Her name was Ophelia, so of course, she was doomed to become arrogant and obnoxious from the start.

To be honest, I should have seen a lot of the signs from the beginning. Like with most people that I found interesting, I made sure to make good use of my discipline and refrain from giving myself any kind of “unfair advantage.” I found her cool. She was outspoken, unafraid to be herself, and unapologetically defensive of her ideas.

She wanted to become a playwright. Most of the people enrolled at the drama program of my university were, at best, misguided – why would you go to a university to become an actor? Go to an acting academy or something. But Ophelia had this interesting self-awareness to her, and even though we met in an economics class of all things (her elective class of choice), we hit it off from the first time we had a group project together. Most acting majors seemed lost and clueless. But her? She seemed to have a clear plan. She knew why she was there. She knew what she wanted to do after she graduated while still at university, and, as odd as this may sound if you never went to university, that was rare.

I guess I wasn’t expecting her to be able to self-reflect like that. Not only was she majoring in the dramatic arts, which wasn’t the best of signs, she also had a perfect mix of the two types of looks that condition someone into being a brat – she looked like a perfect mix of pure beauty and, quite frankly, a child. Despite being nineteen, I almost felt nervous talking to her in public at first. Anyone would have guessed that at oldest, she was eighteen. And yet, she looked like the stereotypical blonde girl that got voted prom queen in high school. She was practically a living stereotype, right down to fixating on one thing that she thought was too ugly – her nose – while the rest of the world clearly didn’t care, fixating either on her beauty or her childlike figure, depending on whether they wanted to drool over her or talk down to her. Some guys, I feared, would switch between the two as they pleased.

The most promising thing about her was probably that she had talent to back up her words. After we began to hang out outside of class, she let me read her first script – something I assumed she showed very few of her other friends. It was good. She was good. If she wanted to push herself and make friends, she could have gone a long way.

I couldn’t remember the last time I progressed a friendship and was completely uncertain where it would go. We would hang out more and more, and as we did, we found more things to do together. And the more things we found to do, the more excuses we had to hang out. We’d go out to neat little restaurants we’d heard about but never gone to, we’d watch movies at my place. At one point we even held hands, even if we didn’t think too hard about what that meant. We talked every day, though most days it was just online. Even so, the absence of tone almost made it ... more interesting. I had no clue if some days we just read each other’s chemistry well, or we were getting serious with our flirting. It started as a joke, as it sometimes does – one silly remark thrown in, as a joke ... then it became part of our daily conversation.

There was the odd red flag here and there of course. She’d make fun of my name, telling me that Randy was an “old person name,” for a little bit longer than a normal joke should last. She’d brag, on more than one occasion, about how her IQ was in the ninety-eighth percentile. Occasionally she’d show me a piece of her writing, and I’d point out something wrong with it, and she’d tell me how unnecessary a criticism it was, then hasten to point out that I’d made a similar mistake in something I’d shown her. Then I’d tell her I was an economics student and I wasn’t planning on publishing my poetry anytime soon, and she was, and ... et cetera.

And yet still, the flirting continued. It was like Ophelia’s gaze was fixed on me, and I on her, the two of us never blinking. We were always at the forefront of each other’s lives, which was very sudden and, frankly, very new to me, at least in the form in which it came. Her downsides could never outweigh the rush of joy I had from just being near her. I didn’t have to cheat to get that way or anything, and it felt amazing.

Then – what else could happen but this? – in walked trouble. When he first came to the university, he introduced himself as Cameron, but now, if you didn’t call him Cam, he’d get irrationally angry at you. He was one of those guys that had a goofy, almost ugly face, and yet his confidence and presentation landed him some reputation of being a charming, even attractive, guy, with a trendy haircut and everything.

