The Soulless Prince | Ethan Dolan

spin around, cinderella

Y/N curled up in the side of her bed, wrapped in her light blue comforter as she leaned her head against the soft pillow. It was about one in the morning - she doesn't think she's ever stayed up this late before - but she can't seem to fall asleep with the insistent guilt eating her alive from the inside out.

Guilt for never believing Ethan, that is.

When she returned to the dorm after a long morning in his father's office, she felt so ashamed and embarrassed that she couldn't bare to face Ethan, knowing she owed him the biggest apology of a lifetime. After her profuse stands on pushing him away and refusing to hear her out, she wasn't sure if he would take her back and she feared rejection. In her defense, however, those messages looked really legit and she was in a time where she wasn't sure exactly what to believe or who she should trust. But she should have trusted her own boyfriend to tell the truth, and he did. She just chose to ignore him.

Y/N wasn't exactly a social media wizard either, so now here she is at nearly two o'clock in the morning listening to Look After You on repeat making herself a designated account on Instagram. Her mother wouldn't be too thrilled to learn of this - but lately she is less concerned what her mother thinks, especially after everything. After setting up her username and password, as well as taking a quick selfie to use as a profile picture (who are we kidding, she used an old picture of her on her camera roll) and set off to search of Ethan's account. She quickly found it and was shocked to find not only a massive amount of followers, but also a plethora of photos of him and her... the last picture was one of him kissing her cheek, and he captioned it saying, "my source of sanity" with a red heart emoji. The comments are turned off.

He hasn't posted in a while, seemingly less enthused to use his account since his relationship all went to shit. Y/N scrolled down to see if she could find one with Chloe, but surprisingly none of her pictures were there. Maybe back then he wasn't so keen on flaunting his girlfriend around on his account.

Or maybe he deleted them all.

Y/N spent the next hour looking at his social media, crying at happy photos of them and one where he gave a long explanation as to why he's so happy with the girl so different, yet so similar to him. She wonders why he wrote all these sweet captions knowing full well she'd never be able to see them; it's not like he ever encouraged her to create an account. Ethan never showed her any of the pictures he posted or captioned... it was almost like he didn't care if she saw it, he just did it because he really goddamn loved her and wanted everybody to know.

"Fuck," Y/N muttered when she accidentally liked one of the photos, but she knows the damage is down so now she has no choice but to follow him. Of course she could have retracted and unliked the photo, seeing as he most likely isn't awake at this moment - but it's too late.

EthanDolan requests to follow you.

Y/N clicks accept.

-

The next following weeks are hectic. Y/N isn't quite sure how to approach Ethan and apologize, him unaware of her conversation with Kyle and the fact that she knows the truth; the only thing she musters up the courage to do is send him light grins whenever he looked at her, which he also recripocated after freezing with shock.

She doesn't have quite much time to cook up a scheme to say sorry, as midterms have begun to take over her life. She tells herself she's avoiding Ethan to prevent distractions and just focus on her studies, but her subconscious knows that she's just using this as an excuse. She doesn't even have to study in order to ace the exams - it's part of the package deal of being an academic prodigy. Ethan's been studying like crazy, and she's tempted to ask if he would like to study together but she doesn't want to bother him.