27. Frankie

If it weren'tfor the fact that I need at least a B on this paper, I would tell Tori to go fuck herself because I do not—and I repeat, I do not want to work with her on a paper. I'm almost positive that the universe is deliberately messing with me right now by placing her in my path.

Our professor even drew names out of a hat. This is a coincidence, but I'm not laughing like the universe seems to be.

This is why we are sitting at one of the back tables at the bar, enveloped in the dim, moody lighting that casts shadows across the old wooden surfaces. The clink of glasses and the low murmur of other patrons create a distant backdrop for our silent standoff.

No words have been spoken between us, we are just staring at each other, the tension thick, neither of us knowing how to start this fraught conversation.

Awkward…

We have shared a dorm for weeks. It's almost the middle of the semester, and I don't understand why professors believe that working with someone builds character, but clearly, they are sadists dressed in tweed.

Running my tongue over my teeth, I heave out a breath. I'm going to have to shatter the tension. This passing by and not talking isn't going to work. Ever since that one day when we walked to class together, she's given me the cold shoulder.

I don't blame her. I did sleep with her boyfriend, but that one small moment with her made me crave friendship, which is ridiculous. I've never had an ally, and that conversation made me want one.

I can't even say I'm purposely avoiding Bishop either. I'm not, because we are still working on the cipher together. It's slow going, but it's going, and I focus on the cipher more than I focus on him. He is a slight distraction though—one I'm learning to ignore.

Thankfully, Andy has been bringing us beer. I'm not a huge fan of beer, but we are half a glass in, and I think it's loosening my tongue.

"So…" I draw the word out, tapping my eraser on a blank page in my notebook. "Technical writing. What topic do you want to write about?"

Blowing her bangs off her forehead, Tori finally looks up at me. Her jaw is tight, and her eyes burn with an anger that can only mean one thing.

She knows about Bishop. I can see it in the way her eyes narrow, filled with betrayal, pain, and simmering anger. As I catch her gaze, I feel a chill, realizing the depth of hurt I've caused. I glance around, seeking a semblance of privacy in the crowded bar.

"You know," I begin, my voice barely a whisper, acknowledging the elephant in the room with a heavy heart.

At the time, I only thought of the pleasure Bishop could bring me, and hell with the consequences.

Well, here are the consequences, staring me in the face.

When she only glares at me, I blow out a breath and glance over her shoulder, ensuring that the door between the bar areas is closed. "You know."

"How could you?" she screeches, her voice slicing through the buzz of the bar, drawing a few curious glances our way.

Okay, so this isn't going well.I knew this would eventually come out, and hell, I probably shouldn't have waited as long as I did, but here we are.

I never wanted to hurt Tori. Hell, I didn't really want what happened with Bishop to happen either, and I don't think telling her it won't happen again is going to make a lick of a difference. That man is my own personal catnip.

"I didn't know?—"

She cuts me off, her voice sharp and cold. "What? That Bishop and I were an item? Didn't I say it enough?"

"I mean, technically, no." I wince because that definitely wasn't the right thing to say. "If I had known you were serious, I wouldn't have slept with him."

"So you did fuck him." Her face turns bright red.

Oh, shit."You played me." Well done.

"I wanted an answer, and it looks like I got one," she snaps at me, her hands trembling as she begins to pack up her things.

"Tori." I close my eyes, feeling the weight of the moment. I have no idea how I got to this point, and honestly, I have no idea how to navigate through this situation. I don't want to ignore it and let it fester and get worse, but I also don't know the right path forward.

Even worse, I feel horrible.

"I feel bad," I continue, my voice softening, trying to intercept her movements as she shoves books into her bag. "I'm not trying to excuse what happened. It was a mess, and I know it hurt you."

I hurt me too, but that is beside the point.

Tori pauses, gripping the strap of her bag tight enough to turn her knuckles white. "Hurt doesn't even start to cover it, Frankie. You think a simple I feel bad fixes anything?" Her voice cracks, a sharp, raw edge slicing through the tension-filled air between us. The dim light of the bar flickers slightly, casting ephemeral shadows that seem to underscore the gravity of the moment.

She took one look at Bishop freshman year and called dibs. She finally got him to acknowledge her this year, and then… yeah. It sucks. No one was ever there for me when my teen years took a wild turn, and I haven't had a friend, not before and not after. I don't know how to be a friend.

"I know it doesn't fix it. Nothing can just fix this," I say, my own frustration mounting. The words feel clumsy in my mouth, as if they are weighted with all my regrets. "I'm not asking for immediate forgiveness, Tori. I just... We have to work together on this project. We don't have to like each other, but we can't even start if we don't talk."

She snorts and slings her bag over her shoulder. "Talk? Like how you should have talked to me before falling on Bishop's dick? Was that the kind of communication you mean?"

