All Chapters of He kissed Me In The Dark And Forgot Me By Morning : Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

"There has to be a mistake," Christian Ashworth says. "I don't do partner projects with strangers."Professor Lindqvist doesn't look up from the seating chart. "You filled out the preference form yourself, Mr. Ashworth. Three weeks ago. You wrote one name."The room goes quiet in the way a room does when something expensive is about to break. I keep my eyes on my notebook, where I have written the date twice and nothing else. Row four, the seat by the radiator, is where I have sat every Tuesday and Thursday since September, and Christian walked past it at 9:02 this morning without seeing it. Or me. That is the arrangement I have with the universe. He doesn't look, and I don't get hurt by it."Which name?" someone behind me asks, delighted."Rebecca Hale," Lindqvist says.Every head in the room turns. I feel it on the back of my neck like a change in weather. Twenty-six people are trying to place a name they have never once heard aloud, and then they find my face and fail to place it a

"You've read that same scrap of paper four times in the last two minutes. I'm timing you."I fold the note into my apron pocket like it might catch fire. "It's nothing.""It's not nothing. Your hands are shaking and you've made two wrong orders since the golden retriever pack left." Priya leans against the espresso machine, arms crossed, dark eyes narrowed in the particular way that means she has already decided she isn't leaving this alone. "Show me.""Priya.""Rebecca Marie Hale.""That's not even my middle name.""It worked, didn't it? Show me the note."I should say no. I should tuck it deeper into my pocket and finish my shift and go home and pretend today never happened, that a boy I've loved from a careful, cowardly distance for six years didn't just prove he remembers a rainy staircase I thought only existed in my own head. But Priya has been peeling my secrets out of me since freshman orientation, when she caught me crying in a bathroom stall over a home I missed and didn't t

"Who else has that number?"Christian's voice comes out low, controlled in a way that scares me more than shouting would. He's still staring at his phone, thumb hovering over the screen like it might bite him if he touches it wrong."Three people," he says. "My father. My mother. And Wyatt, if he lost his and needed a burner." He shakes his head slowly, jaw tight. "This isn't from any of them.""Then it's spoofed." I lean closer, studying the photo again on his screen, the two of us framed through the tall library window from the courtyard below, close together under the single lamp, our heads bent toward each other like we belong in the same small circle of light. "Someone wanted you to know they could reach that number. That's the message. Not the photo itself."His eyes flick up to me, surprised, like he wasn't expecting a stranger from a rainy staircase to think in threats and angles instead of panic. "You sound like you've done this before.""I read a lot of true crime while I ma

"Rebecca, if you don't answer me in the next ten seconds I'm calling campus security and telling them you've been kidnapped by a cult."Priya's voice crackles through the phone, half joking, half not, and I realize I've been standing on the library steps for almost a full minute without dialing anyone, just staring at the message on my screen like it might rearrange itself into something that makes sense."I'm here," I say. "Sorry. I'm fine.""You don't sound fine. You sound like someone who just watched a ghost walk through a wall." A pause, muffled, like she's covering the receiver to tell someone else to be quiet. "What happened up there?"I tell her, standing in the cold with my coat pulled tight, the words tumbling out faster than I mean them to. The text about Kate. Christian's confession, the hotel bar, the lawyer, a girl transferred out of her own life because a business associate happened to be drinking at the wrong bar on the wrong night. And then the second message, the one

"I'll call you back." Christian's voice goes clipped into the phone. "I'm not doing this over the phone, and I'm not doing it in front of her."In front of her. Me. I'm standing two feet away, watching him turn into someone I don't recognize. Careful. Contained. Nothing like the boy who had his hands in my hair thirty seconds ago.He hangs up and doesn't look at me right away. When he finally does, something apologetic crosses his face, there and gone fast, replaced by the mask I'm starting to know too well. The one he puts on the second the Ashworth name walks into a room ahead of him."I have to go," he says. "I'll find you after my last class. I promise.""Christian.""I know." He's already grabbing his jacket, already halfway out the door even though his body's still standing in front of me. "I know that word means less every time I say it. I'm going to fix that. I swear."Then he's gone. I'm alone in a dorm room that still smells like him, holding a phone with a stranger's bank a