Reconnected // Completed

chapter eleven

=UNEDITED=

Luke's POV

It's been a month since that night where I thought about Elise. And ever since then, I've been thinking about her.

I've been thinking about how she's working with Douglas for fashion week now and how proud her family must be of her and how I might be too.

And I've been thinking that she should know the truth.

The truth about how she got into Columbia.

I've been thinking about telling her for the past week. It's been repeating through my mind non stop. It's been distracting me and it's been distracting me from Ari which I don't like at all.

And there is no reason for me not to tell her. It probably will hurt but it doesn't matter if I hurt her because I don't love her anymore. I. Do. Not. Love. Her.

Next Day

"Alright everyone, I hope you all have a nice winter break. Remember that when you come back, we'll have a progress test," I say watching the students pile out of the room, excited to go home to celebrate the holidays.

I hear a laugh, a familiar one, and look over to my left to see Elise and Douglas laughing with each other. Her laugh reminds me that I need to talk to her.

"Elise!" I call and she turns her attention to me.

"Can you come here? I need to talk to you."

I see Douglas whisper something into her ear and then he walks away, her walking towards me.

Her face is red when she says, "Yes?"

"I need to talk to you."

"I would imagine so," she says back with a smile she's hiding. She's clearly not doing a good job of it.

I brush off her smile and ask, "What do you mean?"

"I mean, why else would you call me over here? To talk. Right?" I could see that the shy smile has turned into the smirk. I've also realized that she's moved a lot closer to me than she was before.

I take a deep breath, which probably came off wrong because her smirk grew.

"Look, I need to talk to you about something important," I say, moving away from her.

I'm now at the white board erasing what was on it, not wanting to make eye contact with her when I tell her what I need to tell her. She's at the front of my desk. About, five to six feet away. I'm glad I have my back turned.

"What's up?"

Suddenly, I choked.

I reviewed what I was going to say in my head all of last night and today. But now it's all a blank.

My mind has left me on the spot.

"Luke?"

That caught me off guard. I turn around to look at her, and I see that even she is thrown off guard.

I notice how innocent she looks right now because I dared to look in her eyes and saw vulnerability. I don't know why she was so vulnerable right now though.

I can't do this. I know Elise when she is vulnerable. If I tell her the truth right now, she'll be crushed. She'll be absolutely devastated. She won't believe in herself. She'll lose all the confidence and respect she has for herself. She'll be too dramatic and think of reasons to hate herself. She'll call herself ugly and fat and a horrible person for ever trusting someone so mean. Like I said, over dramatic. She just simply won't be Elise.