Chapter 152
Chapter 152
Linnet's POV
The steam from Mom's soup bowl rose between us, curling in the warm air of our small kitchen. I watched her lift the spoon to her lips, take a careful sip, then set it down with a soft clink against the ceramic. Her hands trembled slightly—whether from the heat or from what she was about to tell me, I couldn't say. The apartment was quiet except for the familiar sounds: Mrs. Chen's television murmuring through the wall, the radiator's gentle hiss, the distant rumble of traffic from the street below.
"I met Cole when we were in college," Mom began, her voice steady but distant, as if she were reaching back through years of carefully buried memories to pull this story into the light. "The first time we ran into each other—literally ran into each other—we were both rushing to get to the teaching building."
I set down my own spoon, giving her my full attention. Something in her tone told me this wasn't going to be a simple story, that every detail mattered in ways I didn't yet understand.
"I was carrying an armful of books," she continued, a faint smile ghosting across her lips at the memory. "Running late for class, not paying attention to where I was going. And he came around the corner at full speed. We collided. My books went flying everywhere, and I stepped right on his shoes—brand new white ones that probably cost more than my entire semester's textbook budget."
Despite everything—despite the tension coiled in my stomach and the weight of Cole's threats still fresh in my mind—I felt my lips twitch with the ghost of a smile. The image was so ordinary, so mundane, that it seemed to belong to a different universe than the one we were living in now.
"He was furious," Mom said, and now there was a hint of something sharper in her voice, something that might have been old anger or perhaps just the memory of youthful defiance. "Demanded that I apologize for scuffing his precious shoes. But I looked at all my books scattered across the hallway, pages bent and covers scuffed, and I thought—why should I be the only one apologizing? He knocked my books out of my hands. He should apologize to me too."
"So neither of us apologized," she said simply. "We just stood there glaring at each other until the bell rang, and then we went our separate ways to class."
"Sounds like the beginning of every romance novel I've ever seen in the library," I murmured, trying to inject some lightness into the moment even as my heart beat faster with apprehension. Because this was Cole Doyle she was talking about—the man who'd looked at me with such cold contempt, who'd threatened my future and insulted my mother and made it clear that he saw us as nothing more than obstacles to be removed.
Mom's smile grew a fraction wider, but there was no real warmth in it. "I thought that too, actually. Looking back, I should have known better than to trust anything that felt like a story."
She took another sip of soup, and I waited, my hands folded in my lap to keep them from trembling. The kitchen felt smaller somehow, the walls pressing in as if the apartment itself was bracing for what came next.
"For the next two weeks, I kept running into him," Mom continued. "At the library. In the cafeteria. Crossing the quad. At first I thought it was coincidence—the campus wasn't that big, after all. But it happened too often to be random. I could feel him watching me sometimes, but I ignored it. Ignored him. I had too much pride to acknowledge that he was getting under my skin."
I knew that feeling intimately—the uncomfortable awareness of being observed, the prickling sensation of eyes tracking your movements. I'd felt it in the cafeteria when Sofia's crowd would whisper and point. I'd felt it in the library when other students would stare at my secondhand clothes. And I'd felt it, God help me, in the best possible way when Bryson looked at me across a room, his gaze warm and intent and full of something that made my breath catch.
"Then one morning," Mom said, and her voice dropped lower, became more careful, "I went to my usual spot under the old oak tree by the history building. I liked to get there early, before the library opened, and sit there reading while I waited. It was peaceful. Quiet. My own little sanctuary before the chaos of the day began."
She paused, her fingers tightening around her soup spoon, and I leaned forward unconsciously, drawn into the story despite my growing unease.
"He was waiting for me there," she said quietly. "Behind the tree. He stepped out as I was settling down with my books, and before I could even react, he was standing in front of me, blocking my path. And he said—" Her lips quirked with something that might have been bitter amusement. "He said I still owed him an apology for his shoes."
"You're kidding," I breathed, incredulous despite myself. Two weeks later and he was still hung up on a pair of scuffed shoes? The pettiness of it would have been laughable if it weren't so unsettling.
"I told him he was being ridiculous," Mom said, and now there was a flash of that old defiance in her eyes, the same fire I'd inherited and wielded like a shield against people who tried to make me feel small. "Told him that if he was that precious about his shoes, maybe he should watch where he was going. I was stubborn back then. Proud. I wasn't about to back down to some arrogant jock just because he thought he was entitled to an apology."
"Good," I said fiercely, surprised by the intensity of my own reaction. "You shouldn't have had to—"
"He kissed me," Mom interrupted, and the words fell into the space between us like stones into still water, sending ripples of shock through my entire body. "Right there under the oak tree. Just grabbed my face and kissed me. It was my first kiss with a boy, and it was... intense. Overwhelming. I didn't know what to do, how to react. For a moment I just stood there, completely frozen."