Submit to Me

8 - Sloane

Seventeen years ago, I moved back to my home state of California because I hated who I was while living in Chicago. After graduating, I realized the friends I made in high school weren't actually my friends. They were jerks, so I ended every one of those friendships.

The final straw that broke the camel's back, making me cut ties with my friends and move far away from them, was when someone who I considered my best friend admitted something she and my other friends had done to a boy—my bestie who befriended me when I first moved to Chicago.

I'm no saint for what I'd done and said to him, but what my best friend, Chloe, did was disgusting. She and my other friends were sending him packages filled with weight and muscle-gain products, fatty foods, junk food, pencils, chopsticks, and more, mocking him.

The strange thing about those girls making fun of Aaron was that he wasn't a nerd or anything. He was actually quite popular, friendly, caring, helpful, funny, and so fucking gorgeous that my heart fluttered every time I was around him.

Then, when I started making more friends outside of Aaron's circle—everything changed—I changed.

My new friends insisted I needed to stay away from Aaron. That he was a bad guy, a player, that he'd break my heart, and that he treated women like shit. Everything they accused him of being floored me, and I never saw him as being anything they claimed.

He was the perfect gentleman every time we were together.

I never understood why they tried ruining his reputation or why they were trying to keep me from hanging out with him. And I didn't want to believe anything they told me until I saw Aaron talking to a woman one day at lunch, his arm around her, laughing, smiling, messing with her, and acting like he and she were an item.

I was looking for him that day to see what he thought about us being a couple, but when I saw his arms around a woman who wasn't me, making my insides twist and knot, the things my friends told me about Aaron instantly came to mind. So I walked away.

Then, later that same day, when our school day ended, he approached me, asking me to be his girlfriend. And because of what I saw at lunchtime and how my friends were telling me, see, I told you so, and more, getting me to believe what they had been telling me for weeks about him, I turned him down—saying things to him I never would've said. And the look on his face while I was putting him down nearly killed me. I hurt him. But at the time, I felt he hurt me, too.

And because of how hurt I was and how I knew I had hurt him, I hid from him. I also hid from myself, becoming a person who wasn't the person my parents raised me to be.

However, it wasn't until much later that I learned the truth—my reasoning for leaving Chicago and returning to California.

I learned that the girl Aaron was messing with the day I felt hurt by him was his younger sister—she didn't have school that day and came to have lunch with him.

I learned my friends were jealous that Aaron was giving me the time of day instead of them. And how, for months before I had moved to Chicago, they were trying to get him to notice them.

I learned they had lied to me about Aaron. That he wasn't this guy they tried painting him as.

I learned they became my friends because they knew I was friends with Aaron and his friends. They hoped that becoming friends with me would be the golden ticket to landing Aaron, Callum, Hudson, Jace, Greyson, or Rory. Since Rory and Callum already had serious girlfriends, they tried getting the other guys to notice them—especially Aaron.

I also learned about the packages they sent Aaron—angry he wanted me, not them.

I learned a lot that day, and instead of looking for the one person I needed to find and apologize to, I left.