All Chapters of His To Hear, His To Hold: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

I walked outside after dinner just to breathe. Not that anyone was holding my head underwater—but the effort to make me feel "better" had been nonstop since my mother showed up like a roach in a beach house. Everyone had gone into overdrive, like distraction was the solution to emotional nuclear fallout. Katy cracked jokes, Victor hovered like a bodyguard with a psychology degree, Aureliano even brought me snacks. And I appreciated it, I did. But it was exhausting. I didn't need cheering up. I needed silence. The ocean view from the beach house was almost rude in how beautiful it was—sun slipping low into the waves, sky bleeding orange and mauve, the kind of thing you'd see on postcards and assume was photoshopped. Wind in my hair, salt in the air, and for once, the world didn't need anything from me. Until it did. 'I wonder if now is a good time.' I groaned. "Just come out already." Mom stepped out from behind a wooden post like she was crawling out of a horror movie. Her silho

I used to be a loser in the library club.Not the cute kind of loser either. Just the regular, invisible, get-talked-over kind. The kind people don't remember unless you're in their way. The club itself wasn't bad at all though. Quiet, kind of cozy. I guess I was friends with some of the girls in it? I don't even remember their names now. Isn't that sad? I just remember the feeling—belonging, sort of. Like background music.Then Lara got dumped on us to serve her detentions.She was everything I expected. Loud. Bored. Looking at us like we were something she'd scrape off her boot. She mocked my reading of Shakespeare within ten minutes. Called it "sexy librarian-core" or something and made a blowjob gesture when no one was looking. I didn't read aloud after that. I couldn't. She made me ashamed of something I actually liked.That's what she was good at—ruining things that made you feel good about yourself.But weirdly, by the second meeting, she was... nicer? No, that's not right. Sh

I sat rocking in the corner of my room, knees to my chest, hands clawed in my hair, tears streaking my face. My mouth kept moving before I even realized it."I'm going to be killed," I whispered. Over and over again like it would change something. "I'm going to be killed."If not by someone at school, then definitely by my dad. I knew those pictures I was sent were fake, doctored trash using some cheap stock porn star bodies pasted with my face. Whoever did it didn't even try that hard. But my dad? He wouldn't care. He doesn't know the difference.And school? The hyenas would eat me alive. I've seen it before—the way they turn. The way they pretend to believe anything so they have permission to hate you later.If Uncle Aureliano saw it... well, he'd already made it clear I was no longer worth the trouble. All his energy suddenly redirected to that bitch Katy like I never even mattered in the first place.Either way, I'm dead. No one has my back anymore. And for what? What did I even d

Elena didn't come to school the next day. Honestly, I couldn't blame her. The video Victor put together had gone more viral than the one she made with Katy and me. Like, way more. The kind of viral that gets stitched on TikTok by drama channels with usernames like @YourHighSchoolHell. And the internet, as always, did what it does best—twist everything and ruin lives. By morning, people were convinced Elena forced Katy and me to be in the original TikTok. That she'd manipulated us. Coerced us. Drugged us, maybe. The theories were so unhinged I actually laughed at one before realizing they weren't really about us at all. Just another excuse to pile on the girl of the week. Her downfall was trending. Nationally. Meanwhile, I was sitting in English class, next to Katy, flipping through my notebook and trying to will time to pass faster with sheer irritation. I'd already finished the assignment—last week, because I'm a try-hard when I'm anxious—and now I was being punished for my produ

No one could find a trace of Jessica after the dog leash incident. Not officially, anyway. I knew she'd come to school that day—I'd seen her slip through the front doors in that ridiculous hoodie pulled so far over her head it looked like she was auditioning for a gritty reboot of Little Red Riding Hood. But after that? Gone. Not sick. Not suspended. Just hiding. And that unsettled me more than anything else. Jessica didn't strike me as the kind of person you could just humiliate into silence. She was spiteful. Unrelenting. The go-out-with-a-bang type, not a fade-into-obscurity girl. If she was quiet, it meant something was building up and she was getting ready to snap. I couldn't stop thinking about it, even though Katy was convinced she'd finally given up. "She's too ashamed to show her face," Katy said casually, picking at her nail polish during lunch. "Humiliation works wonders on narcissists." "Maybe," I said. But I didn't buy it. Not for a second. Another few days passed