Chapter 127: The Kindness She Could Explain

Giselle lowered her eyes.

Elias was looking up at her with those black eyes, and the request inside them was almost painfully clear. There was expectation there, and a little uncertainty, and something else she could not immediately name. It made his face look softer than it should have, as if he had placed something fragile in her hands and trusted her not to crush it.

She understood what he meant.

If she sat with him, the rumors would become harder to dismiss. Even if they were not actually together, other students would think Elias had some close relationship with her. The girls who wanted to approach him would hesitate. Most of them would give up before reaching his table.

In other words, he was asking to trade reputation for peace.

Even that reputation would only last a while.

Human memory was a strange thing. People could remember humiliations from ten or twenty years ago with painful clarity, yet forget something that had consumed an entire campus within days if a better piece of gossip came along. The rumor around them would fade eventually. Westbridge was wealthy, bored, and always hungry for the next scandal.

In Giselle’s eyes, there was a better solution.

Elias only needed to learn how to refuse people.

That would solve everything.

Except he could not do it. Some part of his softness, or what looked like softness, showed itself there. He could be clever, manipulative, and sharp when he wanted to be, but when a stranger pushed into his space with politeness as a weapon, he folded as if he had been trained to make himself convenient.

But after what had happened that night at the hotel, Giselle knew one thing clearly.

Elias was not weak.

Serena Blackwood’s control over him, his fall into that arrangement, the way he had been dragged into a life he could not easily leave, all of it belonged to a deeper pit than ordinary courage could climb out of. It was not something a person escaped just because they were strong. Even someone with a spine could be forced into a place where choice became a luxury.

Giselle, who had once been sheltered enough to judge from a distance, had finally understood that.

None of it was Elias’s fault.

Not the students who approached him. Not Serena’s possession. Not the way other people looked at him and assumed availability because he was beautiful, male, and unprotected in the wrong kinds of spaces.

Her thoughts settled.

She looked at Elias again. The uncertainty in his eyes had grown while he waited, and it made her decision easier than any argument could have.

"All right," she said.

Then she sat down beside him.

Joy appeared on Elias’s face so visibly that even Giselle felt it.

It was too bright for the quiet library, too unguarded for someone who had clearly planned this little scene from the beginning. That was the problem with him. Even when she knew he was setting a trap, there were moments when the trap looked like need, and her body reacted before her judgment could stop it.

Giselle glanced at him. "Keep working on your problems."

"Mhm." Elias’s eyes curved as he nodded.

Giselle did not simply sit there with nothing to do.

After a short while, she left her chair. When she returned, she had a laptop in her hands. No one saw where she had found it, but she placed it on the table, opened it, and began working as if she had brought it with her all along.

System Theta supplied the answer.

[She appears to have paid someone to buy it from them.]

Elias paused.

Someone actually sold it?

That laptop had probably contained years of files, saved passwords, course documents, half-finished assignments, and whatever personal messes its owner had never organized. Cleaning and transferring all of that would take forever.

[Fifty thousand dollars.]

Elias’s breath caught.

Fifty thousand dollars.

That was enough to build a ridiculous high-end workstation, the kind with specs so excessive only gamers, editors, or people with too much money and too little restraint would even understand them. Giselle had apparently used that amount to buy a secondhand laptop from some student just so she could blend into the library better.

Damn it.

The academic atmosphere vanished from Elias’s mind instantly.

He had been in this dramatic campus romance routine with Giselle for long enough that he had almost forgotten she was also a small capitalist nightmare. Fifty thousand dollars for a prop. For a library prop.

If she was going to throw that away, why not throw it at me?

System Theta did not answer.

It probably knew better by now.

With the two main characters of Westbridge’s juiciest rumor sitting together in the library, attention was unavoidable.

The attention inside the library was only the beginning. Someone took a picture. Someone else sent it to a friend. The friend put it in a group chat, and within an absurdly short time, the campus knew that Elias Kane and Giselle Frost were sitting together at a library table as if the last rumor had not already done enough damage.

People started coming to see it for themselves.

Gossip had its own gravity. Students who had never cared about either of them suddenly found urgent reasons to visit the library. Some walked past their table too slowly. Some pretended to search the shelves nearby. Others sat at a distance with open laptops and eyes that kept lifting.

No one was above a messy story. Money, manners, grades, family names, and polished social circles did not change that.

The joy on Elias’s face faded little by little.

At first, he kept his eyes on the textbook. Then his shoulders drew in. His pen stopped moving. His teeth caught lightly at his lip, and his hands came together under the table, fingers twisting with the sort of nervous pressure that did not fit the calm smile he had worn earlier.

Giselle had been working on the laptop, but she had also been watching him.

The change was easy to see.