I flinch. She's right. My silence then had been deafening, a betrayal by omission. "I screwed up, Tori. I should have come to you first. I should have respected your relationship." I didn't think they were truly together, but I knew she was in love with him.

"Respect?" Tori laughs, but there's no humor in it. Her laugh is a harsh, scoffing sound that bounces off the bar walls. "You don't know the first thing about respect, Frankie. Respect would have been you not doing it in the first place. Respect would have been you not pretending everything was fine while we passed each other in the halls and sat in the same classes or, for that matter, slept in the same room."

The words sting more than I expect them to, maybe because every accusation is true. "I know, and I can't change what I did, but I'm here now, trying to... to at least start making it right." Is this how a normal girl would react?

Am I messing this up more?

"Making it right?" She shakes her head, her expression a mix of anger and disbelief. "You can't undo the past, Frankie. You can't un-sleep with someone. You can't unbreak trust."

"I understand that," I respond, my voice steady despite my inner turmoil. The air is thick with the smell of stale beer and the undercurrent of a hundred other bar conversations, none as strained as ours. "But we have to deal with this. We're stuck with each other for this assignment, like it or not. Maybe we can use it to clear the air. Fully. Honestly. It won't fix what happened, but maybe it can be a start."

Tori's eyes narrow, weighing my words. "Clear the air? You want to air out our dirty laundry while we're trying to work on a technical writing paper?" She seems incredulous, but she hasn't walked away yet, which I take as a minor victory.

Baby steps.

"Maybe it's the best time," I suggest. "When else are we going to have a forced setting where we can't walk away from each other? We're going to have to face this sooner or later."

There's a long pause, the kind that stretches out too thin, ready to snap. Finally, Tori sighs, her shoulders slumping slightly. "Fine, but this isn't about forgiveness, Frankie. This is about getting through this project. That's it."

"That's fair," I acknowledge, nodding. My heart isn't lighter, but there's a thread of relief. Just having this conversation feels like a crack in a long sealed door.

Not only that, but I feel better. Imagine that. Admitting the truth to this person who has been nothing but a bitch to me for years actually feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

She sets her bag down with a thud, resigned. "Let's just get this over with, but I'm doing this for the grade, not for you. Got it?" She grabs her drink and downs it in one go before slamming the glass on the table.

"Got it," I reply, agreeing to our shaky truce, if I can even call it that.

With a heavy silence settling between us, we begin.

We sit across from each other, our books open and notes spread out on the table like a battleground. The first few sentences of our joint paper stutter into existence, awkward and tentative. I scribble out a sentence, and Tori revises it. She adds a point, then I tweak the wording. It's cooperation, if you could call it that—strained and silent except for the scratching sound of our pencils dragging across the paper and the occasional clink of pretzel snacks being taken from the bowl between us.

An hour in, one whole beer later, irritation begins to gnaw at me. Here I am, having poured out apologies and acknowledged my mistakes, and yet Tori sits there with her slate seemingly wiped clean by my confession. It's as if, in her mind, her years of making my life miserable don't need to be addressed. She let Chloe and Amanda torment me at every turn, all while she watched from the sidelines with tacit approval.

I can't hold it in anymore. "You know, this isn't just about what I did wrong," I say abruptly, my fingers pausing above my notebook, tension seeping into the silent air around us.

Tori looks up, her eyebrows knitting together. "What are you talking about?"

She really has no fucking idea.

"I mean, yeah, I made a huge mistake with Bishop. I get that. I owned up to it. But what about you? What about all the years you've made my life hell?" I can feel the heat in my cheeks as years of frustration bubble up.

She recoils as if I slapped her. "That's different," she protests defensively, her voice tinged with disbelief.

"How is that different?" I demand, my tone sharper now, slicing through the ambient noise of the bar. "You and your friends have bullied me since freshman year, and when I thought we might actually be friends, you just let them keep going. You never once stood up for me. Don't you think you owe me an apology too?"

Tori's face hardens, and she crosses her arms, leaning back in her chair as if she's putting physical distance between her feelings and mine. "You sleeping with Bishop isn't the same as me not... policing every mean thing my friends said."

"But you weren't just a bystander, Tori," I counter, my voice rising slightly. "You laughed with them, and you made comments too. Just because you didn't start it doesn't mean you weren't involved. You hurt me. A lot."

There's a long pause filled only by the distant clatter of glasses from the bar and the muted conversations of other patrons. Tori looks away, her jaw working as if she's chewing over her words. Finally, she sighs, a long, weary sound. "Maybe I did," she admits quietly, not meeting my eyes. "Maybe I got so caught up in what everyone else was doing, I didn't think about how it was affecting you. I... I guess I owe you an apology for that."

