Chapter 300 - 0300: It’s Just Like Before

Chapter 300: Chapter 0300: It’s Just Like Before

Elena’ s Point Of View

The cold of the marble floor finally seeped through my clothes, chilling my skin, but it was nothing compared to the absolute frost spreading through my chest. I sat there, knees pulled to my chin, staring at the shadows of my own office.

The familiar shapes of my desk, my awards, my carefully curated life had all dissolved into meaningless silhouettes. My breath came in jagged, pathetic little hitches that echoed in the silence. Each inhale felt like swallowing broken glass.

"It’s just like before," I whispered to the empty room, my voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over pavement. "God, it’s exactly like high school."

The memory didn’t just return; it lunged at me, vibrant and cruel, as if the last decade had been nothing but a commercial break. Suddenly, I wasn’t the CEO of a thriving company. I was sixteen again. I was the girl with the thick glasses, the oversized blazer, and the scholarship that felt like a target painted on my back.

That girl who believed hard work and good grades could protect her from anything. That girl who didn’t yet know how badly the world could hurt.

Back then, I was a total nerd. My life consisted of color-coded binders, organized index cards, and a desperate, burning need for top marks. I had a plan: get the grades, secure the full ride to university, land a corporate job, and drag my younger siblings as far away from my mother’s wicked, neglectful clutches as humanly possible. I used to lie awake calculating the exact number of days until graduation, as if counting them down could somehow make them pass faster.

Nothing else mattered. Nothing else could matter. My younger brother and sister depended on me, and I carried that weight like heavy armor, one I polished every single day so no one would see the dents underneath. But then, there was the abandoned boxing gym at the very back of the school compound.

I had found the gym by accident during my second month of junior year, slipping through a propped door while searching for a quiet corner to escape the cafeteria noise. It was usually empty, smelled of old leather and sweat, and had three rows of cracked wooden bleachers that made it the perfect place to hide and study without the whispers following me through the hallways.

The scholarship kids always got whispers. Poor charity case. Does she ever wear anything other than that faded blazer? Look at her glasses, she looks like a library ghost. I had learned to let those words slide off me, or at least I told myself I had.

That’s where I first saw him. Jaxx. Nobody knew where he came from or who his family really was; they just knew he was bad news wrapped in leather and dark denim. He hardly ever attended morning classes, and when he did, he sat in the back row with his boots up on the desk, looking like he was just visiting from a much more dangerous dimension, bored by the smallness of everyone around him.

The girls at school were utterly obsessed. He was broad-shouldered, fiercely handsome, well-built, and notoriously solitary. He didn’t date. He didn’t do flings. He didn’t linger in the hallways to chat up the cheerleaders or reply to the notes dropped into his locker. He existed in his own terrifying orbit, untouchable and magnetic.

A gravitational force that pulled everyone’s attention whether they wanted to give it or not. Even the teachers seemed to orbit around his silence, careful never to provoke it.

I had heard the stories. The teachers didn’t even look him in the eye when giving out detentions. The upperclassmen moved to the other side of the hallway when he walked by, full conversations dying mid-sentence. Rumors swirled about underground street fights, about trouble with organized crime, about a darkness that clung to him like heavy smoke. Some said his knuckles were permanently scarred from fights that never made it into any official record. Others whispered that his family had disowned him, or that he had no family left to speak of at all.

He was notorious, a storm in a school uniform, and yet, there I was, sitting on the dusty top bleacher with a massive biology textbook balanced on my knees, watching him hit the heavy leather bag until his knuckles bled through the cloth wraps. Day after day, I told myself I was only there because it was quiet enough to study. Day after day, I knew I was lying to myself, and day after day, I came back anyway.

"You’re going to fail that test if you keep staring at me instead of the diagrams, Nerd," he said one afternoon, not even looking up from his footwork as his fist cracked against the bag with rhythmic, bone-deep thuds.

My face turned five shades of red. Burning heat crawled up my neck and settled in my cheeks. I slammed my textbook shut, nearly dropping my highlighter. "I’m not staring! I’m... studying the mechanics of muscular contraction and force distribution. You just happen to be a convenient specimen."

He stopped then, unwrapping his bleeding knuckles, wiping sweat from his bare chest with a gray towel. His dark, dangerous eyes narrowed as he hopped over the ropes out of the ring. He walked toward the bleachers slowly, every step deliberate, the heat radiating off his body in waves that made the dusty gym air shimmer.

Up close, I could see the small scar cutting through his left eyebrow, the slight crook in his nose from a fight that hadn’t healed quite right, and the lethal intensity in his eyes. My pulse stuttered in a way no biology textbook had ever warned me about.

"A specimen? Is that right?" he asked, his voice low, gravelly, and deep with a dark amusement that made my pulse spike. He placed one hand on the wooden bleacher right beside my hip, leaning in close. "And what’s the medical diagnosis, Dr. Elena?"

