Victor: Her Ruthless Crush by Theodora Taylor (beach read book TXT) 📕

night, she’d actually put on a bikini and talked to some hockey players who’d flown down for spring break too. But she’d ended throwing deuces the next day and cutting out early.

She hadn’t seemed that broken up about Rohan when we flew down to Florida, so I had to wonder if something else had happened over spring break.

Granted, it could just be guilt making me think she was acting weird. I got so wasted the first night of our spring break that I woke up the next morning with a hangover to end all hangovers. Lena was nowhere to be found when I crawled out of bed. And when the two other friends we’d flew down with and I came back from our hair of the dog mimosa brunch, which had turned into late afternoon shots, we found her packing up her stuff.

She claimed that she didn't feel comfortable spending a full week in Daytona when she was behind in all her classes. And, listen, I would’ve totally understood if she had decided she had better things to do than hold back my hair for a whole week of partying.

Still, I couldn't help but wonder if her leaving so abruptly was about something else. Maybe someone else. I thought about that crazy hot guy she’d run into at the beach bar below our hotel the first night she was there. The one I vaguely remembered her saying had been “some hockey douche from high school.”

Did she have a Victor, too?

“I'm fine,” she insisted, pasting on a smile even brighter and faker than mine.

“Are you, though?” I asked.

“Are you?” she shot back.

“Dawn Kingston!” the dean called out before either of us could answer.

There came a polite smattering of applause, and I waved to my mom and Byron again as I jogged up the steps. Mom was clapping way more happily than anyone else. She only stopped to dab her eyes with a tissue.

This was worth it, I decided as I walked toward my diploma. I was living mom’s dream. The one she had never gotten to have, growing up poor in Korea. This was worth it, totally, totally worth—

Another sight iced over my blood.

A man was standing between the rows of stadium seating. He was tall and Asian and dressed in a well-tailored white suit.

His hair was much shorter than when I saw him last. But other than that, he looked exactly like Victor. But it couldn't be Victor. Could it?

He wasn’t clapping like everyone else. He just stood there, stony and silent. Our eyes connected as I walked across the stage.

“Ms. Kingston! Ms. Kingston!”

The sound of a voice calling my name brought me back to the stage.

I looked over my shoulder to find the dean handing out diplomas in my rearview. She was waving the leather-bound black sleeve with the diploma I had forgotten to take from her at me.

“Sorry about that!” I apologized, jogging back to get it.

“Oh, it happens all the time, dear,” she answered with a laugh. “These graduations are just so overstimulating.”

But Lena, who was next in line, didn’t let me off the hook nearly as easily.

“What was that all about?” she asked when she joined me on the side of the stage after collecting her own diploma. “Who were you staring at out in the audience?”

I looked back to the section between the bleachers. “I thought I saw someone I…”

The "knew" trailed off when I found the place where I thought I spotted Victor empty.

He was gone.

Or, more likely, he was never there at all.

I'd probably imagined him. On my freaking graduation day.

Seriously, what was wrong with me?

25

I asked myself that same question several times over the next twenty-four hours. And not just because of that crazy Victor sighting.

Lena had everything packed and ready to go a week before graduation. But I hadn't taken so much as a poster down from my wall. And I was due to get on a bus to New York at 2 pm.

“Remember how I said that sometimes the emotions we’re trying to suppress manifest in strange ways?” Lena asked when she saw the state of my dorm room.

She helped me the best she could the morning after graduation. But her father had already checked out of his hotel, and he was waiting to drive her back to Boston.

She gave me a wave from the doorway before she left around noon. “Good luck and call me to let me know you got to New York safely.”

“I will,” I promised. I was too distracted by all the stuff I still had to pack before my Peter Pan bus left for NYC to cross the room and hug her.

Not giving her a real goodbye was something I'd come to regret in the years to come. If I'd known this would be the last time I would be seeing her, I would've made the moment count.

I would've thanked her for being the best friend I'd ever had, and I would have apologized for what was about to come next in what we’d both assumed would be a lifelong friendship.

But I didn't know that back then. So I just let her go with a little wave.

And when a knock sounded on my door five minutes later, I climbed over all my boxes with a self-deprecating, “Hold on, just have to get past all of these suppressed emotions.”

I opened the door with a teasing grin. “Did you forget something?”

But the smile dropped off my face when I saw the person standing on the other side of the door. The man who was definitely not Lena.

It had been over four years, but you don't forget a face like his.

Phantom.

Phantom was standing at my door.

26

I woke up… I couldn't have told you how much time it was later. At first, I assumed I must be on the Peter Pan from Massachusetts to New York.

But no…

Wherever I was, it smelled expensive. In a faintly familiar way. Like leather and expensive Japanese whiskey. And suddenly, I knew