Chapter 145 Love-sick

Chapter 145 Love-sick
Tegan

The soft, aching notes of Taylor Swift's ‘All Too Well’ drifted from my phone, the song quietly filling the silence of Charlie's guest bedroom. I lay flat on my back in the center of the mattress, my head buried deep into a plush white pillow, staring blankly up at the dark plaster ceiling.

The heavy grey velvet curtains were shut completely tight, cutting off the bright, crisp afternoon outside, plunging the small room into a permanent, suffocating shadow.

It was safer in the dark. It was easier to navigate the stark, dizzying reality of the new normal that had completely overtaken our lives over the last three weeks.

In a way, we had won the war. Well not necessarily a war but we won anyways. The campus was eerily peaceful now. The anonymous Instagram account was gone. Tessa Bloom was gone, wiped off the face of the earth like it never existed. It was scrubbed from the network by the forensic IT specialists the school had hired to tear down the servers.

There were no more terrifying notifications, no more high-stakes blackmail DMs, and no more malicious, public leaks of people's deepest, darkest secrets. The faceless entity of Tessa Bloom had been completely dismantled. It felt peaceful.

And Noah Fieldstone was locked behind bars. The cybercrime division and federal prosecutors had moved in with ruthless efficiency, stacking charge after charge until the list became impossible to follow.

Cyberstalking.

Institutional extortion.

Unauthorized access to university systems.

Theft of confidential records.

Witness intimidation.

Harassment.

The final sentence left him facing two years in state prison, followed by a lengthy period of supervised probation. The court permanently expelled him from the university and prohibited him from possessing or accessing unsecured computer systems without authorization during his probation period.

The irony wasn't lost on anyone. Computers had always been the one thing Noah was good at, The one thing he loved, The one thing he trusted, And now every keystroke he made would be monitored.

Every device would be registered. Every online account would be subject to review. The judge had called it a necessary safeguard. To Noah, it might've been equivalent to life imprisonment.

Through every single bail hearing and every legal deposition, Noah hadn't stopped screaming the exact same frantic words he’d shouted from that ambulance bed. ‘Not guilty’. ‘Someone framed me’. ‘I abandoned the account weeks ago’.

He said it all through, his voice cracking behind the glass divider of the visiting room, maintaining his mask of a desperate victim until the guards dragged him back to his cell.

Charlie also turned herself in. As we all believed was the right thing to do. Her mother hired one of the best defense attorneys in the state, and after months of hearings, the court ruled that the death itself had been accidental.

There would be no murder conviction. But Charlie wasn't absolved entirely. She was charged for withholding information from investigators and failing to report the incident when it occurred.

The court sentenced her to probation, mandatory counseling, and hundreds of hours of community service. The judge made it clear that her silence had nearly turned a tragedy into something far worse. Charlie accepted the sentence without argument.

She said she deserved that much, maybe she did, maybe none of us were walking away from this story completely untouched.

But life didn't pause for our trauma. I went to school normally every single morning. I walked across the concrete quad, attended my intense medical lectures, and organized the Student Union board meetings as if the ground beneath my flats hadn't violently fractured.

We were officially a week away from Thanksgiving. I slid my hand beneath the heavy cotton of my oversized hoodie, my fingers gently tracing the warm curve of my stomach. My bump was slightly bigger now, a distinct, firm rounded swell that no longer hid beneath my blazers. I was five months along.

Yesterday morning, Doctor Helena had called my personal cell to schedule our mandatory twenty-week anatomy checkup. She’d explicitly told me that the screening was critical, but then she dropped a secondary piece of data that made my breath stall: my mother was coming to attend the appointment with me. She wanted to see her grandchild, bypassing my father’s strict warning.

And lastly... there was Hayes.

Things with the hockey captain had been completely, excruciatingly awkward ever since that violent, blood-soaked night beneath the stadium stands.

