All Chapters of The Boy I Wasn't Supposed To Want. : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Reagan was waiting at the campus coffee shop when Callum arrived, tucked into the corner booth she always claimed like it had her name on it, a manila folder sitting on the table in front of her like a prop she'd been waiting to use."You came alone," she said, sounding almost disappointed. "I half expected her to insist on tagging along.""What do you want, Reagan?""Straight to business. Fine." She slid the folder an inch closer to him, but didn't open it yet, her fingers resting on top like she was savoring the moment before she had to spend it. "How's Ivy doing? Handling the wedding stress okay?""Reagan.""I'm just asking. We're practically family, aren't we? You two, me, this whole little circle." Something flickered behind her eyes, quick and bitter. "Funny how that works out."Callum sat down across from her, forcing himself to keep his voice level. "You said you had proof of something. Show me or stop wasting my time."Reagan's smile thinned. She flipped the folder open and tu

Callum found her on the back porch after dinner, the house quiet behind them, Diane and Marcus already upstairs going over final vendor confirmations."You've been avoiding me all day," he said, sitting down beside her on the step."I haven't been avoiding you. I've been thinking.""About Reagan?""About all of it." Ivy pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. "Four days until her deadline, Callum. Five weeks until the wedding. And we're just supposed to sit here and let her decide what happens in between.""We're not just waiting." His voice was quiet but certain. "I already told her where I stand.""And what does that actually get us? A few extra days before it happens anyway?"Callum was silent for a moment, looking out at the dark yard. "Maybe. Or maybe it buys us time to figure out how to tell them ourselves, before she gets the chance to make it ugly."Ivy turned to look at him. "You want to tell them?""I don't want to keep hiding something that isn't wrong just beca

Ivy woke to the sound of voices downstairs, low and tense in a way that pulled her out of sleep faster than any alarm could have.For a few seconds, lying tangled in the sheets with Callum's arm still around her waist, everything felt peaceful, warm, ordinary, the kind of morning she'd wanted for months without letting herself admit it.Then she registered the light.A thin gold line under her bedroom door, spilling in from the hallway, though she was certain, absolutely certain, that Callum had turned everything off before he'd come upstairs last night.She sat up slowly, careful not to wake him, heart already picking up speed before her mind had fully caught up to why.The voices downstairs sharpened. Marcus, first, his usual easy warmth stripped completely out of his tone."You need to explain to me why you were parked outside this house last night."Ivy went still.A second voice answered, female, familiar in a way that made her stomach drop straight through the floor."I already

The living room still had the wedding binder sitting open on the coffee table, fabric swatches paper-clipped to a page of seating charts nobody had finished. Nobody moved it. It just sat there through the whole conversation, ordinary and devastating at once."Start from the beginning," Marcus said. "All of it. What she has, what she's threatened, what she wants."Callum laid it out plainly, the scholarship sabotage Ivy had faced months earlier, the photograph, the ultimatum in the coffee shop. "She gave me until the end of this week to end things," he said. "We hadn't gotten there yet. She decided not to wait."Diane's face went through several expressions as he spoke, disbelief sliding into something closer to horror. "She tried to get you expelled," she said to Ivy, quiet and stricken. "Months ago. And you never told me.""I didn't want you to worry. You were so happy about the wedding, I didn't want to be the reason anything felt complicated.""Ivy." Diane's voice cracked. "You are

Callum's uncle's guest room had thin walls and a mattress that dipped in the middle, and none of it felt like home, though Ivy supposed that had less to do with the room and more to do with the fact that Callum wasn't sleeping down the hall anymore.They'd fallen into a strange new rhythm since Marcus sent him away, brief texts instead of hallway glances, a stolen twenty minutes between classes instead of whole evenings at the kitchen table. Ivy hadn't realized how much of their relationship had lived in small, ordinary proximity until all of it got taken away at once.They met at the campus library instead, a study room on the third floor that nobody ever booked, Grant slipping in ten minutes after them looking like he hadn't slept."She knows I talked to you," he said, before either of them could ask. "Not everything. But enough."Ivy's stomach dropped. "How?""Old family phone plan. She never got taken off it after we stopped, whatever we were, back in high school. She's been able