No Longer His Second Choice

1: 1

At the gathering, someone asked Austin Barnes what had made him fall for me.

He answered without much thought. "Her eyes. They're pretty."

The friends around us pounced on it right away. "They say when you fall for someone's eyes, you've fallen for their soul. You're done for."

I ducked my head, embarrassed, but Austin said nothing. He only drank, one glass after another.

That night I scrolled onto my stepsister's secret social media account. The post was a close-up of a pair of eyes, the caption plain.

"Three years since we broke up. Do you still like them?"

A minute after it went up, Austin liked it.

"You know I do. You were the one heartless enough to go abroad back then. When are you coming home?" he wrote in the comments.

Only then did I understand. What he liked wasn't my eyes. It was the other person he saw inside them.

I stared at the post on my phone and couldn't make sense of it for the longest time.

I'd been with Austin so long, and I had never once known he and Vivian Sinclair had been together.

……

I refreshed the post. Vivian replied fast.

"Next week. Miss me already?"

Austin didn't reply again, but he liked the comment.

I looked up at him, seated by the window.

The screen of his phone had already gone dark. He held a cigarette, lighting one off the last, and nothing in his face gave anything away.

I opened Vivian's account. The bio across the top of her profile read, bright as day: "Everyday love with my ex-husband."

For three whole years, this account had been logging every little moment with her ex-boyfriend.

I scrolled to the very bottom and started from the first post.

"Broke up with my boyfriend. He drank a lot. He said he couldn't bear to let me go."

"But I'm going abroad, at least six or seven years, maybe never coming back. I don't want to be with him anymore. How am I supposed to comfort him?"

I checked the date. Posted June 28, 2023. The same day I met Austin.

I was on my way home then. A drunk man was standing at the entrance to my apartment complex.

When his bleary eyes landed on mine, something in them suddenly cleared. He seemed to murmur someone's name under his breath, and then it turned into a single question. "Can I get to know you?"

After I met Austin, he chased me hard.

He mined all my social media to learn what I liked, finding new ways to make me happy.

Later I asked him why he'd been so drunk that day. He only smiled and said, "Bad mood. But at least it led me to you."

Only now did I understand. He'd been blackout drunk because of Vivian. He'd wanted my number because these eyes looked so much like hers. And the name he'd murmured to himself was Vivian's too.

My hands were shaking a little as I kept scrolling.

"Got sick. I don't have many friends over here, so I called him in the middle of the night. He flew more than ten hours to take care of me."

"He stayed ten days, didn't leave until I was all better. Before he left he asked again if we could get back together. I still said no."

"I have my studies to finish. I don't want to keep up a relationship that leads nowhere. But he said whenever I needed him, he'd always be at my side."

I remembered. That day was my birthday.

Austin, who used to see to my every need, vanished that day. His phone was unreachable, my messages went unanswered. Days later he told me the company had an emergency and he'd gone abroad.

The comments were all swooning.

"Oh my God, will you two just marry each other right where you stand?"

"I can go without a love life, but not my ship!"

After Austin came back, he confessed to me and made up for the birthday he'd missed.

I was so happy I never once noticed that when he looked at me, those words seemed meant for someone else.

Back then I was overjoyed. When I said yes, I told him he could love only me, be good only to me.

He smiled but never gave a clear answer, and I was so deep in my own happiness that I completely missed how strangely he was behaving.

Tears fell and smeared the screen.

But the words on it were still just as clear.

"Valentine's Day today. My ex-husband came to see me again."

"During the movie our fingers laced together, and I couldn't help kissing him, like we'd never been apart at all."

"I know he has a girlfriend now, my dad's ex-wife's daughter. He says looking into those similar eyes feels like I never left. He says if he can't be with me, he'll be my family instead and keep watching over me."

"No matter what, the person he loves most will always be me."