Chapter 2: The Aftermath

Once the high of that legendary Friday night finally wore off, Damian’s brain did what it always did: it started overthinking everything. By Saturday morning, he’d replayed the tape from every possible angle. No matter how he spun it, the facts were clear—Pamela had totally taked advantage of him. She’d caught him off guard, and her moves and charms hadn’t given him a single second to actually think. End of story.

Like you would’ve even tried to stop her, the sarcastic voice of his conscience teased as he tied his sneakers.

“That’s not even the point,” he grumbled, yanking his laces with an annoyed jerk.

He needed to set the record straight. He had to tell her exactly what he thought of the whole bizarre, surreal situation—a situation so ridiculous, by the way, that literally nobody on earth would believe it actually happened.

Fantastic, he thought, his internal voice dripping with venom. With my legendary social skills, this is going to be friggin’ awesome.

He sighed, pissed at himself for not having a plan. Wasn’t that supposed to be his whole thing? Being the “logic guy”? He stood up and headed for breakfast, his stomach feeling like it was full of lead.

Maybe if she sees me at school, she’ll actually try to talk, he hoped, though he knew he was delusional.

As expected, Monday was a total disaster. Damian couldn’t get anywhere near her. It wasn’t like he could just stroll up to her at lunch and drop a “We need to talk!” while the entire varsity cheer squad watched. That would be suicide. Straight-up social execution. He might as well have walked up and punched Brent Miller in the jaw. Just thinking about it gave him hives.

He finally caught a glimpse of her in the hall after the last bell. She was basically glued to that human octopus she called a boyfriend, and all Damian got was a tiny, “whatever” smile as she walked past.

“God, I fucking love Saturdays so fucking much! Seriously, they’re the best thing ever!” Danny hyped as they cleared the school gates.

“You don’t really need to say ‘so fucking much,’ Danny. ‘Love’ already carries the intensity; adding an emphatic phrase is just redund—”

Danny stopped dead and just stared at him, deadpan. Damian caught himself and bit his tongue. “My bad. I did the thing again, didn’t I?”

“Yep. It’s exactly that kind of shit that makes people forget your name is actually Damian and just call you ‘Nerd,’” Danny said, giving him a playful shove. Damian didn’t even try to argue; the truth hurt.

“Anyway,” Danny continued, his voice going full-on theatre kid. “Like I was saying—it’s Saturday, bro! Saturday! We have thirty-six hours of zero school. Do you even get how massive that is?”

Damian gave him a small, smug smile. “You realize this literally happens every seven days, right?”

“I know,” Danny said, mocking Damian’s “well-actually” voice perfectly. “But that certainly doesn’t make it any less enjoyable, now does it, Professor?”

Damian finally cracked a laugh. Danny was a total clown, but he was effective. He was the only person who could actually snap Damian out of his own head for five minutes.

But as soon as they split up, the anxiety came rushing back to wreck his mood. He couldn’t just let it go. He needed a logical reason for why any of that Friday night madness had happened. A day and a half stuck in his own brain without being able to talk to her... Fuck, he thought gloomily. This is going to be a long-ass weekend.

He spent it all brooding, locked in his room like he was hiding from a goddamn crime scene. He was even more of a ghost than usual, barely coming out for food, his mind stuck in a feedback loop of pure anxiety. Honestly, the whole situation was a toxic mess. He couldn’t figure out what was actually trashing his brain more: the fact that she now knew about his ‘situation’, or the bone-chilling fear that she’d blab to the whole school and turn his life into a non-stop roast session.

He was a total wreck. Mostly because, despite his soul-crushing anxiety, he simply couldn’t stop getting rock-hard every single time he thought about her mouth. He ended up jerking off to the memory of that mind-blowing head five separate times over the weekend, his brain stuck on a high-definition loop of every wet, slurping detail. Each time he finished, the post-nut clarity hit him like a freight train, making the mental spiral even worse.

Get real, genius, his inner critic hissed. She only kept her mouth shut so far because she felt sorry for the local charity case. It was a pity-suck.

Yeah, okay, but follow the logic, Sherlock, he argued back with himself, gripped by a frantic need for it to be real. She literally took the whole thing down to her tonsils. You don’t do that out of pity, she must have liked it, right?

