wildflower | cth

8.2 - stood up

"Do you have a minute?" Ashton asked after knocking on my door softly. I was going to tell him off, ask him to leave me alone in my room but when I looked at him, I saw that his usual carefree face was filled with worry.

"Yeah, what's up?" I asked while I put away my phone. He walked over and took the chair from my desk to sit on.

"Lia asked me not to tell anyone but I have to talk to someone about this, I can't tell Sam either." He said nervously as he looked down at his hands.

"Did they get the results?" I asked, immediately putting a connection with the test we took last week. He gave me a nod and I looked down too, "It was your dad?"

"He was never in my life, my mom never talked about him either. What if she knew what he did? What if that is the reason they broke up?" He asked worried.

"If I can believe what my dad has told me, then your dad was just a fucking asshole and I'm sure that's why your mom ended things. I have only met your mom like once but I'm sure she wouldn't have hidden something like that. According to my dad, not even my mom knows and she was in the house when it happened. So unless your father confessed to your mom, I don't think she knew."

"All of these guys are so proud to be legacies and this house is one of the most popular ones, but how can we be proud of this fraternity if we know what kind of evil they tried to hide? My father raped a woman in this house and your father covered for him, yet we are proud of the house we live in and belong to." He said slowly, his voice was filled with disbelief and disgust.

"We need to change something, or at least do something to disconnect us from the past. To stop being proud of the men who build this fraternity to the size it is now and start being proud of the men living in it now. Because I wouldn't imagine anyone in here capable of doing such things, we know better than our fathers once did." I replied with a soft sigh before unlocking my phone again. He let out a soft chuckle when he saw I had Lia's profile open on instagram but I quickly closed it and went to my notes.

"Still no luck in getting an actual conversation out of her?"

"We talked about what happened and how I should handle the conversation with Emily but nothing more than that. She's been in my bed twice now and just like the first time, she wants to leave as soon as we're done." I admitted and he looked at me with a small smile while I opened the note I was looking for. "I've been thinking about how we could come clean about what happened years ago without ruining any lives and how to move on from this. So I wrote down some ideas." I told him before handing over my phone to him.

He read through the ideas with a small smile on his face. "If Emily would agree on this, we should do it. Especially the last one."

"Apologise to the women that got hurt so many years ago, because the men in charge at the time fucked up." I said and he nodded, because it wasn't just Emily's mom.

"Do you think the guys would agree on a name change?"

"Some would need more convincing than others but I think I'll easily get enough members on board."

——

The second she walked through the front door, the party suddenly became a whole lot interesting. She smiled so widely as she greeted some friends. Her house didn't come in after her, she was here alone and she was looking so good. She was wearing a dress I had never seen her wear before, it was simple but it fit her perfectly. It showed off all the right parts while not giving away too much.

It had been two weeks since I asked her to be fuckbuddies but I had gotten no reply yet. I had went to the library to see her and tried to run into her at the hallways but I hadn't seen her. She wasn't sitting in the back of the library losing herself in books or in the hallways talking to her friends.