Todos los capítulos de My Fake Boyfriend Is My Biggest Rival: Capítulo 51 - Capítulo 60

The post went up at 7:16 on Monday morning, and by 7:40, half of Westbrook had seen it. I found out before I even reached my locker. Two girls standing near the entrance went quiet when I walked past, then one immediately looked down at her phone. A boy from Luca's economics class stared at me so openly that I almost asked whether I'd grown another head overnight. I was still trying to understand what was happening when Priya came rushing through the crowd with her phone already unlocked. She didn't need to explain. I recognised the screenshot before she reached me, and the sight of my own old messages made my stomach drop.The anonymous account had posted everything it could make look convincing. There were photographs from the first weeks Luca and I started dating, arranged by date beside screenshots of my messages to Priya. One showed me joking about Luca holding my hand because Fiona was watching. Another mentioned our mother finding out we were pretending. The last one was the wo

For several seconds after I admitted that my reactions hadn't been fake either, neither of us moved. The parking lot had nearly emptied, and somewhere behind us a car door slammed, followed by the low sound of an engine starting. I expected Luca to do what Luca always did when things became too serious. Make a joke. Say something annoying. Find a way to turn the moment sideways so neither of us has to stand directly inside it. He didn't. He only looked at me with that same unreadable expression he'd worn when he told me calling me his fake girlfriend had started feeling like the lie. The silence stretched until I became painfully aware of my own breathing. Then Luca asked the question I had somehow managed not to think about until that exact second. What happened now?I hated how quickly my mind panicked. Admitting I wanted him had been difficult enough, but wanting someone and defining what that meant were apparently two completely different forms of humiliation. A label came with ex

Luca acted like the postponed meeting meant nothing, which was exactly how I knew it mattered. By the time we left the rehabilitation room, he had already turned the message into a scheduling inconvenience. Universities moved meetings all the time. Recruiters were busy. His injury probably made them cautious. He said all of it while stuffing his phone into his pocket and asking whether I wanted something to eat, as though five minutes earlier we hadn't been sitting together after our second real kiss when his father's message changed his entire mood. I didn't push him. Luca had spent years learning how to look fine when he wasn't, and lately I was learning that forcing him to admit something before he was ready usually made him hold on tighter.The full explanation reached him that evening. The university hadn't lost interest, and nobody had withdrawn anything. One of the recruiters had contacted his father to say they wanted to wait until they had a clearer picture of Luca's recovery

By Monday morning, I expected the photograph from Saturday night to be everywhere. I didn't know anyone had taken it, of course, but I had become so used to private moments turning into public entertainment that part of me checked the gossip account before getting out of bed anyway. Nothing new had been posted. By breakfast, still nothing. At school, people were talking about Luca and me, but they were recycling old information. Nobody had a photograph of our first actual date. Nobody knew he'd kissed me outside my house with no reason to convince anyone we were together. I should have been relieved. Instead, I spent the morning with the uncomfortable feeling that something had gone quiet for a reason.Fiona made that feeling worse. She passed me outside chemistry without saying anything. Not a sarcastic comment, not a glance at Luca when he joined me, not even the small satisfied smile she'd worn whenever the gossip account embarrassed me. At lunch, she sat with her friends and seeme

Luca's father waited until they were near the far end of the clinic before he started talking, but distance didn't make the conversation private. I couldn't hear every word from where I sat, and I had no intention of following them, yet there was something about the way Luca stood that made it impossible to look away. His weight rested mostly on his good leg. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, and every few seconds he glanced toward the ground instead of meeting his father's eyes. I'd seen Luca argue with teachers, coaches and boys twice his size without looking uncomfortable. His father was different. Around him, Luca seemed to become two versions of himself at once: the eighteen-year-old who wanted control of his future and the little boy who still hated disappointing the person who had built so much of his life around him.Their voices rose enough that pieces began reaching me. His father wasn't angry because he'd found me at the clinic. That was only the final thing wa