SimonGhostRileyxf!"Rose"reader
From her highschool bully to her wicked bodyguard, from Simon to Ghost.
"It's tender. It's raw. It's that moment in the story where you realize the boy with the sharp tongue is just trying to survive."
The gymnasium didn't look like a warzone for once. Twinkling fairy lights. Shimmering paper decorations. Music thudding like a heartbeat through the floor. Everyone dressed like they believed, just for one night, things could be good.
They spun in circles under cheap strobe lights.
Laughter, perfume, sweaty palms. Girls in pastel dresses and boys with wrinkled suits. A hundred little moments folding into each other like the ending of a teen film that didn't know it was lying.
Simon Riley stood in the far corner like he'd been carved from stone. Black suit, no tie. Sleeves rolled. Hair slicked back like he hadn't meant to care, but couldn't help looking sharp anyway.
Even now, especially now, he carried the kind of silence that made people nervous. Like a grenade with the pin half-pulled. Boys nodded at him from across the room, girls glanced and then looked away too quickly.
He was used to being the ghost in the room.
Used to watching Tommy from a distance, his younger brother in the center of a circle of friends, laughing like nothing had ever hurt him. Like he hadn't grown up in the same house with fists for lullabies.
He turned his gaze to the floor, pretending not to hear the laughter.
Pretending he wasn't waiting for it all to end.
"Why are you always like this?"
The voice startled him, soft, sure, like it wasn't afraid of him.
She stood a few feet away. Pale blue dress, hair pinned with tiny silver stars. Small. Gorgeous. Out of place and yet, somehow, the moment.
She looked at him like she wasn't sure why she'd come over, only that she couldn't not.
Simon exhaled a slow breath through his nose. "Like what?"
"You know," she said gently, stepping closer, "Alone. Angry. Like you want everyone to stay away, but you hate being left out."
His mouth twisted into something between a smirk and a wince.
"You've been watching me?"
"I've got eyes, Riley. Doesn't take a genius."
He looked away. "Don't worry about it."
"Too late," she said. "I already do."
He didn't speak for a moment.
The music pulsed around them like a heartbeat neither of them wanted to claim.
Rose's voice dropped. "You're not just mean. You're hurting. I can tell."
Simon laughed. Quiet and bitter. "That what you think?"
"It's what I see." Her voice didn't shake, even though her hands were clutching her dress like she was afraid of his answer.
"Then maybe you're seeing it wrong," he said, eyes fixed on the glittering floor. "Maybe I'm just broken. Maybe I'm just built this way."
He looked at her now. Really looked.
Her dark eyes were so wide, so painfully soft, and something in his chest twitched.
"You don't know me," he said. But it wasn't cruel. It was tired.
"Then tell me," she said.
Then his gaze dropped again, jaw clenched so hard the muscles jumped. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other like he wanted to leave his own skin.
"...My dad," he muttered finally, voice rough. "He's not... He's not the man people think."
"He's hit my mum. He's hit me. Tommy." His voice went quiet again. "For years. And no one stopped him. No one saw. And now I don't know how to stop being what he made me."
The confession hung in the air like smoke.
Rose's heart cracked in places she didn't know existed.
Close enough to feel his breath.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
Simon flinched like he didn't know what to do with kindness.
"I didn't tell you so you'd feel sorry," he said, backing off a little. Walls snapping back up. "It doesn't matter now anyway. I've already fucked it all up."
"It's not too late," she said, her voice steady.
Simon looked at her, really looked at her. His brow softened, just a fraction.
"You're brave, Rose," he said. "You always were. Even when you were scared."
She gave a small, sad smile. "You don't have to be alone tonight, you know."
He shook his head once. "I wouldn't know what to do with not alone."
Didn't say anything else.
But he didn't walk away either.
And maybe that was something.
Maybe that was everything.
The music faded into the background , muffled bass, the echo of laughter and heels on the gym floor. But for a moment, time stopped.
Rose stood there, hand extended.
Not shaking. Not begging.
And Simon looked at it like it was a live wire.
His hands stayed at his sides.
"I can't," he said quietly. Not cruel. Not cold. Just... honest.
Her smile faltered, just a flicker, but she didn't drop her hand.
"You can," she said. "You just won't."
He looked away again. Toward the door this time. Like if he stared hard enough, maybe he'd already be gone.
"I'm leaving," he said suddenly.
The words hung between them like a blade.
Her hand slowly lowered. "What?"
"British Army," he said, voice flat, eyes locked somewhere over her shoulder. "I enlisted last month."
She blinked. The breath caught in her throat like glass.
"Why?" she whispered, though part of her already knew.
His shoulders shifted. Not a shrug - more like something heavy settling on him again.
"I need out," he said. "Out of this school. Out of that house. Out of this whole damn life."
"And Tommy?" she asked, her voice cracking for the first time. "Your mom?"
"That's the part that keeps me up," he admitted. "Leaving them. But staying's gonna kill me. And if I stay any longer, I'm gonna turn into him."
She wanted to tell him he was nothing like his father.
She wanted to say there was still time.
But he didn't want comfort.
"I don't expect you to understand," he added after a beat. "I just needed someone to know."
Her eyes were wet, but she nodded. Once.
"I do understand," she said softly. "More than you think."