Please! She was hammered! That’s obviously it! the critic fired back. She was totally wasted, probably saw a giant blurred shape, and went for it. For sure she doesn’t even remember your name today. To her, you’re just ‘Nerd #4’ with the weirdly large problem.

But she’d seemed completely sober. Her eyes were clear, her movements were sharp, and she’d known exactly what she was doing. The war in his head raged on and on, going over and over every single detail: the floral scent of her hair, the insane, sliding heat of her mouth, the way she looked up at him through her lashes—until by Monday morning, he wasn’t even sure what was reality and what was just some pathetic fan-fic his desperate, touch-starved brain had cooked up.

Pedaling toward school with a massive headache, Damian promised himself he’d finally handle it. He’d woken up at the crack of dawn and spent over two hours rehearsing a “cool” speech—a perfectly logical, structured argument that would shut down the confusion once and for all.

First period kicked off with the absolute train wreck that was Bobby “Einstein” Harris. The assignment was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and it was painfully obvious Bobby hadn’t even bothered to skim the SparkNotes. Miss Black, the literature teacher, was right in the middle of a brutal, soul-crushing prophecy about Bobby’s future career in flipping burgers when a knock on the door temporarily saved the meathead from total annihilation.

To the collective jaw-drop of every guy in the room, Pam walked in. She was rocking a pleated skirt that sat way above the knee and a white blouse thin enough to give a localized preview of her lace bra.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” she said to the teacher, dropping that trademark, sugar-sweet smile that worked on everyone. “The Vice Principal needs Damian for a few minutes. She asked me to come grab him.”

The silence in the room was deafening. Every single head swiveled toward Damian like he’d suddenly grown a second head. The spotlight felt like a hundred-pound weight. Why would Miss Devon want the school’s star nerd? And more importantly...

“How the hell does Pamela Van Buren even know you’re alive?” Danny hissed, his face turning a hilarious shade of jealous green.

Damian didn’t even blink. He just adjusted his glasses, his heart already starting to hammer against his ribs like a trapped bird.

“Flanagan, go ahead,” Miss Black sighed, already turning back to resume her execution of Bobby Harris.

Okay, this is it, Damian thought, his resolve hardening even as his palms started to get gross and sweaty. It’s do or die. Time to see if my speech actually works in the real world.

He stood up and walked out, feeling twenty-five pairs of eyes burning holes into his back. The second the heavy classroom door clicked shut, Pam turned to face him.

“Hi, Nerd,” she said, sounding way too cheerful for a Monday morning.

“Hi,” he replied, trying his best to sound like a normal human and not a guy who’d spent the last two days obsessing over her. “What does Devon want with me?”

She giggled—a sound that made his stomach do a literal backflip. “God, you really are such a nerd.” She reached out and snagged his hand, her skin warm and soft. “Come on. Follow me.”

He hesitated for a split second, but his body was already moving. She led him through a maze of hallways, eventually stopping in front of the old science lab—a dusty room that was basically just a graveyard for broken beakers and storage crates. Damian crossed his arms, leaning on the one logical thing he knew for sure.

“Devon didn’t send you, did she?”

Pam put on this fake look of total shock. “Wow, look at that big brain go! Such incredible intuition!” She winked at him.

“Pam, seriously, what do you want?” he asked, his voice sounding a little more annoyed than he intended.

“Someone’s grumpy today,” she teased, pulling a brass key out of her pocket and sliding it into the lock.

“How did you even get—” He started to ask, his “need-to-know” nerd brain momentarily overriding his stress, but she just gave him a knowing smirk.

“Trust me, you definitely do NOT want to know, Nerd.”

“Well, look, we need to talk,” he blurted out. Finally. The words were out.

The queen of the school just shrugged like it was no big deal. “Okay. Let’s talk then.” She pushed the door open and waved him inside.

The lab was huge, smelling like ancient dust and rotting wood. Boxes were stacked everywhere next to heavy workbenches where generations of kids had probably failed physics before them.

“So,” she said, leaning back against a table and looking way too comfortable. “What’s on your mind, Nerd?”

Damian was all set to demand if this was just some huge prank, but before he could even get a word out, Pam draped her arms around his neck. The smell of her perfume hit him like a truck—a total, dizzying flashback to the parking lot. This time, though, he actually kept his head on straight.

“No, hold on,” he said, pulling back and putting a few feet of “safety” between them.

