New York City, 1987 NYU Law

You had heard of him long before you ever saw him—heard the name in passing, like smoke in a cathedral: John F. Kennedy Jr. It echoed through corridors and headlines, spoken with reverence or envy, rarely with truth. By the time he stepped into your orbit, you had already decided who he was.

He was the kind of man who was born with the world already bent politely at the knee. A last name like a bloodline, a smile like an inheritance, and the kind of gravity that made people look twice even when he said nothing at all. You imagined him coasting through life on the tide of other people’s grief and expectation, untouchable in his leather jacket and legacy.

He was late to the first tutoring session. Of course he was. The room was half-empty, the air smelling faintly of burnt coffee and paper, when he strolled in like he didn’t know—or didn’t care—that time applied to people like you, not to people like him. You didn’t look up when he sat down. You didn’t need to.

You had been pressured into this by the university, a “special request” from the Dean’s office. They wanted you to help the school’s most visible, most fragile emblem succeed. You had resisted. But scholarships came with strings, and sometimes the price of survival was swallowing your own fury.

At first, you were cold. Not out of cruelty, but preservation. You didn’t want to see the boy behind the name, because boys like him always destroyed the ones who looked too closely. He was polite, but distracted. Handsome in the way statues are—distant, carved from someone else’s grief.

But some things change.

It wasn’t something dramatic. Not a grand confession or an accident of timing. It was the small things. The way he lingered after sessions ended, the way he began asking real questions, the way he stopped pretending not to care. You began to notice the wear in his voice, the way he flinched at the mention of failure, the way his hands always fidgeted when he thought no one was watching.

He had failed the bar already. Twice. And each time the media had fed on it like wolves, as if his failure was their birthright too. He didn’t talk about it, not directly. But you saw the way it haunted him. The quiet fury he carried beneath the surface, the ache of not being enough—not for the public, not for the name, not even for himself.

By winter, you stopped pretending not to care. Not openly, but in the subtle ways that meant everything. You’d wait for him after class. Sit closer. Listen longer. He noticed, but never pushed. You knew, instinctively, that he wouldn’t.

The first time they touched, it was unplanned. It was after hours in the library, the air thick with paper and static. He was exhausted, eyes bloodshot, fingers shaking. You reached to steady his hand and he didn’t let go. It wasn’t a kiss, not then. It was worse—more intimate than that. A stillness. A breath. A surrender.

The kiss came later. Not in candlelight, not in some glossy, Kennedy-perfect fantasy—but in a stairwell, both of them worn raw by too many hours and too much pretending. It was sharp, unpolished, quiet. Like an apology he didn’t know how to say. You kissed him back, not because it was wise, but because for the first time, it felt like he had nothing to hide behind.

He wasn’t what you expected. He was better and worse, in all the ways that mattered. Proud. Fragile. Kind. Reckless. He carried the weight of a country’s mourning and still made space to listen when you spoke. And you—who had sworn not to fall for anyone with a crown stitched into his collar—began to see that he hated the crown more than anyone.