"You’re... you’re overtraining," I stammered, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird trying to break free. "Your left shoulder is dipping. Your form is getting sloppy on the left hook because you’re exhausted."

He stared at me for three long seconds, and then he laughed... a deep, genuine, rumbling sound that felt like it belonged only to me in that abandoned room. The sound wrapped around my chest and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. I had never heard him laugh before. I didn’t even know he knew how. And that was the beginning of the end.

We spent six weeks like that. My quiet reading, his violent training. We became this weird, unspoken, secret duo that made no sense to anyone, including ourselves. He’d drop an extra green apple onto my textbook; I’d help him outline his literature essays, endlessly surprised to discover he actually cared about the subtext beneath his indifferent exterior. Sometimes I caught him watching me read, his expression unreadable, as though he were trying to memorize something he didn’t expect to keep.

"People write about tragedy because they’re afraid of it," he told me one rainy Tuesday while lying on his back on the mat, staring at the peeling ceiling paint. "Fitzgerald wasn’t romanticizing wealth. He was terrified of being poor and invisible. Just like you."

He understood me. He saw through my pristine report cards and my high-collared shirts right down to the desperate, terrified girl who was scared of ending up like her mother. There was a mind there... sharp, analytical, and hungry, hidden beneath all that carefully cultivated danger. I had never let anyone look at me that closely before, and some reckless part of me didn’t want him to stop.

"Elena, please tell me you’re not actually talking to him," my best friend Lexy warned me one afternoon, her voice hushed to a fearful whisper as we stood by my locker. Her fingers gripped my blazer arm with genuine panic. "He’s bad news, Elena. Seriously. Don’t do this to yourself. He’s not like the other guys in our year. He’s connected to real criminals, he’s dangerous, and he will tear you apart."

"You don’t know him," I snapped back, pulling my arm away, completely blinded by the way he looked at me when no one else was watching... like I was the only real, solid thing in a world full of fake, plastic shadows.

I was so stupid. I was completely spellbound by the boy everyone feared but no one truly knew. I wanted to be the one who unlocked him, who saw past the terrifying reputation to whatever truth lay beneath. I wanted to be special. I wanted to matter to someone who seemed to care about no one at all. Looking back, I think I mistook his intensity for devotion, when really it was just hunger with nowhere else to go.

One afternoon, the air in the gym was thick with the scent of upcoming rain. I was sitting on the bleachers, my pink highlighter poised over a dense paragraph about cellular respiration. Jaxx finished his set, his chest heaving, sweat glistening on his collarbone and shoulders.

"For once, let the textbook breathe and live, Nerd," he said, his voice a low vibration that made my skin tingle from ten feet away. He stepped out of the ring, his knuckles taped and red. Before I could offer a witty corporate-style defense, he reached out and gently removed my glasses, slipping them from my face and placing them on the bleacher behind him. His fingers brushed my hot cheek with unexpected, feather-light tenderness. "You are so beautiful without these. Why do you hide behind them?"

"I’m not hiding," I stammered, suddenly exposed and vulnerable without the familiar plastic frames on my nose. The world went soft and blurry at the edges, leaving only his dark silhouette in focus. "I’m focusing."

"Let’s box," he challenged, a lazy, wicked smirk playing on his lips that made my stomach do a complete violent flip. "Show me that left hook you’ve been critiquing."

I should have said no. I should have grabbed my glasses, packed my color-coded binders, and run all the way home. Instead, I stood up, my heartbeat loud enough that I was sure he could hear it too.

It ended within thirty seconds in clumsy laughter and us tumbling together onto the heavy blue wrestling mat. I lost my balance and fell onto his chest by mistake, my breath catching in my throat as my hands planted on his shoulders. I found myself lost in those dark, intense eyes that seemed to see straight through every defense, every lie, and every wall I’d spent sixteen years building.

His hands snaked around my waist, hot and heavy through my uniform shirt, roaming up into my hair until his fingers tangled in the elastic band and tugged it free. My dark hair spilled messy over my shoulders and his chest. I felt exposed in a way that terrified and thrilled me down to my bone marrow. No one had ever looked at me like that before. No one had ever made me feel like something other than the scholarship girl, the nerd, the invisible background character.

He leaned up and kissed me.

It was soft for half a second... a quiet, tentative question, and then it turned hard, possessive, and demanding, like he’d been starving for weeks and couldn’t hold back a second longer. A small, helpless gasp escaped my throat, and he drank it in, flipping our positions with effortless speed until he was hovering over me on the gym floor, his heavy body pressing me into the mat in a way that made the rest of the universe fade out.

My heart exploded against my ribs. This was my first kiss... the school’s notorious bad boy had officially taken my first kiss on a dirty wrestling mat, and I didn’t mind at all. I clung to him, completely overwhelmed, every rational thought I’d ever prided myself on dissolving into static.

