Chapter 121: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE

AVERY

“Why would you do that?” I asked again. “You don’t fight for random juniors. You don’t suddenly become campus justice because you grew a conscience overnight.”

His gaze tracked over my face. “You seem very sure of what I do and don’t do.”

“I am sure of you.”

That made something sharper enter his expression. “Are you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Which means if you went after Jordan, it wasn’t charity. It was personal.”

A beat passed.

Around the corner of the building, distant voices still floated from the field… leftover cheers, someone yelling for a ride, the ordinary noise of a night that had nothing to do with the pressure building between us.

“Maybe I don’t like boys who hurt girls and get away with it,” he said.

“Since when? Do not pretend like you didn’t hurt me and got away with it”

His eyes flashed. “Careful.”

“No. You don’t get careful from me tonight.” My voice was rising despite my effort to keep it down. “Do you think I haven’t spent all day trying to make this make sense? Jordan gets expelled. Suddenly. After all this time. And your name is attached to it. And everyone wants to talk about what a surprise it is that you have a decent bone in your body.”

“And that bothers you?”

“What bothers me is the part they’re not saying.” I took a step closer. “The only way you could have connected any of that…Erica, Jordan, the timing is if you knew more than you should.”

Silence.

“You read it,” I said quietly.

He didn’t ask what.

That was all the confirmation I needed.

A hard, mortified anger surged through me. “You went through my journal again.”

“I never stopped owning the fact that I had it,” he said.

“That is not the same thing as reading a page I never meant anyone to see.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

I let out a disbelieving breath. “So that’s it. You found out what he did to me, and instead of asking me, instead of giving me the dignity of deciding what came next, you just handled it. Like I’m some problem in your day that needed solving.”

“He drugged you,” Asher said, and the softness was gone completely now. “He put his hands on you after you said no. He left you wrecked enough that I found you on the side of a road barely able to stay conscious. Don’t stand here and reduce what I did to meddling because it bruises your pride.”

“My pride?” A bitter laugh escaped me. “You think this is about pride?”

“I think you hate that someone moved without your permission.”

“I hate that it was you,” I shot back. “I hate that you took something that happened to me and made it yours to avenge. I don’t need you fighting my battles for me.”

There it was. The line that had been sitting under my tongue all day.

Asher went still.

For a moment the only sound was my own breathing and the faint metallic rattle of a fence in the wind.

Then he said, too calmly, “You weren’t fighting it.”

My throat tightened. “That was not your call.”

“It became my call the second I read what he did and realized he was still walking through this school like he hadn’t tried to take something from you by force.” His voice stayed low. “So no. I didn’t ask. I didn’t wait for you to become ready to relive it in an office in front of adults who might not believe you. I found the girl he had already damaged, I made sure she didn’t stand alone, and I shut the door on him.”

“You don’t get to rewrite this into pure protection.”

“I’m not.” His eyes held mine. “I didn’t do it to be noble. I did it because the thought of him breathing the same air as you made me violent. Because every time I pictured him in that car, I wanted to take him apart. Because whether you like it or not, the second I knew, leaving him untouched stopped being an option.”

My pulse hammered so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.

“That is not the same as caring about justice,” I said.

“I never claimed it was justice,” Asher replied. “I said he deserved it.”

I shook my head, overwhelmed and furious and shaken in ways I did not want him seeing. “You always do this. You decide. You push. You take control of the whole board and leave me to live inside the consequences.”

“And you’re alive to complain about those consequences,” he said. “He doesn’t get another chance to change that.”

The bluntness of it stole some of my next attack.

Because under all my anger was an ugly, complicated truth I did not want to hand him: some part of me was relieved Jordan was gone. Some part of me had slept easier knowing I would not turn a corner and find him there. That relief made the rest of this harder, not easier. It made me feel owned by a safety I had not consented to.

“You should have told me,” I said.

“Would you have asked me to stop?”

I opened my mouth  and stalled.

Asher’s expression shifted with grim understanding. “Exactly.”

“That doesn’t make you right.”

“It makes me effective.”

He stepped one pace closer, not touching me, but near enough that I had to tip my chin up. “You can be angry, Avery. You can hate how I did it. But don’t insult both of us by pretending this is simple.”

“It is simple,” I forced out. “I didn’t ask you to fight for me.”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

The agreement should have helped.

It didn’t.

Because the way he looked at me then was not apologetic. It was raw and certain and terrifyingly steady, like he needed me to understand the distinction.

“I did it anyway.”

For a second neither of us spoke.

“You had no right,” I whispered.

Asher’s eyes searched mine. “Maybe not.”

“Say it.”

“I had no right,” he said. Then, lower: “I did it anyway.”

My chest ached with too many emotions stacked too tightly together.

Anger

Humiliation.

Unwanted gratitude.

The residual heat of his earlier joke still clinging to the edges of the moment like smoke.

I hated how aware I still was of him, the heat coming off his skin after the match, the fact that even now, furious with him, my body had not gotten the message that this man was unsafe in more ways than one.

“Stay out of my life,” I said, but the command came out thinner than I meant it to.

Asher’s mouth twitched, almost sad and almost cruel at once. “You don’t want that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then stop coming to find me.”

I had no answer that wouldn’t hand him another victory.

So I did the only thing left.

I stepped back.

His eyes followed the movement, dark and unreadable, and for one suspended second I thought he might reach for me… stop me, pull me back, finish the argument the way he finished everything else, by refusing to lose the last word.

He didn’t.

He just stood there in the shadow of the building and let me walk away with my anger still burning and my pulse still completely out of my control.