Page 33 of Wicked Surrender

Kristin:More reposts of other stuff, but no breakup video today.

I blew out a sigh on Tuesday morning, grateful that she’d be my lookout like that.

Laura:TY

Kristin:No prob. But maybe stay off everything anyway.

I cringed as I sat up in bed. I slept terribly, thanks to the one and only Jason Reeves. He bullied me by day and at night…

I rubbed my hand over my face. I wasn’t sure how many more nights I could take of his teasing me in my dreams. My conscious and subconscious versions of him were the same, yet not. When he teased me in my dreams, sneaking in when I wasn’t awake to tell myself to ignore him and not think about him, he teased me in agoodway.

Wincing at the stickiness in my panties from getting turned on by last night’s dreams of him rubbing a calculator, of all things, between my legs, I knew something had to be severely wrong with me to be turned on by my bully.

Laura:Now what?

Kristin:Ethan went on a binge last night.

Kristin:Tagging you in all these sappy breakup kinds of things.

“Please,” I muttered aloud. “Make it stop.”

Kristin:Do yourself a favor and don’t bother looking.

I didn’t. I didn’t go on to social media all day until I had to. My organic chem professor had us joining a group for a project, so I was on it for that. Then I groaned and read through all the things he’d tagged me in.

Pleas to get back together.

Poems about lost love.

Stories about how people can find love again.

Nope. And nope. And nope again.I ignored it all, refusing to let him bother me after the fact.

I had too many things on my mind. Besides the unwelcome dreams about Jason, I had to contend with the waiting game of when he’d share that video. I knew better than to assume it was an idle threat.

When it didn’t come over the weekend or all of Monday and Tuesday, I still had to put up with his frat buddies picking on me.

They didn’t stop. Collectively, they made my life hell, teasing me, catcalling me. One of my lab partners asked me what I thought of the cruel drinking game they’d made of me, dubbing a game of taking shots that they, of course, called Second-Bests, where the people playing had to one-up each other with crude comments about me.

During my last class of the day, a freshman from their frat house spilled his coffee on me, laughing and getting fist bumps from his buddy afterward. Then during the last lecture of the day, one of them snipped off a couple of inches of my hair.

Kristin fumed, looking at the damage afterward as we walked to the parking lot together.

“Tell your dad.”

I laughed weakly. “He won’t care.”

She picked up my hair and held it for emphasis. “This is illegal, Laura!”

I shrugged. “At least it’ll give me more reason to stop procrastinating on trimming my dead ends now.”

The look she gave me was a unique combination of pity, disbelief, and annoyance. “Don’t laugh it off.”

“Does it look like I’m laughing?” I huffed.

She exhaled and shook her head. “This is so fucked up that I wouldn’t even know how to advise you to fight back.”

I was losing the courage to fight at all. I was stretched thin, stressed and so damn tired. I just wanted to close my eyes, not have another infuriating dream about my bully, and wake up to this mess all magically over.

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