"Relax, Bambina," he murmured against my mouth, his voice a dark, velvety gravel that sent shivers straight to my toes. "Breathe... and kiss me back."

I did. I threw my arms around his neck, pulling him down into me as the kiss deepened, growing infinitely hotter and steamier. His tongue slid past my parted lips, claiming my mouth with a possessive rhythm that made my knees go weak. His hands slid down from my hair, tracing the curve of my waist before sliding slowly, deliberately further up my thigh under my pleated school skirt, his warm palm searing through my tights.

Panicked heat flared through me, and I pulled my head back slightly, my chest heaving, gasping for air. "Jaxx..."

Instead of stopping completely, he nipped gently at my lower lip with his teeth, catching it in a tiny bite that made a quiet moan burst from my lips.

"Careful, Bambina," he whispered darkly, his dark eyes burning into mine with an intoxicating hunger. "I don’t bite... hard."

Before I could answer, his mouth slammed back down on mine, deeper and harder than before. His lips trailed a path of fire from my swollen lips to my cheek, down to my jawline, and then down the sensitive skin of my neck, pressing hard, bruised kisses right over my hammering pulse point. I gripped the shoulders of his shirt, my head rolling back as another helpless moan spilled out.

"Jaxx..." I whimpered, lost in the feverish sensation.

Suddenly, the heavy metal double doors of the gym burst open with a deafening, echoing clatter.

"I told you I saw them coming in here!" a sharp, mocking voice squeaked from the doorway.

Four girls from the senior class... including the head cheerleader and her cruel little circle, stood in the doorway, staring at me with wide, disgusted, and burning eyes. The shock on their faces quickly twisted into pure, ugly malice as they realized what they were witnessing.

"Oh my god," one of them snickered loudly, stepping inside with her phone raised. "Look at the scholarship charity case! Little Miss Perfect Nerd getting felt up on a dirty gym floor! Wait till the whole school sees this..."

Terror, cold and paralyzing, slammed into me like a freight train. My high school life, my scholarship, my reputation, my siblings’ future... it all flashed before my eyes. I shrank back in absolute fear, trying desperately to pull my skirt down, scrambling backward on the mat, hiding my face as hot tears of panic stung my eyes. I was going to be ruined. They were going to destroy me.

"Jaxx, please..." I choked out, trembling violently, hiding behind his massive frame.

Jaxx didn’t panic. He slowly stood up from the mat, adjusting his shirt with terrifying composure. The playful, soft heat in his eyes vanished instantly, replaced by a cold, murderous darkness that turned the temperature in the room to sub-zero.

He turned around and walked toward the four girls. He didn’t rush. Every single step was heavy, lethal, and dripping with raw menace. The sheer predatory aura radiating off him made the cheerleaders’ laughter die instantly in their throats.

He stopped just two feet from the girl holding the phone. He didn’t raise his voice. He dropped it into a low, terrifying growl that made the blood run cold in their veins.

"If you press record, if you say one word to anyone in this building, or if you even glance in her direction again," Jaxx said, his dark eyes dead and black as night, "I will personally make sure your families lose everything they own before the sun sets today. And I won’t just ruin your lives... I will make this town so unlivable for you that you’ll beg to leave."

The girls gaped, their mouths popping open like landed fish. The girl holding the phone began to shake violently, her face draining of all color as she stumbled back three steps, nearly tripping over her own feet. They looked at his eyes, saw the absolute, uncompromising truth in his threat, and realized he wasn’t playing a high school game. He was a monster who meant every single word.

"Stay clear of her," Jaxx hissed, stepping closer until they were literally cowering against the doorframe. "Don’t make me repeat this."

Without waiting for a response, they scrambled backward out the double doors, practically knocking each other over in a desperate, frantic hurry to escape the gym.

Jaxx didn’t watch them run. He turned back toward me, his expression softening just a fraction as he walked back to where I was trembling on the mat. He reached down, grabbed my glasses from the bleacher, and gently slid them back onto my face. Then, his large, warm hand wrapped firmly around mine, his fingers interlacing with my shaking ones.

He pulled me up to my feet in one smooth motion, drawing me close against his side. "Come on," he whispered against my forehead. "We’re leaving."

He held my hand tightly, pulling me out of the gym and through the crowded hallways, completely indifferent to the gaping stares of the students as he walked me away from the noise, protecting me from the world. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I had never felt safer in my entire life than I did walking beside the boy everyone else feared.

Back then, I thought that meant he loved me. I thought his terrifying protection was proof of something real, something noble. I wore his dangerous anger like a crown, proof that I finally mattered, that someone powerful would fight for me. For once in my life, I believed I wasn’t alone. I had no idea how wrong I was, or how much that single belief would cost me.