POV Serena

His mouth tasted like copper and recklessness, and I’m drowning in both.

My hands gripped his bare shoulders like they’re the only solid thing left in the universe. His skin burned beneath my palms, slick with sweat and desperation. His hands moved with terrifying certainty.

Cupping my face, tilting my chin, sliding down my throat to find my hammering pulse.

His tongue found mine, and coherent thought dissolves into sensation.

He lifted me onto the counter like I weigh nothing, settled between my thighs with a naturalness that steals my breath. And then I felt him. Hard and insistent against my center, separated by denim and cotton and six years of destruction.

My hips rocked forward before my brain could intervene, chasing friction I didn’t know I craved.

More, my body demanded. Closer.

His hands slided beneath my top, fingers splaying across my stomach, and I arched into the touch like a flower toward sunlight.

This was what I’ve been missing.

This heat. This hunger. This feeling of being wanted so desperately that someone shakes from the force of it.

His mouth traced my collarbone, tongue following the path of my racing pulse, and I heard myself moan. The sound didn’t belong to me. It belonged to some other girl, some girl who hasn’t spent a lifetime being systematically dismantled by her enemy.

“There’s nothing there to want.”

The memory surfaced without warning, sharp as shattered glass.

His voice. His cruelty. The day he cornered me in my bedroom and touched me like this before calling me pathetic.

Then in heat he called me princess, same voice full with the same mockery, and my body went rigid.

Not from pleasure. From the avalanche of everything he’s ever done to me, crashing through the walls I’d foolishly let him breach. Every insult lands fresh.

Princess. Spat like poison at family dinners while our parents smiled obliviously.

Ice queen. Whispered loud enough for the cafeteria to hear.

Frigid. Carved into the bathroom stall senior year in handwriting I recognized.

The parade of girls through our shared wall, their moans a nightly reminder that everyone was desirable except me. My mother’s name was weaponized in his mouth, used to wound me at my most vulnerable.

The campaign he ran against me for class president. Not because he wanted the position, but because taking it from me was sweeter.

Six years of systematic destruction flood back in a single devastating wave.

I’m kissing the architect of my insecurities. The boy who taught me that wanting makes you weak, that softness invites cruelty. That the safest version of myself is the one that feels nothing at all.

And now he expects me to believe this is real?

Everything blurs after that.

His voice reaches me from somewhere far away, syllables that might be my name. I’m shoving him back, sliding off the counter, my legs barely holding me upright.

His mouth moves, and I know he’s speaking, but the words don’t penetrate the static filling my skull. My own voice sounds foreign when it responds, hollow and automatic, saying things I won’t remember later.

There’s desperation on his face, raw and exposed, and some distant part of me registers that I’ve never seen him look so gutted.

But that part is buried beneath layers of hysteria I can’t control.

I cannot cry in front of him.

I’m backing toward the door, and then I’m through it, and then I’m in the garage staring at my mother’s bicycle through vision that keeps fracturing at the edges.

I don’t remember mounting the bike.

I want him. God help me, I want him.

And that’s exactly why I can’t have him.

The anger arrives without warning, hot and clarifying, cutting through the fog of self-pity.

Who is this pathetic creature crying by a lake, ready to crawl back to a man who spent years making her feel worthless?

Where is the girl who graduated top of her class? Who held her mother’s hand through chemo without breaking? Who rebuilt herself from grief one disciplined day at a time?

She wouldn’t recognize this sniveling mess, and frankly, neither do I.

If I go back to that kitchen—if I let Caleb touch me again, kiss me again, make me forget every wound he’s inflicted—what’s left of my self-respect?

A relationship built on the ashes of cruelty isn’t romantic. It’s pathological. It’s choosing to be a victim with better lighting.

And then there’s my father.

His face at the wedding, wet with tears I hadn’t seen since Mom’s funeral. Catherine’s hand in his, steady and sure. The way he laughs now, really laughs, like someone excavated joy from the rubble of his grief and handed it back to him wrapped in a second chance.

What happens when he finds out his daughter is tangled up with his new stepson?

What happens to that fragile happiness when the scandal lands? When Catherine’s face crumples with disappointment? When family dinners become minefields of awkward silences and loaded glances?

I won’t be the one who destroys what they’ve built.

Not for a boy who might shatter me all over again the moment the novelty wears off.

I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stare at the water until my breathing steadies. Tomorrow I’ll see him at breakfast, and I’ll be polite. I’ll bury this want so deep even I won’t be able to find it.

Serena Lakin doesn’t crumble for anyone, least of all the boy who tried hardest to break her.