Phil felt a pang of fear he hadn’t felt since Adam challenged him way back at that infamous council meeting. Once again, Adam Watson was playing on Phil’s insecurity that he did something disrespectful when in reality, he had her best intents at heart. Adam was trying to make Phil doubt his own actions. Adam was trying to make Phil nervous. Why? “Where’s this coming from?”
Adam paused. “The kiss.” he admitted. “Your first kiss with her, the one I witnessed, she was initially uncomfortable with it but then started going out with you. Maybe that led you to believe that Nicole views initiative and consent in a way that she doesn’t actually.”
Phil had meant to ask Adam exactly what he saw and when but they were clearly too far along for it now. Uncomfortably, Adam had made some connections that showed he was even more conniving than Phil gave him credit for. If he was just that much more unambiguously evil, Phil would have considered him a true worthy opponent, and stopped at nothing to take him down. Maybe that day would arrive someday, but it wasn’t going to be today.
For now, Phil’s mind was a battlefield of what to say. Adam had truly rattled him. Yes, he was a bit… bold with Nicole, but that was Olivia’s idea. Was he going to talk about Olivia with Adam? Hell no. Was he going to talk in explicit detail about his past bedroom life with Nicole, in front of a kid? Hell no. At this point, Phil was exhausted, so at the risk of also convincing himself, he decided to cherry-pick the information he said from this point onward, and elected to tell Adam what he wanted to hear.
“Our first time… was kind of similar to that. Like, she was playing hard to get, so like you said, I figured, if it was good enough for our first kiss, it was good enough for our first time.” What he said wasn’t necessarily untrue, but there was a lot more context for it, like how he stopped at one point and asked Nicole if she was into it, and she replied, ‘yes, you dummy.’ For some reason, he felt it was… advantageous to paint himself in a worse light for Adam. He knew that if Adam heard Phil defending himself, Adam probably would have denied it anyway.
That said, he knew what he was beginning to look like, and knew he couldn’t sway the narrative too far into ‘disrespectful.’ “But!” he continued, jutting a finger up into the air. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t complain. And that’s how we first became a couple. So clearly I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Is that when Nicole started being distant?” Adam asked.
Phil did not like to admit it, but Adam hit a bullseye with that one. “Yes.” he sadly grumbled, then realized that, true to his fears, he was starting to look bad. He needed to make himself look better without admitting he twisted the truth only to suit Adam’s narrative. “Wait. Is this one of those bullshit stories where the girl wanted it but then after the sex she changed her mind so the dude became the bad guy? Because I am not a rapist.” He knew that maybe Nicole and he were a bad match, as painful as that was to know, but he also knew that he in no way was the bad guy. He even asked, he asked, if she was into it. Either Nicole had lied to him, which was impossible – he trusted that girl with his life – or Adam was making up shit for… some agenda Phil couldn’t figure out yet.
“Don’t worry, relax.” Adam’s voice now took on a tone as if he was in command of this conversation. How cute. “I don’t think it was rape.” Because it wasn’t. “It was a misunderstanding though. It just makes sense that that’s what she’s upset about.”
A misunderstanding… now that was possible. Maybe there was a third option. Nicole wasn’t lying. She just got some kinda PTSD flashback from Phil’s brother while having sex. She suddenly felt uncomfortable and couldn’t be with someone that similar. “Maybe.” Phil found himself saying, his facade of feeding a story to Adam gone. The more Phil thought about it, the stronger and less of a ‘maybe’ it became. “But we don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t, but I mean, you want to be on better terms with her right now, right?” Adam asked him.
Phil nodded. “Hell, I wanna be with her.” he couldn’t stop himself from saying.
“Well then maybe we can come to an agreement. I’ll step off and give you two that time you’ve been asking for if you communicate with her about that. I mean, if it was your first time, you don’t really know if ‘playing hard to get’ is Nicole’s style in bed, right?” Adam offered.
Cocky little fuck. It’s not like he knew her any better. And Phil was all too willing to learn exactly what Nicole’s style was, whatever it took.
“Maybe from her point of view, it was a kind of rape.” Adam continued. That was the last straw. Phil stood up and decided, fuck it, no more facade, he was going to tear Adam a new asshole.
Adam got there first. “…Which we both know wasn’t your intent.” Phil narrowed his eyes, still angry at Adam, but regained his cool and remembered who he was. Student Council President. It was his job to be diplomatic even when the fucker didn’t deserve it. He sat back down.
Adam continued. “So in order for things to heal, you should straighten things out with her. You know, try to see things from her view.” Who the hell was he to tell Phil this? “Then afterwards, you won’t have to wait as long before getting to see her smile again. Doesn’t it kind of hurt seeing her happy with everyone but you in a kind of selfish way?”
Fuck. Another bullseye. “The kind of hurt you don’t even know yet.” Phil admitted.
“So will you talk to her? I mean, I want to see you two happy again. You can feel the tension between you two right now.”
With that, something shifted. He realized he had no idea what Adam’s intent was right now. There was literally nothing Adam could gain from this. Phil hated knowing that others saw how awkward the two were, and from Phil’s perspective, which he liked to believe was allergic to deception, Adam was offering him solid advice, or at least solid information, even if he was totally misinformed. But misinformed by what? The kiss he saw and his own intuition? Was Nicole feeding him lies, or at least her own misinterpretation? He knew this at least advanced his cause, and even though he spent half of this conversation seething mad at Adam, something for him switched at the last second, and he actually believed Adam was trying to set them back on course. Maybe even help get them back together.
Phil was standing up by now, and loudly exhaled. “Fine,” he admitted, walking towards Adam. “As long as you do two things for me.”
“Shoot.”
Phil had realized that even though he deliberately misled Adam, Adam could use what was done here to fuck over Phil. No way he’d let that happen. “One, I have no clue how good you are at keeping secrets. You can’t be that good since you went against Nicole’s word to tell me this. So maybe your promise on this is worthless, but I still want to hear it from you. Do not mention a word of this to anyone. As far as you know, this conversation never happened. A rumor of an alleged misunderstanding of a sexual assault could mean expulsion and a criminal record for me.”