I was sitting in fourth period, half-listening to the lecture, when the whispers started.
It moved through the rows the way gossip always does in high school, not loud, just persistent. Phones angled under desks. Elbows nudging. That kind of quiet where everyone is talking about the same thing and pretending they're not.
Kat's sex tape.
I already knew about it. Not because someone told me, but because I remembered. The other version of this world, the one I carried around in my head like a second set of memories, had shown me all of this. The tape. The fallout. Troy and Roy. The principal's office. Kat turning the whole thing into a power play.
The strange part wasn't knowing. The strange part was watching it unfold in real time and feeling the gap between what I remembered and what was actually happening. In my memories, it all moved fast, compressed into scenes. Here, it dragged. The rumor had been building for days. Kids were still debating whether it was really her. The embarrassment was slower, heavier, more human than anything I'd seen on a screen.
These are real people. Not characters. Real people living through real shit.
And yet, even thinking that, I couldn't stop my brain from doing what it always did: running the angles, mapping the timeline, calculating where things were headed.
If the tape is circulating, that means Kat's about to flip the script. She's about to become someone new. Someone bolder.
And then, before I could stop it, another thought.
Maybe I should fuck Kat.
It landed in my head fully formed, casual and sharp, the way bad ideas always do. Not a plan. Not a fantasy. Just a possibility that appeared,
The bell rang before I could argue with myself about it.
* * *
RUE (V.O.)
Here's the thing about my brother. Jordan's not a bad person. He's just someone who makes decisions the way most people change lanes on the freeway. Quick. And committed.
* * *
I found Kat at her locker.
She was pulling books out with that tight-jawed expression people wear when they're trying to look unbothered. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were a little too focused on the locker's contents, she was pretending to be normal for an audience she hoped wasn't watching.
I leaned against the locker next to hers.
"That's not you, right?"
She didn't look at me. "Of course not."
I studied her face for a second. The defiance in it. The way her chin tilted up, daring me to push further.
"Yeah," I said. "I figured. You'd fuck way better than that."
That made her turn. She looked at me, and something shifted behind her eyes. The tightness in her jaw loosened. Not a smile, not yet, but the architecture of one.
"Yup," she said. "I would."
I held her gaze. "You down to prove that?"
Now she smiled. It was quick and sharp and a little reckless, the smile of someone who had been waiting for permission to be the version of themselves they'd been rehearsing in their head.
"Maybe."
"Meet me after school. I'll be in the parking lot."
She closed her locker. Turned the lock. Looked at me one more time.
"Maybe."
* * *
RUE (V.O.)
Now, I didn't know about any of this at the time. But looking back, I think this was the moment where Jordan stopped just watching things happen and started making them happen. Which, in my experience, is usually where the problems begin.
* * *
She showed up.
I was leaning against the 350Z, scrolling my phone, the afternoon sun throwing long shadows across the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone. A few stragglers hung around the front steps. The buses had already pulled out.
Kat walked toward me with her bag over one shoulder, trying to look casual. She was wearing a black top and jeans that hugged her hips. Her hair was down.
She didn't say anything. Just stopped in front of me and raised an eyebrow.
"Get in," I said.
She got in.
* * *
The drive was short. Five minutes. I kept the music low, something with a heavy bass line that filled the silence without making it awkward. She looked out the window. I looked at the road.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"My place. Nobody's home."
She nodded. Didn't ask any follow-up questions. I liked that about her. Kat wasn't the type to pretend she didn't know what was happening.
* * *
I unlocked the front door and let her in. The house was empty. Mom was at work. Gia was at a friend's house. Rue was wherever Rue goes when she disappears for the afternoon.
Kat looked around the living room like she was cataloguing it. The family photos on the wall. Gia's shoes by the door. The faint smell of whatever Mom had cooked that morning.
"You live here with Rue?"
"And Gia. And my mom."
"Hm." She turned back to me. "So."
"So."
I stepped forward and kissed her.
She kissed me back, harder than I expected. Her hands went to my chest, gripping the fabric of my shirt. I pulled her closer, one hand on her waist, the other sliding to the back of her neck. She made a small sound against my mouth, something between a gasp and a hum.
I moved to her neck. Kissed it. Sucked on the skin below her ear until she tilted her head and let out a soft moan. My hand dropped to her ass and squeezed. She pressed into me.
I slid my other hand down the front of her jeans, over the fabric, and ran a finger across her pussy. The heat came through the denim.
"Oh," I said. "You're wet."
