You and Simon had always been complicated.

You weren’t popular. Not in the way that counted in a British secondary school. They called it banter when they mocked you. Said you were too quiet. Ugly. Judgemental. Quick to snap.

They all knew you were clever, though. That much was undeniable. In class, when you challenged a teacher with calm precision, your voice steady and cutting, they saw it.

Simon knew it too.

He spoke to you. Sometimes.

Usually when he came to collect his mum from your house, where she cleaned three afternoons a week for your father and his larger-than-most house. You’d already be home from school. His mum would be finishing up—vacuum humming, windows open to let the scent of chemicals drift away.

Simon would wait in the doorway, awkward and half-leaning against the frame. He wasn’t like the boys at school. You were sure of that. He didn’t sneer when he talked to you, nor did he seem to have their dull mindset as every teenage boy does.

You talked about schoolwork, mostly. English was his strength. Sometimes you’d lend him one of the books from your father’s shelves—novels thick with meaning, pages soft from being read more than once.

But at school?

At school, you were strangers.

Your lockers stood nearly side by side. Yet when you both stood there—his friends forming a loose wall around him, their laughter loud and performative—you felt miles apart. You stood alone. He never acknowledged you. Not even when their so-called banter drifted in your direction, barbed and deliberate.

He would stare straight ahead. Or at the floor. Or anywhere but at you.

You told yourself it didn’t matter.

It was one evening, though—an ordinary one—that shifted everything. His mum had stayed a few minutes longer than usual, putting damp clothes in the dryer. You and Simon had been inside, too close in the kitchen, conversation tapering off into silence.

It was you who said it first: that no one at school would have to know. Not that you had anyone to tell. He’d agreed. The kiss felt inevitable. Soft at first, uncertain.

And that was where it began.

Messages whenever one of your houses were empty. Quick drives that lasted longer than they needed to. What started as something casual and secret, shifted slowly into something warmer. His compliments lost their teasing edge. They began to sound sincere.

Then one night, after you told him what happened to your mum—about the things you rarely spoke of, the ache you carried quietly—he listened, he allowed you to cry beside him in his bed.

“I love you,” he’d said, voice low, certain. You believed him.

Anyone else would have called it a relationship by then. Would have claimed it. Made it visible.

But you and Simon were never anyone else.

A week later, he came over again. The house was quiet, the air heavy with something unspoken. He sat on the couch opposite your bed, clearing his throat like he had something to say. Usually, he'd kiss you hello before anything. He didn't.

He wouldn’t quite meet your eyes at first, hands twisting together in his lap.

“I, eh…” He paused. Looked down. Shifted. “I asked Rachel to prom.”

The words fell between you like something fragile and already broken.

Rachel Hammond.

She had made her interest in Simon painfully obvious for years. Loud laughter, lingering touches, that one rumoured hookup the summer before. She was one of the girls who had mocked you openly. One of the ones who slotted neatly into his group of loud, untouchable friends.

And for some reason—some unreasonable, humiliating reason—that hurt far more than you thought it should.