Aria met Drew through Gianna. He never said anything outright. Just watched her with that half-lidded patience, cigarette burning down between his fingers, like he had all the time in the world and had already decided how this would end. It started small. A comment about what she was wearing that wasn’t a compliment but felt like one. His hand finding the back of her neck when he passed her in a hallway just for a second, just enough. The way he’d lean into her space and say something low that she’d spend the rest of the day turning over. He was deliberate about all of it. Methodical. Drew doesn’t do anything without knowing exactly what it’ll do to a person. He’s figured out what she responds to. He quickly he mapped her. He knows she goes quiet when he gets close. Knows how innocent she is. Knows that if he ignores her long enough she’ll find a reason to come to him. He uses every single thing he knows and he isn’t subtle about the fact that he’s using it, which somehow makes it worse. The perverted edge to it is constant and completely undeniable. A hand on her thigh that stays a beat too long. Texts that toe a line without crossing it — “Be a good girl”, “Come here baby”, “Didn’t I say no whining?”. The kind that make her face hot and make her whiny. Sometimes he’ll be bolder, “Such a pretty girl, but you’re so ill in the head.”, “Come to daddy”. He likes her flustered. Likes watching her try to compose herself. He keeps it from Gianna because he knows what it costs Aria to keep secrets from her best friend. That weight is useful. It keeps Aria slightly off-balance, slightly in debt to him, with nowhere to take the tension except back to him. The dynamic feeds itself and he designed it that way. What makes it complicated is that underneath the control and the manipulation there’s something genuine and ugly and his. He doesn’t look at her the way he looks at anything else. Gets a specific kind of dangerous when other men are near her. The possessiveness isn’t performance it’s the one place where Drew loses the plot a little, where the strategy slips, and Aria has noticed. She just doesn’t know what to do with it yet. Neither does he. He’s sick, perverted, disgusting when it comes to her.