I was older than Ophelia and Cam, so I had heard everything about him since he first arrived. Also a dramatic arts major, a frequent party-goer that had a weird reputation around the women of the university. Almost every party-faring freshman girl at the university had some kind of story about him. When they told the stories, it was clear that every word out of their mouths was tainted with bitterness, and yet, every story involved them falling hopelessly for him and not ending at just ‘making out with him at that party’ or something. Oh no. It went far beyond that. Most of the storytellers would, in an out-of-character way, describe the sex they had over the next week or so, and all of the new and weird sexual fetishes they adopted for him, before he inevitably cheated on them, dumped them for someone new, or did something to them without their consent, sometimes the stories climaxing with all three events.

If I were a nosier guy I would wonder a couple things. How all of these girls managed to have practically the same story. How his reputation only got worse and worse, and yet he was never punished or brought to justice or anything. How none of his latest victims had managed to hear the increasingly-present stories about him. Most bizarrely, the few that did hear the stories about what he did seemed to actively not care, either because they believed they could be ‘the one to fix him’ or just outright dismissing them. On more than one occasion, I had to wonder if perhaps Cam and I shared qualities we could not speak about in the open.

Genuinely, I thought Ophelia was too smart to go for him. The first time I heard of them interacting, it was when Ophelia and I were watching a movie and she was talking about the party she went to last night. Cam was there. Cam was talking to her, more than the other partygoers. Cam asked if she was single. Cam was seeing another girl at the time, so Ophelia figured it was just casual conversation.

I shot right to attention and told Ophelia every story I knew immediately. For possibly too long, I gave her all of the reasons I could for her to leave Cam alone. In classic Ophelia style, she gave me a weird look, asked me if I had a personal stake in any of this, and laughed off the whole situation, telling me she was capable of making her own decisions. At the same time, she promised she’d keep a more careful eye on Cameron now that she knew his history.

Over time, as Ophelia and I hung out more and more, so would they. At first it was unavoidable things – the second time, he stopped her at the university’s cafeteria and asked her about something related to a class. The third time, he smartly fed her ego and admitted he didn’t get the theory in one of his dramatic arts assignments and asked if they could study at the library together sometime. Inevitably, the two started seeing each other regularly.

Our friendship was still going strong, though both of us were now getting completely confused. At first, Ophelia had a dream where she kissed me – and no, I didn’t cause it – and a week or so later, I had a similar dream about her, though I lied about how far we went in that dream, so that I wouldn’t weird her out or anything. We were now having weekly hours-long conversations in our car after I’d drive her back to her residence after a movie night we shared. She’d lower the seat and get comfy. She’d talk about her past or her family, and she’d cry. She’d tell me not to tell our mutual friends that she cried. I’d admit a few things about myself along the way, though I’d reframe what happened so she wouldn’t freak out or anything. We’d hug each other goodbye, she’d tell me I smell good, and we’d be texting the next morning.

In what I thought was a victory, Ophelia was starting to hear more and more stories about Cameron. At one point, she asked a friend to sit between her and Cameron during the only class they shared, since he always gunned for the seat next to hers. She now fully believed, in her words, “he treats wild animals better than human women.” I was relieved. It was clear, even in unspoken terms, that she was interested in him for a while, and I was glad to see that interest subside.

Or so I thought. Eventually, I’d start seeing her walking around the university grounds with Cameron. If Ophelia and I were going to hang out, he’d show up with her and ‘drop her off,’ leaving a visibly embarrassed Ophelia defending herself and explaining she still thinks he was bad, but that they talked it over or something. She was, of course, blissfully unaware that this announcement would ring more alarm bells than less. Maybe I was living in a glass house, but the man was a master manipulator.

Even so, it was clear she believed me, even if she was starting to see him more. She’d talk lowly of him to me, and every single microaggression, every single thing she disliked, she’d tell me all about them and we’d share our critiques on his character, eagerly agreeing with each other.

