His Social Anxiety Vanished the Day His First Love Came Back Chapter 2

"She won't be coming."

"Different circles. She wouldn't have any fun with us."

Marcus dropped the words like they cost him nothing and reached over to pull the wrap higher on Chloe's shoulders.

The group behind him let out a few muffled snickers.

"Right, dragging some stranger along would kill the mood."

"Marcus is as protective as ever. God forbid Chloe feel out of place."

They tossed the lines back and forth, and every one of them spelled out the same cruel truth.

In Marcus's world, I was the outsider. Chloe was the rightful leading lady, the one everyone gathered around.

In college, Marcus and Chloe had been the golden couple, and nobody disputed it.

Their families matched. Their faces matched.

It lasted until the year they graduated, when Chloe left the country without a word to anyone.

After that Marcus, who had always been so proud, fell apart completely and spent his days soaking himself in alcohol.

I was the one who quietly stayed beside him and took care of him down to the smallest thing.

That went on until alcohol poisoning put him in the hospital.

When he woke up, he stared at my swollen red eyes and said, out of nowhere, "Vivian, do you want to marry me?"

No flowers. No ring. He had never even said he liked me.

And that was how we blundered into signing the license.

I had thought that because I walked him through his darkest years, I had to mean something different to him.

But now there was the way he looked at Chloe: the fixed, hungry focus of a man who has just gotten back what he lost.

And I finally understood—these three years had been nothing but a compromise he settled for while he waited.

A car horn at the curb pulled me back.

"Well, since everything's been said, we'll be going."

Marcus turned and got into the black sedan beside him. He didn't even give my parents a token goodbye.

The streetlight stretched the shadows of the three of us long and crooked across the pavement.

My mother's rough fingers twisted together anxiously.

"Vivi... it's my fault for opening my big mouth. Did we make trouble for you again?"

She pressed the gift box in her hands into mine.

"You said last time that Marcus has been getting headaches. I knitted this scarf for him myself. Portland winters are damp and cold, and he works so hard. If his neck gets chilled, the headaches come."

"Go home and explain it to him properly. Married life is married life. Don't fall out over two old people like us."

Something thick and sour rose in my nose, and my eyes burned before I could stop them.

I stepped forward and gripped their cold hands tight. "It's all right, Dad, Mom. I'm the one who was a fool."

I looked toward the direction the car had disappeared.

"He's never going to respect you. So I don't want him either."

Marcus came home at three in the morning.

He caught sight of me still awake on the couch and stopped halfway through changing his shoes.

"Why aren't you asleep? Still sulking about tonight?"

He set a solid wood gift box on the coffee table in front of me.

"I was too harsh tonight. You know how I am with crowds."

"Your father likes tea, doesn't he? Give him this tin tomorrow. Call it a late birthday present from me."

I stared at the gold lettering stamped across the lid. Cloudmere. My eyes stung.

Cloudmere was a hundred-year-old tea house. It never sold loose leaf at all.

The only way to get a tin of their reserve oolong was as a free tasting sample with the season's most expensive signature pressed cake.

And I had just seen that exact signature cake in Chloe's photos.

How this tin had come into his hands didn't need spelling out.

I didn't even have the strength left to demand an answer. I just pulled out the document pinned under the box.

"Marcus, since Chloe is back, then we..."

He cut me off before I finished, impatient.

"Vivian, if you're going to keep picking at what happened at the restaurant, this stops being interesting."

Without warning, lightning tore across the sky outside.

Marcus turned his head toward the floor-length window before he could stop himself.

After a short silence, something seemed to come back to him, and his face changed in an instant.