酷视

And even more importantly, given Irene\'s insistence on bringing her out to see something, Cassie couldn\'t help but feel curious.

"Just a little bit further," Irene urged her friend as she rushed down the street, looking around at every intersection, as if she was a hunting dog trying to catch the smell of her prey.

\'She really looks like she\'s smelling something out,\' Cassie thought, even more puzzled than she was before. \'Wait, what if she\'s trying to bring me somewhere where her other friends would…\'

Cassie\'s lips pressed together as she turned her mouth into a single, slim line.

\'Nah. She might be a bitch… Or she might be simply misguided and mistaken in her ways. But up until now, she never gave me any reasons to believe she\'s that much of a trash human being!\'

Controlling her anger was something that Cassie could do to a surprisingly huge degree. As an introvert at heart and someone struggling to get the words out of her mouth with those that she didn\'t really know, she learned how to read the atmosphere and control her feelings, not to say the wrong things or act in the wrong way while out with others.

And yet…

\'What was she apologizing to me about? And why am I even following her?\' Didn\'t I decide to cut the contact?\' Mere few minutes after leaving the restaurant, Cassie\'s mind bogged down on those questions as she lost the grip over herself.

The reality took a turn too quickly and too drastically for the heartbroken girl to easily process all the changes and adapt to them.

\'It\'s all Peter\'s fault!\'

A stray thought appeared in her mind, startling the girl to the ends of her mind.

\'What the hell was that?\' she asked herself, suddenly scared of her own brain and the weird ways it was operating today. Yet,  before she could properly give the issue some thought, Irene suddenly stopped.

Nearly crashing into her \'friend,\' Cassie shook her head and cleared her thoughts. She then took a step back and looked at her friend, only to see her raise her arm up and point at something with a guilty and unsure look on her face.

\'What is she even…\'

"They are over there," Irene finally raised her hand up and locked it in place, settling on what she was pointing at.

Puzzled, Cassie followed Irene\'s arm and then turned over to where she was pointing at…

Only to see Peter walk side by side with a girl that could easily put all the school idols of the entire city if not a whole damn country to shame.

That girl had a feeble frame, giving off the vibe of someone who had to be protected and cherished at all costs… While boasting a bust even bigger than Irene\'s -not to speak about how much bigger her breasts were than Cassie\'s - wide hips and long, extremely long, and beautiful white hair.

"Are they… holding hands?" Cassie asked, shocked by the sight.

Her heart ached. Seeing Peter, someone who she still wasn\'t ready to give up on…

\'I need to apologize,\' a distant part of her soul somehow pushed the thought to the top of her head, through all the conflicted and painful feelings that otherwise flooded her heart. \'I need to apologize, explain everything, ask for forgiveness…\'

In the last few days that Cassie spent enclosed in her room and thinking about what happened, she gave some thought to how everything had to look from Peter\'s perspective.

And it wasn\'t a pretty sight whatsoever. In fact, after putting herself in his shoes, the only way in which she could sum up her own behavior was greatly disjointed with how Cassie actually looked at herself, who she considered herself to be.

Yet, as quickly and surprisingly as this thought appeared, it vanished from her mind, pushed away by the mix of shock, despair, regret, anger, fury, betrayal…

"That\'s why I\'m sorry," Irene spoke with a face full of guilt… Or was it really guilt? Wasn\'t it anger by any chance? And what were those small sparks of an entirely different emotion dancing at the bottom of her eyes? "It looks like my meddling, rather than helping you out, made things even worse!"

With her mind already struggling to process her own emotions, Cassie simply ignored her observation, focusing on her own emotions rather than paying attention to the emotions of someone else.

Somewhere in the process, Cassie\'s sense of guilt for the pain she inflicted on Peter vanished. There simply wasn\'t enough room in Cassie\'s heart for her to feel guilty while going through all those different emotions!

And before she could even think about what she was supposed to do, or when she rushed forward, what she was supposed to say… Cassie already rushed ahead, stopping not on the crossing over the street, only having some miracle and fate to thank for how no car turned her into a bloody pancake plastered all over the driveway.

Cassie rushed forth, and in a mere moment, she reached the pair of her disgusting ex who somehow managed to get over the supposedly painful breakup and find himself such an otherworldy beauty!

As Cassie got closer, her worst fears proved to be true when she could no longer deny the fact that the two were holding each other hands, something she fervently blamed the distance and her bad eyesight for.

And when she finally caught up with the pair and rushed past them only to rapidly turn around and stand in their path, only a single thought was left in her mind.

A single sentence that fully encompassed all the feelings bustling in her soul.

"Who the hell is she?!"