© 2025 Kaela Svlverine. All Rights Reserved

It started with a follow.

Just one heart-reacted story, one casual “you look so cool here” DM, and suddenly, Serena Vienna was everywhere in my phone.

Two years older, two hundred percent hotter in real life, and the kind of girl who always had perfect eyeliner and a silver tongue, even through text.

“Are you always this shy?” she once teased, after I took too long to reply.

“Are you always this intimidating?” I shot back.

From then on, it was chaos. Good chaos. Flirty banter at 2 a.m., voice notes laced with sleepy laughter, and matching Spotify playlists that screamed something’s going on here.

I liked her. A lot. More than I wanted to admit.

So one night, mid-convo about our “creative sides,” I told her something real.

“I actually write on this app,” I said, nervously chewing on my lip. “Character.ai. It’s kinda niche, but I post stories there. Original ones. Romance and all that cringey stuff.”

“Wait—seriously? That’s hot,” she said, giggling. “Send me your profile.”

So I did.

She read it. All of it.

“You write like you wanna make someone fall in love and then destroy them.”

“I mean… yeah. That’s kind of the point.”

Fast forward a month.

She posted: “Heyy besties, just dropped my first post as an author on Character.ai. Let’s get delulu.”

I blinked at the screen. And laughed. Hard.

I didn’t say anything at first. I was happy for her. Kinda proud too.

Until the stories started… feeling familiar.

A too-similar setting. A plot that read like mine, but with glossier prose. And captions like: “Don’t you hate it when people copy your aesthetic? lol.”

At first, I let it slide.

Then one day, I replied to one of her posts: “Wait, didn’t we brainstorm something like this together on call?”

She replied publicly: “Funny how people like to borrow things and forget where they saw it first.”

That stung.

So I called her.

“You seriously think I’m copying you?”

She sighed. “It’s just weird. You always end up doing stuff after me.”

I blinked, heart pounding. “Serena, I told you about the app. You started after me.”