He finally met her gaze again. And in that moment, he looked less like a ghost, and more like a seventeen-year-old boy on the edge of a cliff he'd built himself.
She wanted to reach for him again.
But he was already pulling away.
"Goodbye, Rose," he murmured.
Out the side door. Into the dark. Into the future he hadn't even seen yet.
She stood there under fairy lights that suddenly felt too bright.
With an ache in her chest she didn't have the words for.
Because sometimes the boy who pushed everyone away...
Was just trying to survive in a world that kept telling him to disappear.
She hadn't thought about Simon Riley in years.
She buried him somewhere between prom night and the letter she never sent. Between the awkward silence of her graduation photo and the last time someone mentioned his name like it was a rumor, not a boy.
He had vanished like a ghost.
She was good at pretending things didn't hurt if she wrapped them in silence long enough.
she never went back to Manchester.
Sure, her body stayed for the last few weeks of school, her final exams, her quiet goodbyes, but her soul had already started packing the day he walked away at prom.
She moved to Dubai that summer.
Her parents had been planning it for months, a family opportunity, they said. Bigger dreams. Better life.
A city of glass towers and desert gold.
Because anything that took her away from Simon Riley's absence felt like safety.
She told herself she was starting over.
New country. New friends. New version of herself.
But grief doesn't need a visa.
And some boys, no matter how cruel they were, leave shadows you can't scrub off.
Still, she adapted. She always did.
She learned the rhythm of a new place, Arabic coffee at 4 p.m., Marina traffic at 6, rooftop brunches, long silences between calls with old classmates. Everyone had moved on. And so had she.
She kept herself polished like the skyline outside her window.
in the middle of the night,
when the wind howled between the towers like it was lost,
She'd wonder where he was.
That boy with the fists like fury and eyes like winter rain.
The boy who never took her hand.
The boy who ran away to save himself and left her holding a thousand unanswered questions.
She wondered if he ever thought of her.
If he ever wrote her name in his mind the way she still wrote his in the margins of her journals.
Maybe she was scared he wouldn't reply.
Maybe she was more scared he would.
And then everything, every tower she'd built around herself, crumbled like ash.
Because no matter how far she went,
she couldn't outrun the people who made her bleed.
Sun-drenched cliffs, lemon trees in bloom, silk scarves fluttering in sea breeze. A billionaire girl on holiday. A Don with a past soaked in blood. And the kind of silence between them that feels louder than a gunshot.
She was no longer the girl from Manchester.
That girl had burned away long ago, somewhere between heartbreak and rebirth, between grief and grit.
The kind of someone who didn't flinch anymore.
The kind of someone who had made her millions before thirty.
The kind of someone who could afford to disappear on a whim.
She went to Portofino for the summer.
To stop dreaming about boys with frost-bitten eyes and scars that never faded.
What she didn't know was that he would be there.
Someone far more dangerous.
A name whispered in corridors.
A man who dripped power like cologne.
Sharp suits. Sharper tongue. Eyes like a wolf who knew how to hunt.
She met him at a gallery.
He said her name like it tasted expensive.
She should've known then.
Her multi-million dollar mansion, the crown jewel of the Palm. Walls of glass. Private beach. Armed security. Opulence with a pulse. But safety? That was just an illusion now.
She lived in the biggest mansion on Palm Jumeirah.
The kind you only saw in magazines.
Glass walls, ten bedrooms, imported marble, chandeliers that looked like falling stars.
It was supposed to be her haven.
It started with shadows in the CCTV footage.
Men in suits parked outside too long.
Unfamiliar calls from Milan. Palermo. Naples.
Always red. Always perfect.
Tucked into her villa's iron gate at dawn like a secret waiting to be found.
A single rose on the front step.
Until they were everywhere, on her doorstep, her window sill, tucked into the wiper blade of her Rolls.
Cursive handwriting, inked in Italian.
Things like "Perfection should be protected."
And "You look best when you think no one's watching."
Then came the black boxes.
Lingerie she never bought. Lace that had never touched her skin, but somehow, the sizing was perfect.
The guards said no one got in.
The cameras said nothing.
She knew someone was watching.
And for a moment just a moment, she let herself believe it was harmless.
And not all princes save you.
And then came the voice on the phone.
Like danger dressed in velvet.
"Do you like the gifts, bella?"
"You should smile more. You look lonely in all that gold."
She froze in her own home.
In her kitchen. Her closet. Her bath.
Nothing was sacred anymore.
It was Massimo Toricelli.
The Don she'd brushed shoulders with in Portofino.
The one who watched her like he was reading a book he'd already memorized.
She thought it was a coincidence.
"Why me?" she whispered once to the silence.
But silence never answered.
"Run, if you like," Massimo said.
"But I always catch what's mine."
She smashed the phone against the marble floor.
It didn't stop the ringing in her bones.
She didn't know who had sold her name to the underworld.
She had to disappear again.
This time, she wasn't running from a boy who never loved her back.
She was running from a man who swore he did.
And so she tried to leave.
The guards wouldn't look her in the eye.
Phones didn't work the same way anymore.
Everyone around her now worked for him.
And suddenly, her empire felt like a mausoleum.
A beautiful, sun-soaked prison.
Her name still glittered in the headlines.
But behind the glass walls, she wasn't Rose the mogul.
And she didn't know how much longer she could run
when she wasn't allowed to run at all.