She giggled. It was nervous and genuine and it made her seem, for just a second, like exactly who she was: a girl doing something for the second time and wanting badly to look like she'd done it a hundred times before.
Then she dropped to her knees.
* * *
She unbuckled my belt and pulled me out. Looked up at me.
"Wow." Her eyes widened. "You're big."
"Not too big."
She smiled. "Not too big." And took me in her mouth.
She started slow. Her lips were warm and wet and she was trying, genuinely trying, to be good at it. Halfway down she gagged, pulled back, tried again. I let her set the pace for a minute, watching the way her cheeks hollowed and her eyelashes fluttered when she went deeper.
Then I put my hand on the back of her head.
"I thought you were a slut?"
She looked up at me with watery eyes and something that might have been a challenge. She went deeper. Wetter. Her tongue pressed flat against the underside and she found a rhythm, sloppy and deliberate, the kind of effort that came from wanting to prove something.
I let her work.
When I pulled out of her mouth, a string of spit connected her lips to me. She wiped it with the back of her hand, breathing hard.
I turned her around.
She braced her hands on the edge of my bed, arching her back as I pulled her jeans down to her thighs. No hesitation. She wanted this. She'd been wanting this, maybe not with me specifically, but this, the act of it, the feeling of being wanted hard enough that someone would take her to an empty house on a Tuesday afternoon.
I pushed into her.
She moaned. Loud. Louder than I expected, a full-throated sound that filled the room and bounced off the walls. It made me harder. I grabbed her hip with one hand and slapped her ass with the other.
She yelped. Then she started pushing back into me, rolling her hips, twerking on it like she was trying to prove a point. Her fingers gripped the sheets.
"Harder," she said.
I gave her harder.
"Harder."
I fucked her until the bed frame knocked against the wall and her moans broke apart into short, breathless sounds that didn't have words in them anymore. Her back arched deeper. Her thighs shook.
I pulled out and came on her back. The warmth spread across her skin and she stayed bent over for a second, catching her breath, her face half-buried in the sheets.
* * *
She sat up. Grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and cleaned herself off. I pulled my jeans back up and sat on the edge of the bed.
The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that follows something loud.
"Not bad for your second time," I said.
She looked at me. Something flickered across her face, surprise, then defiance, then the faintest crack of vulnerability before she sealed it back up.
"Who said it was my second time?"
I just smiled.
"I can tell."
She held my gaze for a long second. Then she laughed. Not a nervous laugh. A real one. Like she'd been caught and was deciding whether to be embarrassed or relieved, and had landed on something in between.
"Whatever," she said. She fixed her hair in the mirror on the back of my door. Pulled her top back into place. Checked her neck for marks.
"You left a hickey."
"My bad."
"No, it's fine." She covered it with her hair. Looked at herself one more time. "I'll just say it was someone from St. Mary's."
I walked her to the door. She stopped on the porch and turned around.
"So, is this like a thing now?"
"It can be whatever you want it to be."
She thought about it. "Friends with benefits?"
"Works for me."
"Cool." She pulled out her phone and started walking. Didn't look back. I watched her until she turned the corner, then closed the door.
* * *
RUE (V.O.)
I don't know who Jordan was hooking up with at this point, and honestly, I didn't care enough to ask. But I noticed he started closing his door more. Which, for a seventeen-year-old boy, could mean literally anything. But with Jordan, it usually meant he was keeping a secret. And Jordan's secrets always had a way of getting complicated.
* * *
The house was still empty.
I went back to my room and sat at the desk. The sheets were still wrinkled. The room smelled like sweat and her perfume, something vanilla and synthetic.
I should have felt something. Guilt, maybe. Or at least the awareness that what I'd just done was calculated in a way that most people would find fucked up if they knew the full context. I knew Kat's insecurities. I knew her arc. I knew that she was in the middle of reinventing herself, and I'd walked into that moment and used it.
But the thing is, I didn't feel calculated. Not while it was happening. While it was happening, it just felt like two people who wanted to fuck, and did.
That's the thing about knowing the future. It doesn't make you smarter. It just gives you better timing.
I pulled up the beat I'd been working on the night before. Put my headphones on. And let the music fill the space where the thinking was.
* * *
RUE (V.O.)
Here's what I've learned about boys. They will do the worst shit imaginable and then go make a sandwich. Or in Jordan's case, go make a beat.
I'm not saying he's a bad person.
I'm saying that the line between a bad person and a person who does bad things is thinner than anyone wants to admit.
And most of the time, you don't even know which side you're standing on.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR