Page 27 of Wicked Surrender

“Why are you even calling?” I snapped.

“Because this doesn’t look good. For you. Me. The family. Poor Ethan. He must be so hurt by all this slander too.”

I laughed, just because I refused to cry.Fuck Ethan.

“You need to be careful. Ethan is the kind of man you could marry. A good, honest?—”

I hung up. She wasn’t calling to comfort me or offer me sympathy when I was targeted by bullies. And she wasnotgoing to make me feel sorry for Ethan.

Fuck him.

I shook my head, my mind made up.

His lack of support was worse than this stunt of Mai calling me. While I was supremely annoyed that these campus rumors were reaching her when she wasn’t here, he was a spineless idiot about this smear campaign that Jason wanted to put me through while I had to try to tutor him.

While Ethan was quick to whine to me about how cruel Jason was being towardhim, just by association with me, he offered nothing else. Only complaints.

He admitted that he was too afraid to stand up for me against Jason or his frat buddies. He was too shy and nervous, not “a fan of confrontations” to tell Jason to leave me alone.

I was supposed to be Ethan's girlfriend.

Kristin was just a friend, and she was theonlyperson who stood up for me. She replied to some of the nastier posts online, but when they turned the attacks onto her just for standing up for me, I told her not to bother. I didn’t want her to suffer.

At least she wanted to stand up for me.

She was a true friend. My only friend, it seemed.

Ethan had no backbone or willingness to give a shit, expecting me to tell Jason to knock it off. The fear of Jason turning his attention onto him was what kept Ethan quiet and scared.

And that, more than anything else, was the last straw. It was the final clue that I was way overdue to break up with him.

If I had to fake interest in a lackluster boyfriend, then it should at least be someone who’d care enough to defend me when I was slandered and teased mercilessly like this.

Tonight. After this class.I vowed to get it over with.

I texted him that I wanted to talk. I sent the message just before I got into my organic chem lab, glad that he quickly agreed to meet me at the outdoor seating area near the food court after his next class.

I wasn’t nervous after the lab was done. Walking back toward the center of the campus, I mentally rehearsed how I’d tell him that I wasn’t interested in being with him anymore. And that was what surprised me. I didn’t have to brainstorm for long. The words were already there in my head. It seemed like I’d been thinking of this for a while now, so it was almost like manifesting it and making it happen now.

“Hi, Laura,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.

He didn’t land on my lips, placing an awkward, too-wet kiss more on my cheek and the area under my nose.

For fuck’s sake.He wasn’t farsighted. He had twenty-twenty vision. It was this nervousness to show affection, or a lack of knowledge how to. Still after all this time we’d been dating, he was just so… bad at it.

I didn’t have much to compare him to. He was my first. But my God, even I could tell this was lousy.

As he stepped back, indicating for me to sit first at a bistro table, I nearly gagged at the onion on his breath.

Oh, nasty.It seemed like his kiss was stinky too.

“So.” I sat and waited for him to sit, too.

“So. What’s new?”

“What’s new is that I want to break up.”

He stared at me for a long moment as if he couldn’t understand. Then he laughed nervously. “Funny. That’s a good one.”

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