She raised an eyebrow, looking totally surprised that he’d actually rejected her, but she waited. Damian cleared his throat, his eyes glued to the floor.

“Pam ... what was the deal with the other night?”

“Seriously, Flanagan? Do you really need me to draw you a map?”

He didn’t look up. He just stayed stone-faced, waiting.

“Fine, whatever,” she said with a shrug. “I sucked you off. Case closed.”

Damian rolled his eyes, his face heating up. Did she really think he was that clueless? “I mean why did you do it?”

“Because I felt like it,” she shot back.

Damian almost let out a cynical laugh. “That’s it? That’s your whole reason?”

Pam stared at him for a few seconds, her “popular girl” mask finally slipping. She looked down, her voice getting a little more honest, maybe even a tiny bit guilty. “Well ... okay, look. I spied on you in the bathroom. I saw... him.” She gestured vaguely at his crotch. “And I just couldn’t help myself. I had to know.”

Damian’s jaw hit the floor. He crossed his arms, his “I’m-being-victimized” meter red-lining. “Well, you shouldn’t have! I told you to stop, remember? And what would you even do that? I told you I have a ... a problem, and you—”

“Are we still on this?” she cut him off. “Will you please tell me why the hell you think you have a ‘problem’?”

She sounded genuinely confused. Damian just stared at her, totally thrown by how sincere she looked. He took a breath and finally just spat it out.

“Because it’s like ... way too big, okay? Obviously. I don’t even have to tell you—you saw the damn thing,” he said, his face turning a deep, burning crimson that made his ears glow. “That’s why I never hit the showers with the guys after gym. I’m literally ashamed to even unzip. I’m a straight-up freak.”

He said it like he was confessing to a literal murder, like his “problem” was the only reason he was such a social disaster. Pam just stared at him, her mouth hanging open, before she finally just exploded.

“Are you actually, like, brain-dead?” she burst out, her voice echoing off the glass beakers. “I have never heard a bigger load of literal bullshit in my entire life! Like, are you even for real right now, Damian?”

Damian blinked, finally looking up from the floor to find her straight-up scowling at him. He looked totally lost, which just made her more annoyed. “You actually think you’re a freak, don’t you?” She took a deep breath, trying to stay chill like she was dealing with a particularly slow toddler.

“Oh my god! Alright, listen to me really carefully, because I’m only saying this once and I’m not gonna repeat it,” she said, stepping into his personal space until he could smell her perfume. “You need to be, like, obsessed with your huge friend down there. Do you hear me? PROUD. Like, you should be walking around with the biggest ego-trip in the history of the school.”

Damian just gave her a skeptical “yeah, right” look. He was still deep in his own head, stuck in a pity party that was clearly driving her absolutely insane.

“I’m for real, Damian. Like, seriously, stop acting like you have a literal disease or something. You have zero reasons to feel like a loser—you have to believe me,” Pam said, her voice dropping into a softer, more intense gear that actually made him listen.

“What you’re packing ... it’s a gift, okay? Like, you straight-up won the genetic lottery, you idiot.” She winked, her tone turning teasing again as she saw him start to melt. “It’s a gift that’s gonna make a lot of lucky girls very, very happy. Honestly, since when is being huge a bad thing? That’s main character energy, Damian. Own it.”

Damian wasn’t 100% sold, but he could feel his entire defensive wall starting to melt under her gaze. He was so incredibly confused; his brain was spinning, trying to reconcile years of deep-seated shame with the way she was looking at him right now—like he was a prize instead of a punchline.

“Are you even being serious right now?” he asked, his voice cracking slightly. He looked at her, searching for even a hint of a prank or a hidden camera. “Like, you’re not just saying that to be ‘nice’ so I don’t feel like a total freak of nature? You’re actually for real?”

She rolled her eyes so hard they probably heard it in the next zip code. “Damian, honey, look at me. Like, actually look at me.”

She stepped even closer, her eyes locked onto his, making sure he couldn’t do his usual move and stare at his shoes. “I basically own this school, and I know you know that. I could have literally any guy I want, right? Any jock, any senior—whatever. And yet, here I am. I tracked you down, followed you into a parking lot like a total stalker, and got on my knees just to get a taste of that ‘problem’ of yours. Why the hell would I lie to you? If it were gross or weird, I’d be as far away from you as possible. But instead, I’m literally obsessed. Does that sound like I’m just being nice, or are you actually that dense?”