My Lovely Headmaster

Chapter 2

Three weeks pass in a haze of avoided phone calls and dodged encounters. I haunt the university corridors like a ghost with a sick obsession, searching for that cologne—that particular blend of cedar and smoke that clings to my memory like morning fog.

God, I've become absolutely pathetic. I breathe deeply near every male student in the library, in the lecture halls, in the cafeteria. I probably look insane, leaning in close to random guys, inhaling like some kind of perfume predator.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Jessica asks after watching me practically sniff Tom from our Romantic Poetry seminar. "You're acting like a bloodhound having a mental breakdown."

"Nothing," I lie, but my mind keeps circling back to that night, to those hands, to that scent that meant safety when my world was ending. I can't even remember his face—how fucked up is that? I gave my virginity to a shadow wearing expensive cologne. "I just thought I recognized someone."

"You've been 'recognizing' someone for three weeks, Jas. It's getting weird. Like, weirder than your usual weird."

She's right. I know she's right. But every time I smell something even remotely woody or smoky, my body remembers. Not his face, never his face, but the weight of him, the way he held me like I might shatter, the way he made me forget, even if just for a few hours, that Nathan had ripped my heart out and fed it to some blonde stranger.

Nathan's messages accumulate on my phone like evidence of a crime: seventeen texts, nine missed calls, two voicemails I'll never listen to. Each notification is a small wound, a reminder that he doesn't even know why I'm destroying us.

"Jasmine, can we talk?"

"I don't understand what I did"

"Please, just give me five minutes"

"I love you"

I delete them unread, or try to, but my eyes catch fragments—"love," "please," "sorry"—before they disappear into digital oblivion. Jessica thinks I'm being dramatic. "Just fucking talk to him," she says, painting her nails blood red on her bed. "This whole mysterious silence thing is so seventh grade."

But how can I explain? How can I tell him I saw him with her, that I fucked a stranger in revenge, that I don't even know if we used protection? The words rot in my throat every time I try.

I'm thinking about this—about cologne and mistakes and the way betrayal tastes like vodka—when Nathan corners me outside the literature building where the ivy grows thick enough to muffle sound. October has turned the leaves the color of old bruises, and he looks like he hasn't slept in days. His face carries the particular exhaustion of the persistently ignored.

"Jasmine, please." His voice cracks on my name like he's been practicing this speech. "Whatever I did—"

I try to turn away, but he's faster, moving with that gentle determination that made me fall for him in the first place. His hand catches my wrist, not hard, just enough to stop me from running again.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he looks so genuinely confused it makes me want to scream. "For whatever it is. Please, just tell me. These three weeks have been hell. I don't understand what happened. One minute we were fine, and then you just vanished at the party and now you won't even look at me."

The words tumble out like broken glass, cutting my tongue as they leave: "The party. The blonde girl. Your bedroom."

I watch his face cycle through confusion, then recognition, then something that looks devastatingly like relief. "Oh my God, that's what this is about? Jasmine, no—fuck, no. That's not what happened."

"I saw you," I whisper, hating how my voice shakes. "She was on top of you. Your shirt was off."

"I was drunk, coming from the bathroom. She pulled me in there—I don't even know her name. She tried to—but nothing happened. I pushed her off, told her I had a girlfriend, left immediately." He runs his hands through his hair, that gesture I know so well it hurts. "I spent the rest of the night looking for you. Ask anyone. Ask Tyler. I was going crazy trying to find you."

His hands come up to frame my face with devastating familiarity, thumbs brushing away tears I didn't know were falling. "I love you. Only you. How could you think I'd throw us away for some random girl?"

The conviction in his voice cracks something inside me. I think about that stranger's hands, about the cologne, about what I did, and the guilt threatens to swallow me whole. But Nathan's eyes are so green, so earnest, and I need this to be true. I need to not have destroyed everything for nothing.

"You pushed her off?" My voice sounds so small, so desperate for this narrative where I'm not the only one who fucked up.

"Immediately. I was looking for you. I'm always looking for you."

I let myself collapse into him, let myself believe because the alternative—that I gave myself to a stranger in revenge for something that didn't even happen—is unbearable. He holds me while I sob into his shirt that smells like his pretentious sandalwood detergent, not like cedar, not like smoke.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I'm so sorry."

"Shh, it's okay. We're okay. It was just a misunderstanding."

A misunderstanding. The word tastes like ash.

That evening, in his apartment that smells of coffee and old books, we make love with the desperate intensity of the recently reconciled. But it's different—I'm different. Nathan whispers apologies against my skin for something he didn't even do, while I bite my tongue to keep from apologizing for something he doesn't even know about.

His hands are familiar where that stranger's were exploratory. His kisses taste like Earl Grey where that stranger's tasted like whiskey. Nathan is gentle, treating me like something precious, something breakable. The stranger had been urgent, desperate, matching my pain with his own need. I hate myself for comparing them. I hate myself for remembering.

"I love you," Nathan breathes against my neck, and I say it back, meaning it, hating that it's not enough to erase what I've done.

Afterwards, wrapped in his sheets that smell like us, like before, like pretending, Nathan traces patterns on my bare shoulder—circles and spirals, tiny infinities that feel like promises I've already broken.

"We're okay now, aren't we?" he asks, his voice heavy with approaching sleep.

I nod against his chest, feeling the lie settle into my bones like sediment, like something that will fossilize there, becoming part of me forever. "Yeah," I whisper to his heartbeat. "We're okay."

But I'm still searching for that cologne in my dreams, still tasting whiskey and regret, still carrying a secret that grows heavier every time Nathan looks at me like I'm something pure, something worthy of his love. The guilt is a living thing, eating me from the inside out, and I know—I know—this reconciliation is just another beautiful thing I'm going to ruin.

Outside, October wind rattles the windows like the universe laughing at my attempts to rebuild something from ashes that are still warm, still burning, still capable of destroying everything they touch.