He Used Our Sex Tape To Blackmail Me Out Of Harvard Chapter 10
I thought that would be the last of it. That my life and Preston’s would never cross again.
Not six months into my first term, my father called me, his voice tight with panic.
“Luna. That Ashford boy has somehow found out you’re alive. He knows you’re studying in London.”
“I can’t hold him off anymore. He’s going to come looking for you.”
“Mm. He’s already here.”
I set the phone down and looked at the man standing a short distance away.
Preston stood in the wind on the bank of the Thames, gaunt to the point of unrecognizability, worn thin enough that he looked ten years older.
He walked over, his eyes rimmed with red.
“My little moon. I got the necklace back.”
His hand trembled as it opened. On his palm lay the crescent-moon necklace—the very one he had told me to hand over to Chelsea.
His eyes were full of hope, and full of a grovelling desperation.
I glanced down, and gave a soft laugh.
“You know as well as I do—you can’t unring a bell.”
“No.” He clenched his fist. His words tumbled over each other. “Chelsea’s in prison. There won’t be any other women. I only want you. Trust me, little moon, please—”
“Have I ever *not* trusted you?”
I looked at him, my lips curling. “Twice. And you saw what it got me.”
His mouth trembled. He couldn’t speak. The tears fell one after another.
Ten years. He had saved me. He had helped me. He had loved me.
I had imagined every good future.
I really had believed he was the one who would walk through this life with me.
But now—there was truly no point.
“Preston. Go home.”
“There’s no going back for us.”
Preston didn’t go home.
He stubbornly tried to prove his remorse with time.
Every day, he waited on the path I took to campus.
Flowers. Food. Drinks.
In the end, it was my mother, seeing how relentlessly he was tormenting me, who called the Ashfords.
I don’t know what she said to them, but by that evening they had flown to London and taken him away.
For three years after that, we had no contact.
On the day I graduated, I heard through an old classmate—
The Ashfords had cut off Preston’s ability to leave the country. In his rebellion, or perhaps as some kind of self-punishment, he had given up his Harvard admission.
He drank himself to ruin, wrecked his health.
Now, they said, he couldn’t leave the hospital.
I listened to it the way you listen to a story about someone you barely know. Then I turned the page.
In the distance, the sunset was beautiful.
My father and mother stood side by side, flowers in their hands, smiling as they walked toward me.