He was better as a concept.
That was the universal truth about Evan, whispered like a shared secret between girls in the back rows of classrooms and over sticky cafeteria tables.
He would sweep into a girl’s life like a summer storm, letting her believe, with absolute, unwavering certainty, that he loved her.
And then, the moment the calendar turned, he would suddenly become the most distant person on the planet.
It was a pattern so precise it was almost mechanical.
The love-bombing was just the bait. But once he had someone hooked, the real Evan crawled out.
He was the type to casually "forget" anniversaries, to scroll through his phone while you were pouring your heart out, and to make you feel completely insane for expecting the bare minimum.
Worse, he was a chronic, unapologetic cheater.
His eyes were always wandering to the next girl before the ink on his current relationship was even dry.
He would text his exes late at night, flirt with your friends right in front of you, and gaslight you into believing you were just being "insecure" when you caught him.
He would drain a girl of her confidence, strip away her self-esteem, and then discard her like a candy wrapper when he got bored.
He was like a damn vampire, a boy who took and took until there was nothing left, and he deserved every single ounce of bad karma coming his way.
Which brought you to the bet.
It started out as a joke between you and your friends over an iced coffee on a Tuesday afternoon.
Someone had brought up Evan’s latest victim—a sweet girl from the track team who had been crying in the girl's bathroom all morning—and the conversation quickly turned into a critique of his predictable routine.
"I bet he uses the exact same script on every single one of them," your friend had scoffed, swirling her straw. "It’s so transparent. I give it three weeks before he pulls the vanishing act."
You had laughed, leaning back in your chair. "It’s not even that hard. The guy is practically a machine. You just input a little attention, and the love-bombing protocol starts automatically."
"Oh yeah?" your other friend challenged, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
"Prove it. Thirty bucks says you can’t get him to do the whole routine for you. Let's see how he actually love-bombs when someone is looking for it."
Thirty dollars wasn't life changing money, but enough to get you some fastfood so of course you agreed ! (lmao)
Besides, it sounded entertaining. Evan was in your English and your PE class, meaning he was practically served to you on a silver platter.
You accepted the bet with a laugh, fully aware that it was going to be a walk in the park.
It was actually..almost embarrassingly easy.
Literally all you had to do was start talking to him.
You began by lingering after the bell in English, asking him stupid questions about the reading assignments you already understood.
In PE, you’d walk the laps next to him, laughing a little too loudly at his shitty jokes and tossing your hair over your shoulder when the sun hit it just right.
You gave him a few lingering looks, a handful of playful nudges during warm-ups, and a bit of calculated flirting that left just enough unsaid to keep him hungry.
You didn't even have to give that much effort because Evan was a boy validated entirely by female attention, and you were throwing him a bone.
And predictably, he bit down hard.
You got his number by the end of the first week under the guise of "needing help with the essay."
By the third week, right on schedule, he cornered you by your locker after school, his eyes wide and brimming with a desperate, practiced intensity.
He confessed his feelings with a speech that sounded like it had been plagiarized from a bad indie romance novel, his voice trembling as he asked you if he could be your boyfriend.
You smiled, the perfect picture of a flattered girl, and said yes.
The thirty bucks was practically in your pocket.
Dating him, however, quickly turned into an exercise in pure exhaustion.
You hated the boy. Watching his routine from the inside was infinitely more repulsive than watching it from afar.
You could tell, with absolute clarity, that he was love-bombing you. It was a performance that felt entirely manufactured and completely overdone.
Every morning, he was waiting at your locker, hovering like an anxious puppy.
He was constantly trying to kiss you, to wrap his arms around your waist in the middle of the crowded hallways, and to hold your hand so tightly your fingers went numb.
He would smother you with grand, empty gestures. He started buying you cheap, silver-plated rings from those little boutiques downtown, sliding them onto your fingers with a reverence that made you want to roll your eyes.
If your shoelaces came untied, he would aggressively drop to both knees right there on the dirty linoleum, tying them with a dramatic flourish as if he were a knight in shining armor performing a holy duty.
But the worst part was the way he looked at you. It wasn't sweet, it was intense to the point of being suffocating.
He looked at you like he wanted to eat you whole, his dark eyes tracking your every movement, devouring every expression on your face as if he were trying to memorize your soul.
It was entirely too attached, entirely too fast, and completely different from how he had treated any of the other girls he had dated.
With them, he had been a charming man. With you, he was a frantic, clinging mess.
And by the time the relationship hit the three-week mark, the novelty had completely worn off. Honestly, it was becoming incredibly boring.
You and your friends would sit at your usual lunch table, and you’d show them the latest cheap ring he’d bought you, laughing as they groaned at his pathetic antics.
"He’s suffocating," you complained, picking at your food.
