wasn’t me. Even though I thought it would be funny to see him walking around all day itching himself, it wasn’t particularly fair. He didn’t find me attractive and he was just telling his friends the truth, it wasn’t his fault that I was listening in to his conversation and got hurt. It would be better if I just cut him out of my life forever and never thought about him again. Around me, my friends were still discussing elaborate plans for how I could get revenge, and things were getting a little out of hand. One of them had even mentioned hacking into his social media to post derogatory things about him. I needed to put an end to this madness before someone ended up getting hurt. “I think it would be better if I just forgot all about him. What kind of a stupid name is Ace anyway.” “That is a great idea, and I know the perfect way to help you. There is a massive party going on tonight in one of the dormitories.” Normally I would have rejected Sadie’s suggestion without even a second thought. I much preferred staying in my room with a large bag of potato chips and a good book or TV show, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to enjoy either of those things tonight. If I was left to my own devices then I would just spend the whole evening overthinking what Ace had said about me, while feeling sorry for myself. Maybe a party was exactly what I needed tonight, even if it was for no other reason than the noise from the party would overpower the noise in my head. “Fine, I will come to this party.”