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“Stop,” Violet said. She had her hands through her hair, tugging loose the curls from the wedding. “You’ve apologized three times - within minutes of finding out.”
“It’s … it’s the right thing to do.”
“I’ve waited years for you to acknowledge what you did. Years. Every time I saw you, I wondered if it would the time you finally mentioned the comments.”
“But I didn’t know, I swear. When you cornered me in the cafeteria that day, I thought you were mad about me saying your thesis was loose. That’s it.”
“Then I looked like a fucking idiot, Charlie!” She was yelling, and Charlie didn’t know if they were about to fight, or if she was about to start crying. “I was waiting for the other shoe to drop for six years, and it never did! Because it wasn’t you! Fuck! Why didn’t you ask me?”
“I … I wanted to, but Lauren said you weren’t worth my time. She said it was all on you.”
Violet looked livid, but she only nodded and turned away from him.
“Violet, I’m sorry. I -“
“Did you ever look at the file?”
Charlie sighed. She was going to hate his answer. “Lauren told me to delete it.”
“You know, it’s starting to make sense why she’s a lawyer. She walked all over both of us.” Violet shook her head and crossed her arms so tightly around herself it looked painful
“Did you ever tell Liv what I said? Maybe she could have…”
“I never told Liv I was applying for grad school. I was too ashamed about how bad my paper was.”
“God damn it,” Charlie muttered.
“I took those comments personally. I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t good enough for something everyone else was already doing.”
“That was - we both…“
“We both let Lauren play us like a fiddle,” Violet finished for him. “For six fucking years.”
Charlie didn’t have anything to say to that. He still didn’t know where this would end up. Would they yell at each other? Were they finally on the road to recovery? It could go either way.
But Charlie knew he was pissed. At Lauren. At himself. That dull gaze he had seen every time she spoke with him was her thinking of this exact paper, thinking of words he hadn’t even said. For years, all because of Lauren, she had thought he had called her a waste of time, a disappointment.
It made him angrier than he had been in a long time.
But as he looked at Violet, who had wet eyes and a murderous expression on her face, he realized he wasn’t angry at her. Not at all.
Maybe she didn’t feel the same way. Hell, she probably didn’t, but her character suddenly made so much more sense now. She had never been immature. She had been torn down by comments made under his name. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle criticism - she couldn’t handle being torn apart.
No one could.
He saw her for who she was - someone who trusted him, and then someone who had been hurt. She kept her misery secret and her pain even closer. She always had.
And he? Well, he had been letting Lauren control his life. What once had been a smart, pretty girl in this class was now a woman who had manipulated him into fighting with a former friend. She had told him to be a bad version of himself, and he had listened instead of trusting his gut that told him it was wrong - that it didn’t make sense.
The haze in his mind had never been Violet. It was Lauren. It had been all along. She had been putting poison into his head for years, all to keep Violet out of the picture, all in desperation to keep them apart.
And it worked.
As he stared at his former friend turned enemy, he promised himself no more. It ended here. That promise turned into something harder than diamond within him, and he knew he was no longer Violet Moore’s enemy.
Chapter Ten
Violet