He was retreating into the same state he had shown at the hotel, when the weight of other people’s eyes had pressed too hard and his composure had started to fray. Giselle looked at him and felt a quiet, unshowy frustration.

This had been Elias’s solution.

Had he thought about what would happen afterward?

She could ignore other people’s opinions. Elias could not. He had never been able to do that, no matter how clever he was, no matter how often he acted as if the world’s judgment was simply another bad smell in the room.

"I think that’s enough," Giselle said, turning her head toward him. "Don’t you?"

Elias blinked as if waking up.

"Huh?"

He had not followed the question.

Giselle closed the laptop. "I think we can leave now."

For a long while after today, no one would approach him so casually.

Elias nodded at once. His eagerness gave him away. He had wanted to leave for some time.

"Okay," Giselle said. "I’m returning the laptop."

Elias’s head tilted slightly.

Returning it?

Knowing Giselle, she was not going to ask for the money back. Which meant she had spent fifty thousand dollars to rent a campus-life prop for less than an hour.

Elias felt that loss in his chest as if someone had reached into his wallet personally.

A short while later, Giselle came back. "Let’s go."

Elias started packing his things.

He moved with more care than usual, clearly trying to avoid attracting any more attention than they already had. Books went into the backpack one after another. His notebook followed, then his pencil case, then the textbook that had been open in front of him. When he slid the last book inside and lifted the bag by one strap, a tearing sound cut through the table’s quiet.

The bottom of the cheap backpack split open.

Books surged downward.

Giselle moved before the first one hit the floor. Her leg shot forward, and her knee braced the collapsing bottom of the bag, stopping the books from spilling across the library carpet in front of everyone.

Several students nearby had already looked over.

Giselle’s voice dropped. "Give it to me."

Elias handed her the backpack obediently.

She kept her knee under the torn bottom, gripped both sides, then flipped the heavy bag with controlled strength. The opening was now on top, and the weight of the books settled safely inside instead of pouring out.

The whole thing had to weigh more than fifteen pounds.

Giselle held it out to him. "Carry it like this for now. We’ll buy you a new one later."

Her words stopped.

Elias was looking at her with red eyes.

Moisture gathered at the edges, trembling as if one wrong breath would make it fall. He looked as if he was trying not to cry and failing in slow motion.

Giselle understood after a second.

Shame.

Anyone would feel some of it if their bag tore open in front of half a library. For Elias, it was worse. There was likely a trace of self-consciousness under it too. The backpack was cheap, probably not even a hundred dollars, and now it had betrayed him in the middle of a room already hungry to look at him.

Giselle had saved the moment before it became a spectacle.

Elias reached out with both hands and took the backpack from her. Their fingers brushed, whether by accident or because he let the moment happen, Giselle could not tell.

His face grew redder.

"Thank you," he whispered. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

It was only two words.

Somehow, they carried feeling he had not managed to hide.

Even Giselle, who had never dated anyone and had spent most of her life treating romantic entanglement as something that happened to other, less disciplined people, understood the look in his eyes.

She withdrew her hand and kept her face calm. "Let’s go."

Elias shifted with the bag.

His body wavered, and for an instant it looked as if the weight might pull him sideways. Giselle caught the backpack again.

"Never mind," she said. "I’ll carry it."

Elias really began to cry then.

One tear slipped from the corner of his eye and traced down his cheek. He lowered his head, embarrassed and grateful all at once, and his voice caught when he spoke.

"Thank you. Really."

Giselle fell silent.

Elias was too small in that moment. Not physically, exactly, though the heavy bag and his thin wrists made him look more delicate than he should have. It was the way he stood there, overwhelmed by one basic act of help, as if no one had ever made protection feel that simple before.

Of course he would feel something for her.

Of course he would look at her that way.

But Giselle could not answer that feeling. She did not know how to answer it, and she did not trust herself to learn in a crowded library with students pretending not to watch them.

So she said nothing.

Elias did not mind.

He had only needed to give her the look. Giselle could interpret the rest on her own.

He lowered his head and wiped at his tears, laughing brightly inside while his face stayed wounded and soft.

[Giselle Frost favorability increased. Current: 30%.]

If you like helping me this much, then help me for the rest of your life.

They left the library together.

Once they were outside, Giselle handed the backpack back to him. Her expression had returned to its usual cool restraint, and with the open air around them, she looked less like someone caught in a rumor and more like a person stepping out of one by choice.

"I have something to do," she said. "I’ll go first."

She turned and left before Elias could answer.

Elias watched her walk away until the distance made conversation impossible. Then he shifted the backpack easily into one arm.

What a joke.

If his body were truly that weak, he probably would not be able to get out of bed at all.

It was only enough to fool a girl who had never been in love before.