She Stole My Comic Ending And My Crush Chapter 05

She Stole My Comic Ending And My Crush Chapter 05

The combination of an elite university and two beautiful students had turned the video into perfect social-media bait.

It had been online less than a day and already had more than one million likes.

Brielle had started with barely two thousand followers. Overnight, she gained one hundred thousand.

I watched the video loop once more before pausing it and opening the comments.

The top response congratulated them. The second was a long theory from a webcomic reader.

[I had replayed this so many times, and the confession was almost identical to the ending of *When Time Stayed Awake*.

The finale went live at six this morning, but this creator confessed yesterday. Wild guess: Are you secretly

the author?

Were you giving us the real-life sequel? I was crying.]

Hundreds of replies praised the theory and promised to protect the creator’s anonymous identity.

The comment had been there for eight hours. Brielle had not corrected it.

The app’s suggested search phrase now read: [*When Time Stayed Awake* creator’s confession succeeds.]

I opened my creator dashboard. The regular readers had begun flooding the finale with messages.

[@BrielleUnfiltered was you, right? I shipped it so hard.]

[Please give us a sequel about their dating life. I was begging.]

I chose one comment and replied.

Creator: [The author has never been in a relationship. There will be no sequel.]

Then I put down my phone, and the world became silent again.

The heroine of my comic was named Lila Monroe.

She was warm as sunlight, raised by loving parents, and born into the kind of financial security I had only

ever imagined.

She was not an exceptional student, but people loved her instinctively.

No matter what happened, she remained hopeful, and she grew up laughing beside the boy who had been her

best friend since childhood.

Lila and I were opposites.

I had been wrong to let fiction and reality blur until I could no longer tell which one was supposed to save

I tried to distract myself with math. One proof kept defeating me no matter how many different approaches I tested.

In the past, I would have photographed the problem and sent it to Adrian. We would have argued over it until one of us found a clean solution.

That was no longer an option,

I shut the notebook too hard and reached for my phone again.

Without thinking, I scrolled through one bright, meaningless clip after another, feeding my brain whatever momentary reward the algorithm offered.

The next video was geotagged at Kingsley. It had the shaky, distant framing of a candid clip that had never been meant to feel private.

A man and woman walked side by side beneath the trees. I recognized Adrian from his back before the

camera zoomed closer.

Although we had spent two years in the same department, I had rarely encountered him. Even our large

general-education courses seemed to fall at different times.

For one quarter, we shared ordinary differential equations. Adrian’s roommates always saved seats near the

window in the second-to-last row.

That was the only class in which I deliberately chose the last row.

For three hours each week, all I had to do was look up to see him.

In the TikTok clip, Brielle barely reached his shoulder. She reached secretly for his hand!”

Adrian pulled his hand back in surprise, but his ears turned red.