It wasn’t every day you got asked to dinner by your high school nemesis. On the one hand, I was surprised he had the gall to show his face around my father’s company at all. On the other, there was nothing Reece Roman could do that would surprise me.

They said no one was the same person they were in high school, and I decided I’d find out soon. Either way, despite my initial reaction to respond to his invitation with a resounding, “screw you,” there was a certain appeal in the way the tables had turned. Now I had something the great Reece Roman wanted, and he was willing to lower himself to having dinner with a commoner to get it.

Reece and I had a history as long as the one I shared with the town I’d grown up in and planned on never leaving. For most of that history, I’d barely been a blip on his radar, but my childish crush on him throughout grade school had blossomed into infatuation that ended abruptly in sophomore year of high school. Reece’s life was like a perfect mirror of mine in every way, as if we somehow existed in parallel universes where everything that had gone right for him had gone wrong for me. In fact, our literal mirror reflections were just about the only thing we didn’t have in common. He’d always been tall, broad, dark, and handsome with the money to wear the latest trends and a letterman jacket on top of them. I was a scrawny, freckled ginger who stumbled over his words, and sometimes his own feet.

Our fathers were both men who’d made their own way in the world, but his was a multi-billionaire while mine had to take out a second mortgage on the family home just to keep his small company afloat. We’d barely managed to hold out against Roman Enterprises’ gradual takeover, but my father always was a stubborn man. He always said that even though my brothers were the Alphas, I was the one who took after him. We were alike even in that regard, except that Reece’s younger brothers adored him while Patrick and Brayden had always viewed me as a tagalong. The irritating younger brother who could do no wrong in our father’s eyes, even if the rest of the world disagreed.

While Reece brought the school to victory at his football games, I sat on the sidelines and did my homework. At least until I stopped going to the games at all. The last day of Freshman year, I remembered being so elated that Reece had finally acknowledged my existence. Sure, it had only been to ask when the assembly was being held, but it was something. I’d gone off to help my dad at the factory that summer convinced that next year, things were finally going to be different. I’d shed my braces, traded my glasses for contacts and grown out my ginger locks into a less nerdy style. My summer job on the assembly line and puberty had worked in tandem to make me a slightly less lanky and awkward version of myself by the time I arrived back at school. Sure, I wasn’t anything like the girls Reece usually dated, and rumor had it, he’d never so much as looked twice at a guy, but there had always been something in my heart that said, He’s mine. Maybe he doesn’t see it now, but one day, even if it takes years, he’ll feel it, too.

Looking back, I was an idiot. It should have been obvious then to a kid with a perfect GPA and a few credits’ worth of college classes, but it wasn’t. Call it love, call it obsession, call it naïveté, but I’d only had eyes for Reece for as long as I could remember. When I first walked back through those double doors, I was on top of the world. All it took was one day to drag me right back down to the bottom.

* * *

I could still remember the look in his eyes when they’d met mine for the first time all summer. He’d gotten even taller over the break, and he already looked like a senior rather than the sophomore we both were. I had known with one glance that I all my summertime hopes and dreams were the product of delusion, because no ‘90s romcom makeover could make a guy like him think twice about a guy like me.

Except he stood there staring at me for long enough that the other kids in the hall had started to notice. The look on his face was blank, but it wasn’t anger or the apathy I was so used to seeing every time he looked right past me. For the first time in the fifteen years I’d been a satellite in the orbit of his perfect world, Reece Roman was actually seeing me.

His friends had noticed, too. Drew gave him a nudge and made a crack about him staring like a lovestruck idiot only in far less civil terms, and Reece’s trance turned to ice. He shoved Drew against a locker, slung his backpack over his shoulder and stalked down the hall.

We were scheduled in the same first-period English class, a fact that had been the reason for much rejoicing all summer. When I’d entered the room to take my seat, Reece was gone and he’d never shown up. I learned later that he’d transferred out of the class and two of the others we were supposed to have together. The only one he couldn’t get out of was gym, but that was only because there weren’t enough of us in the lower grades to make more than one class.

Reece ditched the first P.E. period, and the other kids were already whispering about the possibility that his absence was connected to whatever had happened in the hallway. I was still struggling to process it myself, and for the first time in my academic career, I found myself the center of attention.

Anonymity wasn’t nearly such a bad deal, as I soon discovered.

Before long, the whispers became rumors. Word traveled fast that the richest, most popular guy in school had imprinted on one of the nerdiest, weirdest kids from the wrong side of the tracks. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not, or whether either one of us had even been in the same room since. It was enough in the land of folly and farce to qualify as a done deal.

