Prologue: Late Night Notifications
Lucia Garcia was sprawled across her twin XL bed in her dorm room, surrounded by a fortress of psychology textbooks, highlighted notes, and empty LaCroix cans. Her Developmental Psych midterm was in two days, and she'd been camped out in her room since dinner, surviving on dining hall coffee and the questionable pizza Freya had brought back from Blaze.
Her laptop played lo-fi beats in the background while she highlighted another passage about Erikson's stages of development. The floor's group chat was blowing up—something about pre-gaming for Pub crawl Thursday—but she'd muted it hours ago. Junior year was no joke, especially not when you were trying to maintain a 3.8 GPA for grad school applications.
Her phone buzzed on her nightstand. Lucia ignored it, thinking it was probably Charlotte asking if she wanted to hit up the GSU Starbucks for a study break. Then it buzzed again. And again.
With a sigh, she reached for her phone, expecting to see the usual suspects in her notifications. What she saw instead made her stomach drop.
Lucia sat up so fast her textbook slid off the bed with a thud. Her heart was doing that annoying flutter thing it always did when—no. She knew exactly who this was. There was only one person cocky enough to text her at midnight with that kind of energy.
Her fingers flew across her screen.
The response was almost immediate. Of course it was. Trent Marshall probably had his phone glued to his hand when he wasn't throwing fastballs at Nickerson Field.
Lucia could practically hear his smug laugh through the screen. She imagined him in his off-campus apartment—probably one of those bougie brownstones on Comm Ave that his socialite mother helped him lease—sitting there with that infuriating smirk on his stupidly handsome face.
She shouldn't engage. Lucia knew this. Every fiber of her psych-major brain told her that responding to Trent's attention-seeking behavior would only reinforce it. Classical conditioning, operant reinforcement—she'd literally just reviewed this material.
But here she was, heart racing, fingers typing, unable to stop herself from falling into their familiar rhythm of banter.
Lucia's breath caught. No. He didn't get to do this. He didn't get to text her in the middle of the night with that kind of loaded statement, not after months of being an absolute menace. Not after the cafeteria incident. Not after the library smugness. Not after he'd somehow found out about her condition and tried to—
She shook her head, pushing away the memory of his failed blackmail attempt. That particular disaster had ended with her threatening to report him to the Dean and Trent backing off so fast he'd nearly tripped over his own Jordans.
Her finger hovered over the send button. She should end it there. Clean, final, no room for misinterpretation. But then—because apparently she enjoyed emotional chaos—she added one more message.
She hit send before she could second-guess herself, then immediately regretted it. What was she thinking? Sending him an angry ball-cutting kaomoji? Real mature, Lucia. Very therapeutic.
Her phone buzzed immediately.
Lucia threw her phone across her bed like it had personally offended her entire family line. Which, in a way, it kind of had. Her face was burning—from anger, she told herself. Definitely anger. Not from the way her stomach had done a little flip when he called her threatening him "hot."
She grabbed her pillow and screamed into it, a muffled sound of pure frustration that hopefully didn't carry through the thin dorm walls to her neighbors.
Trent Marshall was going to be the death of her.
And the worst part?
She didn't actually block him.