"It was funny for the first ten days, but now I can’t even breathe without him texting me 'what are u doing?' It’s so tiring."
Your friends completely agreed.
The bet had been won, the point had been proven, and the entire charade had become a massive, irritating chore.
It was getting genuinely annoying the way he always clung onto you, the way his name would flash across your phone screen thirty times an hour, the way he would pout if you wanted to spend lunch with your friends instead of tucked under his arm.
Everything about him was irritating.
So, you planned to break it off.
You figured it was time to give him a taste of his own medicine.
You’d show him exactly how it felt to have the rug pulled out from under him, to be treated like an absolute afterthought by someone who had claimed to adore you just days prior.
You started ignoring his texts for hours, replying with dry, one-word answers.
When he tried to put his arm around you, you’d seamlessly step out of his reach to grab something from your bag.
You watched him flounder, watched the confusion bleed into his eyes, and you felt a cold, vindictive sense of satisfaction.
You called him out to the bleachers after track practice on a Friday afternoon to finally end it.
The air was cooling down, the sky a bruised shade of purple, and you stood there with your hands shoved into your pockets, ready to read him his eviction notice.
Except, you hadn't anticipated one crucial, horrifying detail.
"We need to stop doing this," you said, your voice flat, cutting through the quiet hum of the empty field. "I’m breaking up with you, Evan. It’s over."
You expected him to sigh, maybe look a little annoyed that his game had been cut short, and walk away with his hands in his pockets to go text his next target.
Instead, the world seemed to violently fracture right in front of you.
The color drained from Evan's face so fast it looked like he had been struck.
His jaw slackened, his eyes widening in a look of such raw terror that you actually took a half-step back.
For a second, he didn't breathe. And then, the tears came.
It wasn't a quiet, dignified single tear, either. Evan started crying like a absolute baby.
A harsh, choking sob tore out of his throat, his shoulders violently shaking as his entire composure crumbled into dust.
Before you could even register what was happening, he dropped to his knees on the cold metal of the bleachers.
He reached out, his hands trembling violently, and grabbed onto your leg, burying his face against your denim-clad knee.
He held on for dear life, his fingers gripping your jeans so tightly his knuckles turned stark white, as if he were a drowning man and you were the only piece of wood left floating in the ocean.
"No, no, please, please don't do this," he sobbed, his voice cracking, completely ruined.
He lifted his face, and he looked entirely pathetic—his nose red, his eyes bloodshot and streaming with heavy, frantic tears, his chest heaving as he gasped for air.
"Please, just tell me what I did wrong. Was I too loud? Did I do something stupid? I’ll change, I swear to God I’ll change. Whatever you want me to be, I’ll be it. Just don’t leave me. Please, please don’t leave me."
You stood frozen, looking down at him in sheer disgust and shock.
"Evan, get off me!" you said, trying to pull your leg away, but his grip only tightened, his body shaking with another wave of hysterical sobs.
"I love you," he choked out, the words spilling out of him like a confession of a crime, raw and bloody and horrifyingly real.
"I've never felt like this before. I swear I'm not lying to you. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I just think about you every second of the day. Please, don't do this to me. I'll do anything. Just tell me how to fix it."
And in that agonizing, pathetic display, the truth finally clicked into place, sharp and cruel.
For the first time in his miserable, narcissistic life—the idiot had actually fallen in love.
He hadn't been playing a game with you.
The love-bombing, the suffocating attention, the cheap rings, the tying of your shoes, the hungry, desperate looks—it hadn't been his usual manufactured routine.
It had been the clumsy, overwhelming reality of a boy who had finally been struck by the lightning bolt he had spent years pretending to wield.
And unfortunately for him—it happened to be with the one person who never loved him back.
You looked down at him, at his tear-stained face, his desperate hands clinging to your clothes, and you didn't feel a single shred of pity.
You remembered the track girl crying in the bathroom. You remembered the countless other girls whose hearts he had chewed up and spit out without a second thought.
He was experiencing, for the very first time, the exact flavor of agony he had dealt out as a hobby.
"Let go of me, Evan," you said, your voice entirely devoid of warmth, cold as ice.
You wrenched your leg out of his grasp with a sharp, forceful tug.
He stumbled forward, his hands hitting the cold metal of the bleacher where your foot had just been, a fresh sob breaking from his lips as he realized he couldn't hold on.
He stayed there, on his hands and knees.
You didn't look back as you walked away down the steps, leaving him entirely alone in the ruins of the first and last thing he would ever truly care about.
Evan the type to rub his bulge over his phone that's open to a pic of u 🫡
and then Evan grew up to be Yan ex
No bc real shit I hope none of u hoes feel bad for him bc he's a bad person and #hatemen #hatecheaters !!!
