**Winner 2024 Amby Awards**
Fiza has everything planned-medical school, a respectable future, and an engagement she never wanted. Determined to escape a loveless match, she creates a checklist to find the perfect husband her father will approve of.
...
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My stomach was a knot of nerves and a wild, foolish hope as I waited outside the library. And then I saw her.
Fiza.
But it wasn't the Fiza I knew. This Fiza was... stunning. Heart-stopping. She had ditched her glasses for contacts, her lips were a bold red. A crop top hugged her figure, and her hair flowed loose around her shoulders, catching the sunlight. She looked confident, radiant, and completely unaware of the effect she was having on everyone she passed including me.
She spotted me and her face broke into a beaming smile. But instead of mirroring it, confusion and a sharp spike of irritation rose up in me. Why? Why was she looking at me like I was everything when she had vanished? When she had left me drowning in silence for months?
I saw her smile falter as she took in my expression. Worry clouded her features. She looked deep into my eyes, searching for answers, and all I could let her see was the anger and the hurt.
She took a breath, mustering her courage. "Are we still friends?"
The word was a trigger. Friends. I shook my head. "You tell me, Fiza," I said, my voice harsher than I intended. "You were the one who ghosted me. You made me promise to talk things out and not to disappear on you, but you disappeared on me... after everything..."
Our eyes locked. We were both right back in that bathroom, in the steam, in the feeling of her skin under my hands. I saw her flush. But she stood her ground.
She took another breath, her words tumbling out in a jumbled, desperate confession. "I got scared. I was falling for you, but you weren't the one. And I couldn't be with you." She paused, realizing how it sounded. "I needed space to figure it out."
You weren't the one.
Of course, I wasn't. I would never measure up. She was everything—beautiful, kind, intelligent, talented, full of a light I could never touch. And I was... a monster.
For a moment, I was back in Aarthy's bedroom. Her laugh was cold and mocking. She pushed me off of her after she had cum. "Aarthy please..." I begged as she straightened up and buttoned her shirt.
"You're pathetic.Finish on your own."
The insult was one of countless, but that day, it landed on a raw nerve. For the first time I had raised my hand against her. I slapped her across her face. Shocked silence followed.
Then laughter more terrifying than before. "You should be locked up like the monster you are. You can run, but you can never run from yourself."
I was a violent monster. I was doomed to be alone because that's what I deserved.
The library, the sunlight, Fiza's beautiful, worried face—it all faded as I relived those days.
