Prom Queen ⚢ [EDITING]

↻ ◁ eleven ▷ ↺

"cause she's got that fire,
doesn't even try"

Half a second, I counted. It took her half a second to rip open the door and stomp away. And then only twenty more seconds to find Graham.

I tried to calm her down in those short twenty seconds—begging her to let it go, trying to convince her it wasn't a big deal. But the truth was that it was a huge deal to me.

Graham never once acted so aggressively with me, not before this morning. Sure, he'd yelled at me a few times during some arguments, but things had never gotten physical. And they still hadn't, if "getting physical" meant strictly throwing punches, but that didn't change how scared I was when he grabbed my wrist like that. So rough, so carelessly. I didn't even feel like I was looking at Graham.

I think I was so shocked that I'd been trying to push it out of my mind. I needed a distraction, so I found Ivy, and I tried to forget about it.

Kind of hard to forget about when Ivy was about to fuck him up.

"You fucking asshole," she'd spat through her teeth as soon as she got to him, absolutely seething with unmatched rage. Her hair was back to its usual position as her hands were at her sides and I wasn't sure whose side I was on right now.

"Ivy?" Graham frowned in confusion when she approached. "What are you doing?" he whispered so quietly I almost didn't hear.

His eyes locked with mine when he spotted me glued behind Ivy. He sent me a look asking why she was acting so unusual, but I didn't answer. As soon as I even saw his face again, I was reminded of how horrible he reacted to my confession and how unattractive he was beginning to feel to me.

His precious brown eyes began to feel like pools of poison staring me down and enveloping me in a cloud of hate. His soft brown hair began to feel like millions of sharp blades cutting deep into my skin when I thought about touching it. His smirk, that one that I was once so obsessed with, now felt so malicious it was almost terrifying. I used to love everything about Graham, right down to his flaws and imperfections. But now those imperfections started to look like warning signs.

And he completely understood that when I refused to respond to his stare.

"What, so you guys are friends now?" He asked with his voice low and condescending. He glanced back over at Ivy whose anger was almost visible with a red cloud surrounding her. I couldn't believe he was turning such a sour situation into an opportunity to tease me. How could I have fallen for someone so selfish?

And why did I still want to be with him after the shitty things he'd said and done in only the last few days?

It was disappointing, almost—to feel so horribly about him but still want to stay in a relationship with him. He was usually okay, I would always tell myself. There were never any signs of abuse or manipulation before the night of Ivy's party. Or maybe there were, and I was just too blinded by love to see them.