That was the best it would get from there on in. After a few weeks of her seeing him more and more, she would start to see me less and less, and the red flags would get abundant. She’d get irrationally angry at increasingly small blunders and mistakes I made, and she would start getting favorite words. ‘Entitled’ was a big one. I was ‘entitled’ for demanding she stop seeing Cameron. I was ‘entitled’ for asking why we were barely hanging out in person anymore when she insisted she was my friend. I was ‘entitled’ for accusing her of lying to me about being too busy to hang out, when she’d drunkenly text me many nights a week about her hanging out with other friends.

The drunk texts were getting a bit much. I felt she was embarrassed for dreaming about me kissing her and opening the floodgates for me to confess the same, because whenever she got drunk, she’d either make a big show over text about wanting some space for the night (in some cases texting me first to ask me to not text her because I ‘talked to her too much’) or outright complaining to me, taking my past errors and blowing them up to hyperbolic proportions. Of course, it all reached a climax at 2am one some weekend.

“I hate you!”

Phone to my ear, I heard Ophelia shrieking drunkenly over the phone, and my mouth went dry. Filled with cotton. What could I say to that? It was said with such meaning and power.

I couldn’t help but think perhaps this was orchestrated. Even as the two began to hang out more and more, things didn’t really start to go south for Ophelia and I until Cam actively perceived me as some kind of threat. Maybe that’s my own ego talking, but from the way he was acting, it was clear that Cam had some kind of eye on me. And to be honest, that was flattering more than anything. Almost perceptive, even. Maybe he knew. But if he did, I highly doubt he’d go up against me. If he knew, he’d run and hide.

Stewing in my anger, I had made up my mind. Maybe Cam taught Ophelia that she hated me, or maybe Ophelia felt conflicted and came to that conclusion herself. Well, if she wanted to label me as entitled, I may as well play the part. I had the tools at my disposal, so why not?

I gave Ophelia a few more chances, and we actually did end up hanging out exactly once more, to help her move a couple things out of her residence. She thanked me and seemed reservedly polite, seeming to want to leave the past in the past. In that moment and that moment alone, I second-guessed myself, and almost committed to doing no harm.

But, like clockwork, a few days later, she was drunk, and weirdly angry at me. I had texted her first, hearing from a connection that she had a bad experience at a party that night, and reached out to her, asking if she was okay, knowing nothing about her situation. She began by laughing. It was that kind of obnoxious drunk laugh over the phone you do to let you know someone is beneath you. From that moment onward, I knew Ophelia had a show for me.

And did she ever. She let loose on me, telling me that I was never concerned for her, that I only cared about owning her, even that I was the one to condition her. If only she knew how very much that could have been the case. Then at the end, she let out the bombshell, letting me know how angry she was that my only interest in her was sexual from the beginning, and that I ‘started acting entitled with her ever since I asked her for sexual favors and she said no.’

In that moment, I knew exactly how I would play my cards. I never asked her for sex. In fact, after we confessed our kissing dreams to each other, I outlined to her specifically that I was okay with our relationship turning anything but sexual. For a guy, especially with my ‘gifts,’ I was actually pretty asexual by nature, and thank God for that, if I was to thank anything but a mirror.

So, was that how Ophelia saw it? I only wanted sex from the beginning, and once she ‘denied sexual favors’ (what an ‘acting major’ way to phrase it), I got cold towards her? She had quite an imagination with her accusations, something I was sure she’d live to regret.

Planting the seed was actually quite difficult. With most of the people where I planted the seed, it was something easy. “You don’t hate me, you really like me” was a particular favorite seed of mine to get out of awkward situations. I had used the seed of “you’re in love with me” an embarrassingly high number of times, but never what I wanted for Ophelia. Warping someone’s thoughts for basic instincts was like solving a children’s puzzle for me, but planting a seed this complex took damn near days.

I was glad Ophelia didn’t apologize. If she did, I might have been tempted to downgrade the seed. She simply ignored me for the next few days while I worked on perfecting the seed I wanted to plant.

