Chapter 20
Luigi felt like someone had detonated a bomb inside his ribcage.
He was shaking his head before she’d even finished speaking: “That’s not fucking true! I never used you as anyone’s substitute. You were never some practice dummy to me. Don’t believe their toxic bullshit.”
Yeah, she and Rosalia looked alike, but what he felt for Aurelia had been something completely different.
Aurelia just stared at him with those empty, dead eyes.
Panic clawed at Luigi’s throat-what if she disappeared again? He lunged forward and grabbed her wrists.
‘Everything I felt for you was real! We had a plan, remember? We were gonna go public after graduation, once we knew where we were going to
college!”
His voice was getting more desperate, more frantic. “When you vanished without a word, that plan died. Your sister threw herself at me, and I… I wa o fucked up and confused that I went along with it.”
Aurelia, you have to believe me. Please.”
His eyes were wild with desperation, tears actually forming as he begged her.
ut Aurelia felt nothing. She was too exhausted, too hollow to care whether he was lying or telling the truth.
If I meant so much to you, why did your teammates talk about me like I was some pathetic whore? Why didn’t you defend me?”
ler voice was eerily calm, which somehow made it more devastating. “You sent them a photo of our bloodstained sheets, Luigi. You let them mock me nd judge me.”
he memory still made her stomach turn.
Aurelia didn’t know who Luigi really loved, but she knew with absolute certainty that he hadn’t loved her enough. Whatever regret he was feeling ow was probably mixed with guilt and nostalgia-not real love.
rue love was supposed to be fierce, protective, exclusive. You didn’t let people you loved get torn apart for entertainment.
uigi’s love had never been that pure.
le was scrambling now, his explanations tumbling out in a rush: “I didn’t see those messages when they sent them! I was too caught up in… in what we’d just done. When I found out later, I tore them apart for it. I’ve been searching for you for four fucking years!”
ears were actually streaming down his face. “Maybe I was too young and stupid to understand what real love meant. I made terrible mistakes. But I now now-I know what I lost. Can’t you give me one more chance?”
Aurelia watched his breakdown with something like clinical detachment.
He claimed he didn’t understand why their relationship had to be secret?
He didn’t understand why he’d pressured her into sex and then let his friends humiliate her afterward?
She didn’t understand how she’d been naive enough to believe his lies.
“Luigi, every time you chose to abandon me in public, you destroyed whatever we had.”
Her voice was steady, final. “I stood at that crossroads for months, going over every light that changed, before I found the strength to walk away from you forever.”
The metaphor hung between them like a blade.
“If I go backward now, I’d be betraying everything I’ve built since then.”
Chapter 20
Aurelia shoved him away with surprising force. “Wrong is wrong. Actions have consequences. We both have to live with the choices we made.”
She’d chosen to trust the wrong person and lost her virginity to a lie.
Luigi had chosen to deceive her and would lose her forever because of it.
“Aurelia, just let me explain-”
But she was already gone, disappearing into the dorm building and leaving him standing alone under the harsh exterior lights.
Luigi stood there shaking, feeling like someone had hollowed him out with a rusty spoon.
The night wind cut through him, filling all the empty spaces where his heart used to be.
Maybe he really had destroyed everything beyond repair. The secret relationship, the confusion with Rosalia, the way he’d let his friends treat Aurelia like entertainment-it had all led to this moment of complete rejection.
Now she saw him as nothing more than a lying manipulator, and he had no way to prove otherwise.
Luigi tilted his head back to stare at the dormitory windows, wondering which one was hers.
His eyes desperately searched the scattered lights.
‘Aurelia,” he whispered to the darkness. “Please just wait for me a little longer…”
He would find a way to win her back. He had to. Because living without her was slowly killing him.
uigi stood there for what felt like hours before finally forcing himself to walk away.
The moment he turned around, he spotted Isaac watching him from the shadows.
