His eyes narrow. “After four years of being a shitty guardian to you, a guardian who’s ruined your life, who’s toyed with it and played with it like it’s his own amusement park, I’m not going to be an even shittier one who toys with your body, you understand? So you’re going to get down from my desk, go into the bathroom and throw water on your face, rearrange your uniform to look respectable like it did when you entered my office, and then you’ll leave. You’ll only come to me if you need something your guardian or your principal can provide. Because that’s the extent of our relationship, and I want you to remember that.”
I’m a guardian.
A guardian is the one who defends.
He is the one who protects and keeps and preserves.
That’s from the dictionary.
I believe the dictionary. I believe in following the rules. I believe in doing the responsible thing.
Not to mention, I believe in being strong enough to do the responsible thing no matter how much I hate it.
This is not the responsible thing.
Nowhere in the dictionary or anywhere else does it say that a guardian is supposed to pick up his purple-loving, fire-breathing, havoc-wreaking wildcat of a ward’s phone and look at naked pictures of her.
Nowhere does it say that he’s supposed to not only look at those naked pictures but bring the phone up to his nose and smell the screen like a fucking pervert.
The dictionary, the rule books, all the fucking books don’t say that when a guardian smells the screen, he should then get a hard-on. Not that the hard-on ever went anywhere.
It was there five minutes ago when she finally left. It was there ten minutes ago when she was telling me about what she did last night.
And it has been there for longer than that.
Ever since she showed me those pictures, asking to be friends.
Friends.
Fuck friends.
So yeah, it’s there.
And it’s fucking throbbing.
It’s fucking hurting like a motherfucker and I want to bring it out and wrap my hands around it, and fucking jack off until I ruin her phone.
Until I come all over her naked photos.
Until I bring her back and fucking make her lick it all up, for doing these things to me.
For fucking with me, fucking with my head.
Sitting in my chair, I decide that I’m not going to do it, however.
I’m not going to do anything.
Because I’m a guardian. And a guardian doesn’t do these things.
A guardian is strong and good and fucking responsible and as I told her, I’ll be damned if I don’t live up to that.
Not to mention, I’m also the principal.
The principal who’s here to fix this school after all the indiscretions — similar indiscretions with students — done over the past year by none other than faculty members.
So I’m going to sit here and focus on my work.
And the first order of business is doing something that I’ve been avoiding doing for so long: implementing the bed check rule.
As a reminder that I’m here to do a job.
Not fuck around with a girl I should stay away from.
I’m not good at following the rules.
I’m not good at obeying or doing what I’m told or even doing the right thing or taking the high road.
But I’m doing it now.
I’m doing it because I promised him.
I promised to obey him, and I intend to follow through.
Even if it means that we won’t be friends. Even if it means that I have to stay away from him, and any relationship between us will be that of a guardian and a ward, or a principal and a student.
Even if it means that I have to watch him from afar when he leaves his cottage and makes that highly popular walk up to the school building. And that I have to sit on the stone benches and listen to all the girls giggle and fawn over him and pretend that I don’t want to scratch their eyes out. Not only during that walk but also other times, like when he goes to buy his lunch from the cafeteria or passes by in the hallway.
Without sparing them a glance.
Without sparing me a glance.
Besides, it’s not as if he wasn’t doing that before. It’s not as if I wasn’t doing any of those things before either.
We’ve both been following the same routine, the same pattern.
It’s just that it hurts now. It makes me ache. It makes me feel a kind of hollowness that I’ve never felt before.
And it’s because he’s my soulmate and I’ve just realized that.
I’ve just realized that he and I are the same, and now I won’t get to know him. I won’t get to get close to him.
I won’t get to kiss him.
Because I want to.
I want to give my first kiss to him.
I’m not sure when I decided that. Was it the moment Mo told me his story and everything simply clicked inside of me? Or when he confessed to all the crimes he’d committed, his regret so plain to see? Or it could have been even before that, every time I showed him my designs and he stared at them with a reverence that shook me to the core, the day he told me that he’d keep my secret safe.