In the beginning, I felt worse for Reece than I did for myself. After all, it wasn’t like I had any room to go down on the social ladder. A few people even started to say things like, “At least he’s not an ugly duckling anymore,” as if they needed a reason to justify Reece’s supposed interest in me. I did my best to deny the rumors to everyone who would listen. Kids who hadn’t so much as talked to me for years suddenly wanted to sit with me at lunch. Under any other circumstances, I might have found the sudden escape from social outcast status to be a godsend, but my adolescent heart still beat only for one Alpha and the idea of causing him pain, even if it was only by association with me, was unforgivable.

The kids who did see me, the ones who took it far enough to shove me and strike my books out of my hands every chance they got, started to back off. After all, no one wanted to risk crossing Reece Roman’s omega on the off chance that the rumors were true. I got to enjoy that reprieve for a couple of weeks, until fate in the form of Mr. Simon, the P.E. teacher, decided to pair us together for drills.

That elicited all the knowing looks and whispered taunts one might expect from a room full of teenagers with nothing better to do than create drama where there wasn’t any, and I could feel Reece getting progressively more pissed off as time went on. We were throwing the medicine ball when Drew purposely beaned me out of nowhere, sending me to the ground.

“Aren’t you gonna help your boyfriend up?” the other Alpha taunted.

Reece looked down at me while I was still nursing my bleeding lip. I remembered watching the war behind his eyes as he considered his decision, and the sting when he made it. With a snort, he left me on the gym floor and walked back over to his buddies.

That was the day things changed. When the rumors that Reece had imprinted on me got twisted into a far more sinister theory that I was stalking him and simply couldn’t take no for an answer. Until then, I had lived in some no-man’s land where no one was quite sure what to do with me. I was still the nerd no one particularly liked if they noticed me at all, but the potential that Reece did like me kept them in limbo. Once the narrative was set and I was painted the villain, the bullying went from occasional taunts and light shoving to constant gossip, disgusted glances and the odd black eye if I lingered too long on my way home from school.

I started walking home with my brothers, even though I was too embarrassed to tell them why. The twins knew about the rumors, but in their senior year, the lowly concerns of sophomores scarcely made it to the upper echelons of their elite world with any kind of clarity. They couldn’t be there all the time. As the sophomore year I’d held out so much hope for wore on, the rumors my mother promised would fade with time only materialized further, taking on a backstory so complex I was almost impressed.

I wasn’t just stalking Reece, apparently. The entire summer, I’d been writing him love letters and sending him locks of my hair. I’d taken obsession to the point of sickness by flinging myself at him and apparently, my sole desire in life was to bear his love child.

Reece never actually participated in the physical bullying, but he never made an attempt to set the rumors straight, either. His crew picked me as the favored target of its pranks, and he seemed to take glee in proving his disdain by taking part at every opportunity. I couldn’t be sure if he was the one who’d come up with the incredibly original moniker of “stalker freak,” but I had quite literally caught him red-handed spraying it onto my locker.

It would have been so much easier if I could have said that my feelings for him had turned to disgust, but they hadn’t. Every prank and slur was a fresh betrayal. The one time I’d tried to appeal to the sense of mercy I wanted—needed—to believe he had, underneath all the cruelty and adolescent bravado, his friends had caught us talking and he’d quickly switched tunes from awkward denial to revulsion.

“I’m not fucking gay,” he’d spat when they came within hearing range, as if that had anything to do with me begging him to call off his dogs. “Just leave me alone.”

Those words dug the knife in deeper, and I wished it had just ended there. I wished they had just killed whatever self-destructive part of my heart still belonged to him, but they didn’t. Maybe if they had, I would have understood what the look in Drew’s eyes meant that day.

* * *

As I sat nursing a margarita at a table for two at the hippest restaurant in town, a familiar voice drew me out of the memories of the past.

“Ellis?”

His voice was full of confusion and the look in his eyes was the same as it had been on that first day after summer vacation in our sophomore year of high school. Here he was, the guy who helped make my adolescent years a hell that seemed unending, and he was looking at me like a deer in the headlights.

I hoped it was awkward for him. I hoped he would spend every minute of this long-avoided meeting squirming in his seat before I rejected his offer the way I wished my heart had rejected him all those years ago.

And yet, it still betrayed me with the way it quickened in his presence. He was taller and broader and more handsome than ever, and the three-day beard that covered what was once a clean-shaven face accented the hard cut of his jaw. Those blue eyes locked on me, only this time, I was strong enough to hold his gaze.

We were on my terms now. I just had to keep reminding myself of that.