The admission hangs between us, surprising in its sincerity. It isn't all the acknowledgment I want, but it's a start. Something shifts inside me, a loosening of a knot I've carried for too long.

"I appreciate that," I say after a moment, and I mean it. It's not wiping all the slights clean, but it's a recognition, and that's more than I expected.

Tori nods, looking a little relieved that I've accepted her words. "Look, I know it doesn't change what happened, and I know we're not going to be best friends after this, but maybe we can at least work on this project without wanting to kill each other?"

I let out a small laugh, surprised by the lightness in it. "Yeah, I think we can manage that."

"You know…" She blows out a breath and lifts her drink to her lips, her cheeks flushed and her eyes alert. "Fuck." She takes a long swig before setting the glass down with a soft thud. "Bishop and I were forced together."

I wrinkle my nose. "Forced?" That feels dramatic.

"There are things you don't understand yet," she hedges, tracing circles in the condensation on her glass. "Bishop's mom thought we'd be a great match, and I latched onto that idea." Tori shifts in her seat, her gaze drifting toward the window before snapping back to me. "You know how it is when parents get involved. They see things they think are perfect and make up stories in their heads about happy endings."

I nod, despite having no idea what it's like to have a parent care that much about you. Mine didn't even care enough to keep me around. The thought hangs in the air, a silent shadow over my words. "So it was more about pleasing his mom than actually wanting to be with Bishop?"

"It was both," she admits, tracing the rim of her glass with a finger, her movements slow and thoughtful. "I liked him, sure, but the pressure... It made everything feel more serious than it probably was, and when it isn't just your feelings but your family's expectations, breaking up seems like you're failing more than just yourself."

The vulnerability in her voice catches me off guard. It's a side of Tori I've never seen—the fa?ade of the confident girl crumbling a bit. "That sounds really tough," I say, my tone infused with genuine sympathy.

"Yeah, it was," she murmurs, and then her eyes lock on mine, a flicker of challenge in them. "Which is why what you did hurt so much. It wasn't just about losing Bishop. It was about everything falling apart and having to face that alone."

My stomach twists with guilt. My actions hadn't just been a simple mistake, they had ripple effects I hadn't considered. "I didn't see it that way at the time," I confess, the weight of my words thick in the dim light of the bar. "I didn't think about the bigger picture. I'm really sorry, Tori."

She nods, acknowledging my apology with a terse smile. "I know you are, and I'm trying not to hold onto that anger forever, but it's hard."

"I get that," I reply, the weight of our shared honesty making the air between us feel less heavy.

"He loves you though," she whispers, almost too low for me to hear, but I do, and it sends a chill through me. "He never wanted me. Only you."

"Well, he has a fucked up way of showing it," I blurt out, remembering his cold words.

"He's a good guy. He'd be amazing as a ma—" She cuts herself off. "Give him a chance."

"What?" After all that?

"Listen, like I said, I knew he'd never love me, and I still pushed for it, and look where it got me." She lets out a humorless laugh. "Hurt. But he loves you, Frankie. I don't know, make him work for it."

"You want me to be with him?" I ask. Color me confused.

"No." She laughs. "Yes." Shaking her head, she continues on. "It's hard. Maybe when—" She cuts herself off again. "Trust your gut."

I raise a brow at her, speechless.

We sit in silence for a moment, the only sounds the distant hum of conversation and the clink of glasses from the bar. Tori takes a deep breath, as if deciding to shed more of her guarded persona.

"You know, dealing with Chloe and Amanda... I let them go too far. I thought if I kept them close, I'd be safer socially, but it just made me someone I didn't want to be."

The frankness of her insight into her own behavior surprises me. It's as if our forced collaboration is pushing us both to confront things we'd rather keep buried.

"It's easy to get caught up in that," I say, thinking about all the times I've seen similar dynamics play out around me. "Being on their good side means you're not their target."

"Exactly," she agrees with a bitter laugh. "I hated that I became part of that... toxicity. It's something I'm trying to change about myself."

Hearing this, I feel a flicker of respect for her. Admitting you are a part of the problem is the first step toward making a real change. "It's good you see that. It's not easy to break away from those kinds of dynamics."

"No, it's not," Tori agrees, then she looks at me with a new level of understanding. "But maybe this project, this forced partnership, is a chance for both of us to do better and be better."

I smile, a real one this time. "I'd like to move forward, not just be stuck on past mistakes."

"Agreed," she says, raising her glass slightly toward me in a gesture of peace.

We clink our glasses, a small but significant acknowledgment of our shared path forward, and then turn back to our notebooks. There's a project to complete, and perhaps a new beginning to explore, not as friends, not yet, but as two people understanding each other a little better.