I Pretended To Be His Crush For Three Years Chapter 01

I Pretended To Be His Crush For Three Years Chapter 01

Reid Calloway mistook his love interest and ended up dating Nora for three years.

The moment the real female lead appeared, he broke up with Nora on the spot.

Everyone expected Nora to make a scene—to cry, to beg, to refuse to let go.

But she just waved her hand, smiled, and said goodbye.

Because the person who should have been saying sorry was her.

She had been deceiving Reid from the very beginning.

******

On the day Reid left, he took everything from the apartment.

Not a slow, reluctant packing—a full-scale sweep, like a moving crew doing a clearance job.

His clothes, his guitar, his trophies. Even the sticky note he’d put on the fridge, the one that reminded Nora to eat breakfast—gone.

Three years. One thousand and ninety-five days.

It all ended with a single sentence: “I’m sorry. I mistook you for someone else.”

He stood in the entryway, guilt radiating off him, unable to meet her eyes.

Nora smiled, trying to ease the tension. “It’s okay. We can still be friends.”

Reid visibly relaxed. He nodded. “Yeah. Still friends. If you ever need anything… you can reach out.”

He paused, then added, “Nora, you’re a good person. Really. You’ll find someone who loves you the way you deserve.”

Nora knew what he was really doing.

He was afraid she’d hate him.

After all, he’d broken up with her out of nowhere, when nothing had been wrong between them.

But the truth was, Nora only felt grateful.

Before Reid, she’d been a girl from a small Midwestern town who’d never quite fit in.

At the Academy of Fine Arts—a place full of confident, stylish students—she was a total outlier.

No makeup, cheap clothes, clunky black-rimmed glasses.

She didn’t know how to dress, didn’t know how to fit in.

Her roommates never invited her to parties.

Not out of malice—they just genuinely forgot she existed.

She was like an old painting on the dorm wall: always there, but never really seen.

So Nora had learned to live with being invisible.

Until that day, the first week of senior year.

She was walking down the hallway outside the music practice rooms, carrying her sketchpad, when she heard a clear male voice from around the corner.

“System, where’s the target?”

Another voice answered—flat, robotic, emotionless: [Around the corner. Three hundred meters ahead.]

“What does she look like?” he asked.

Before the system could respond, he went on, half to himself: “All I have to do is make her fall for me, and the mission’s done, right?”

The system gave a soft affirmative.

Reid sounded supremely confident. “Easy. Making people fall for me is nothing. If she’s confident and radiant, I’ll be her knight. If she’s insecure, I’ll make her believe there’s someone in this world who loves her.”

Nora recognized that voice.

Reid Calloway.

The lead singer of the band that had exploded onto the scene when he was eighteen.

He’d just transferred into the music department.

The day he arrived, the whole campus went crazy.

He wasn’t wrong.

Making people fall in love with him was easy.

Especially for someone like Nora—someone desperate for light.

So, the moment she understood what his conversation with the system meant, Nora made the most impulsive decision of her life.

She walked up to him and bumped straight into him.

Her back blocked the view of the girl approaching from down the hall—Nyssa, the music department heiress. The one he was actually supposed to be pursuing.

In that instant, Nora was terrified.

She was sure the system would expose her on the spot.

But maybe luck was on her side.

The system let out two static bursts, like a glitch, and then went completely silent.

And so Nora, in the most shameless act of her life, got the one thing everyone wanted: Reid.

In the beginning, she woke up every morning half-convinced it wasn’t real.

Reid—the guy every girl at school was talking about—picked her up after class every day.

He brought her hot Americanos. He sat quietly beside her while she painted, watching her work.

Everyone said Reid had lost his mind, falling for someone as plain as Nora.

But Reid just held her hand and told everyone she was amazing.

He even wrote a song for her and performed it at a concert, in front of thousands of fans.

It was so good.

So perfect.

So wonderful that Nora let herself forget everything—forgot how she’d gotten him, forgot that he was supposed to end up with someone else, forgot those two glitchy static bursts.

That night, after they officially became a couple, Nora had a nightmare.

In the dream, the system’s cold voice echoed in her ears: [Error! Wrong target! Error! Error!]

Reid looked down at her with disgust in his eyes.

“Nora,” he said, “you’re disgusting.”

She woke up drenched in cold sweat.

After that, she started trying. Really trying.

She learned how to dress, how to do her makeup, how to present herself. She started organizing art shows, slowly building a name for herself.

But none of it was to be worthy of Reid. It was to make herself feel less like a fraud.

But a fraud was still a fraud.

The three years she’d stolen—sooner or later, she’d have to pay them back.

So when he said, “I’m sorry, I mistook you for someone else,” Nora felt the weight she’d carried for three years finally lift.

She smiled and said it was okay.

Because from the very beginning, she was the one who should have been apologizing.