Sexual. Purely sexual. No changes to her levels of love, or friendliness, or even hatred towards me. She could hate me all she wanted. In fact, that made this all the more fun.

It worked within days. After a few days passed, in economics class, she’d take every opportunity to look at me. Sometimes I’d have fun with it and ‘notice,’ looking back at her. She’d either look away immediately and blush, or she’d attempt to curdle her expression, letting me know that she only thought of me in a view of contempt.

I knew even that was torture for her. A favorite delusion of the acting major was to say, “Do and think whatever you want. I don’t care. You’re the only one that cares here, not me. I’m not even thinking about you.” Looking at me so often was proof positive she was thinking about me.

I upped the dose after a few days of fun, and soon, in economics class, she was squirming in her seat while looking at me. After a full day’s worth of that, I decided to play along with my own production and look at her weirdly. She was still squirming when she saw I was looking back, and she was even halfway through biting her lower lip. I gave her a look that told her, “What the hell is wrong with you?” She attempted to scowl at me, but couldn’t. She looked down, embarrassed, for the rest of the class.

There was no mistaking it. The seed worked. I was warping her thoughts. Without hating me any less, she was getting more and more sexually attracted to me every day. She was wetter and wetter every time she looked at me. She longed for me...

... and yet she couldn’t let go of her ego and stop despising me.

It was perfect. And like hell was I done. I upped the dose again, and within the next day, she messaged me telling me she felt we needed to chat in person.

Staying in character, I agreed, and we met somewhere very public, at my request, so I could see what conclusion she’d reached.

She looked like a complete mess when I got there. It looked like she was getting slightly less sleep than usual, and while she seemed to get a hold on her squirming, she still practically vibrated in place, her body feeling never satisfied but not yet knowing fully why.

“Hey,” I casually said to her as I sat down. “So, what didja need from me? I imagine you want to make this quick.”

Ophelia blushed a deep crimson. “Hey, look. So I ... I feel like I think I might have taken things a bit far with what I said around a week ago.”

I decided to let my humanity show for a bit. “I’m not gonna lie, you said a lot of unfair stuff there, Ophelia,” I told her darkly.

Subconsciously, she bit her bottom lip when my voice spoke lowly like that. She squeezed her legs together. “I ... I know. Look, I’m going to be a hundred percent honest with you. I’m not sorry for what I said, but I’m sorry for how I said it. Like, I was harsh, but there was nothing I said there that was untrue or anything.”

My look at her turned more incredulous and yet more dark. Even like this, she was still trying to maintain the upper hand. Hell, if Cam wanted her, I almost felt sorry for the guy. “Ophelia ... you told me that all I wanted from you from the beginning was ‘sexual favors,’ and that I became ‘entitled’ after I asked you for them.”

It was hard not to smirk when Ophelia practically visibly throbbed when I mentioned sex. “I didn’t say it exactly like that, but-”

“Ophelia. I never, ever asked you for sex. I even told you when we were talking about the kiss dreams – remember the kiss dreams? – that I was comfortable with our relationship going to anything except sex.”

“Okay, okay, okay!” Ophelia conceded. “Maybe I worded that one wrong.”

“You did not word it wrong, you accused me of something I never ever did,” I asserted.

“I – yes...” Ophelia, defeated, whimpered. “Look, I’m sorry. I just felt ... cornered ... and...” It was becoming hard for her to focus.

I had an idea. A downright evil idea. Up the dosage, right then and there. I closed my eyes, pretending to look stressed from the conversation, and planted the seed.

The effect was instantaneous. Ophelia’s chest was now rising and falling with her breathing. Her hands needed to be somewhere, and one lightly stroked her skirted thigh, her other lightly scratching the back of her neck. “I ... I’m just sorry...” she managed, her voice becoming breathier. Huskier.

I sighed. “Well, if that’s the best I’m gonna get,” I mumbled aloud. “Okay. Apology accepted. Was this why you wanted to see me, to just talk this over?”