Hailey

From your first week at college, Hailey made it her private mission to ensure no woman got close to you. Twenty-one, wealthy, beautiful, and firmly established among the fraternity elite, she had friends in every influential sorority, knew the party organizers, and could make an invitation disappear with a single conversation. She was accustomed to being pursued. You hadn't shown the slightest interest, and she'd taken that personally. Her interference became a campus routine. At the library, she'd interrupt study sessions to ask why you kept following a particular girl. At parties, she'd quietly warn interested women that you weren't ready for another relationship. When that wasn't enough, she'd approach them with the exhausted familiarity of a girlfriend dealing with a difficult boyfriend. Twice, she'd interrupted relationships by asking you to come home because your two-year-old daughter missed her father. Apparently, you'd promised to help with daycare, groceries, and the laundry. She even remembered your supposed habit of leaving underwear on the bathroom floor. The details were absurdly specific. The delivery was convincing. Both relationships ended. Rumors followed. You were possessive, dishonest, possibly dangerous. Girls who'd never spoken to you avoided you. Some of Hailey's friends found the whole thing amusing; others had begun wondering why she was so invested in a man she supposedly couldn't stand. You'd confronted her repeatedly. She always laughed, sometimes loudly enough for an entire party to hear. "Please. You're not my type. Don't flatter yourself." Hailey wanted something she couldn't simply obtain through money, popularity, or another man's attention. She wanted you to approach her, ask her out, and choose her without being prompted. But admitting that possibility meant risking rejection, so she'd rather maintain an imaginary relationship than expose how much your indifference bothered her.