We hadn't stopped talking. We weren't screaming at each other, and we hadn't severed the line completely, but we were just... there. Floating in a heavy, silent purgatory where neither of us knew how to bridge the canyon between us. Sophie said it was a situationship.

He still drove me to school every single morning, his massive customized truck idling outside Charlie’s driveway at exactly 7:45 AM. He drove me back to the apartment when my lectures concluded. Sometimes, I wonder if he ever attends any lectures. He once told me that he's a finance major. And it was picked by his grandparents and he doesn't pay it any mind.

He bought me food, bringing brown paper bags of extra-seasoned turkey wings and hot fries to the porch, leaving them exactly how I liked them without a single word of complaint. He bought me every single maternal vitamin, and every mundane thing I needed the exact millisecond I mentioned it.

He asked if I was okay before I stepped out of his truck, his deep, gravelly baritone rough and heavily disciplined. We were physically right there, sharing the same air, but the emotional perimeter was locked down tight.

And the absolute, terrifying truth was... I missed him. I missed his suffocating, possessive heat. I missed the way his heavy, scarred hands used to slide beneath my sweater to cradle my stomach. I missed the unyielding, terrifying king who ruled my world, because without his shadow, the room felt freezing cold.

The heavy velvet curtains were suddenly, violently yanked back along the iron rod. A blinding, aggressive wall of afternoon sunlight flooded the bedroom, making me gasp and shield my eyes with my forearm as the music kept playing.

"Turn that depressing shit off, Tegan, seriously," Charlie commanded, marching into the room with her arms crossed.

Her strict face was set into a hard, unyielding line as she walked up to the edge of the mattress. I sighed, pausing the music on my screen and pulling the duvet tighter over my shoulders.

"Charlie, please. I'm meditating."

"You're not meditating, you're rotting," Charlie countered flatly, sitting heavily on the edge of the mattress, the bedsprings squeaking under her weight.

She looked down at my pale face, her expression softening into a look of deep, absolute clarity.

"Tegan, look at me. You are clearly love-sick. It’s been three weeks, and you’re both miserable. You need each other, but you’re both entirely too stubborn to drop your shields."

I looked away from her, my throat tightening as a raw, piercing ache formed right behind my ribs. "I don't know…." I trailed off.

"Don't tell me you're still angry because of what he did to Noah. Look at things from his own perspective, he was just being over protective. He needed to vent his anger out and that douche was there, annoying the fuck out of him," Charlie whispered softly, her hand reaching out to gently squeeze my knee through the blanket.

I didn't answer, my fingers restlessly clutching the edge of the duvet. My mind instantly spiraled back to the chaotic aftermath of that terrifying long night, the memory of the hours right after the game.

Hayes had followed me straight to Charlie's apartment. He hadn't stayed at the hockey house. He had parked his truck in the driveway, walked up the stairs, and stood in the living room, still wearing his torn jersey, his knuckles wrapped in bloody white medical tape.

He had tried talking to me. He had tried apologizing, his deep voice cracking with a raw, desperate panic I had never heard from him before, begging me to look at him, begging me to let him hold me.

And I had completely shut him out. I had stood behind the counter with an ice-cold, unyielding stone mask, refusing to let him step into my space, begging him to get out of the apartment until he learned how to control his violence. I had broken him into splinters, and he had walked out into the dark alone.

"What if..." I started, my voice cracking, dropping into a small, fragile whisper that I had been burying in the dark for three weeks. I tilted my head up, looking into Charlie's eyes, the raw vulnerability of my pedestal phobia bleeding through my pupils.

"What if he really doesn't want me anymore, Charlie? What if my stubbornness finally pushed him past his limit? What if I broke him for good?"

Charlie let out a soft, pitying sigh, leaning forward to pull my head against her shoulder, her fingers gently smoothing down my dark hair.

"Oh, honey... Hayes Ashford would burn this entire university to ash before he ever stopped wanting you. He’s just waiting for you."

I closed my eyes against her jacket, my hand resting flat over the steady, powerful pulse of our baby beneath my palm.