you know i'm such a fool for you (Olivia x Viola)

Prologue

Olivia stared down into the white oval of the bathroom sink, following the trail of tiny black lines that scattered around the counter like fine sprinkles.

She spat the rest of the toothpaste water out of her mouth, and the tiny hairs flit around the basin to eventually get swallowed by the drain. Olivia watched with satisfaction before taking a tissue and wiping the rest with the care and slight snobbish disgust of an ex-cultivated Junior League debutante. Gingerly, the tissue was squished down into the tiny wastebasket next to the sink so that no facial hair could escape its plush papery prison.

Certain high society attitudes were hard to shake, no matter what crowd Olivia now surrounded herself with now.

Putting her toothbrush back in its cup next to its green neighbor, she wondered idly if she were to ask Sebastian one more time to clean up the sink after he shaved in her bathroom, he'd finally listen. If maybe one day that flippant, "sure, babe" would lead to some proof her words don't go in one ear and out the other. Olivia swore, sometimes Sebastian's willingness to take what she said into consideration mirrored her father's.

Sebastian and Olivia had been dating for months now, and she still found that being in a relationship with him- the real Sebastian- didn't differ from her past serious relationships.

Before any Hastings sibling had entered left stage in her life, the majority of her relationship experience had been with the mayor's son, Joshua Smith. The mayor was a 'family friend' as her mother liked to say and his strapping youngest son was closest in age (a mere three years older than Olivia).

Olivia remembers awkward dinner parties with the Smith family when she was just getting to the age of training bras. A red-cheeked Joshua would shoot glances at her from across the table as she tried to remember which fork was for salad.

With Olivia's parents all gung-ho for the relationship, it seemed inevitable that they'd court once she got a bit older.

She'd liked him. What wasn't to like, really?

Dreamy and sweet Joshua. Of course, he was also what you could call inattentive, but that wasn't necessarily unknown territory for her with the men in her life.

It still stung when junior year rolled around and she was broken up with. He'd took her aside in a crowded courtyard and said that she couldn't give him what he wanted. To a wide-eyed Olivia who was freshly sixteen, it sounded like a death sentence.

Unsurprisingly, her mother had been unpleased, and the whole school was buzzing. He wasn't supposed to have been the one to dump her. Not the boy who seemed so invested in her for so long.

"She was dating this college guy, but he dumped her. I hear she's a total mess now, really vulnerable."

"Confidence, self-esteem is way down."

"In man words, it's time to pounce."

She'd become haunted after Joshua. The whispers and concerns. The anxiety of what went wrong caused everything to shift around within her.

However, her fears had gone out the window, along with her inhibitions, after crashing into a certain green-eyed 'boy' years later.

At the time, her attraction to a guy like Sebastian was odd for her, but there was something about their interactions that burrowed deep into the corners of her. They'd talk and she'd feel like the whole world was holding its breath until the invisible tether between them broke. She couldn't help the fact that she was so hung up by this boy, and it was only enhanced by how relieved she was over feeling this way about someone, finally.