When Gracie is humiliated after following her best friend's brother to college and finds he's moved on without her, she grows closer to his rival--the captain of his basketball team--the infamous Kalen Rush, and suddenly Gracie wonders just what len...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The echo of Gracie's sweet voice reverberating through the corridor stamped itself onto the burning visage of my brain.
"You, too," she'd said, almost like in passing or a throwaway comment to a throwaway person.
I didn't want to be her throwaway person—quite the fucking opposite, actually.
There was just something about the way he'd stood there in front of her—watching, waiting for me to leave as if he had any kind of fucking claim on her in the first place and I'd...I'd just wanted her to go back to looking at me the way she had been before he decided to open his mouth and try to get between us—again.
Well, I'd had fucking enough.
It wasn't like Gracie actually even cared about him, or so it seemed.
But there was something about her, something that I'd learned in whatever short time that I had already known her.
Gracie wouldn't turn her back on anyone, regardless of what they had done to her, until they crossed the line.
The line? Well that line was blurry and no matter how many times someone stepped on her, she would always come back for more until they stepped their toe one inch across that painted line in her heart, the line reserved for those that she loved more than herself.
It wasn't hard to picture her beautiful face, that adorable upturned nose as she tilted her head towards mine, those swimming pools filled with honey that she called her eyes filled with a certain type of adoration that I had never experienced before.
And then there was Colby, standing there between us.
Our one obstacle in a sea of roadblocks ruining the path ahead of us.
When it came to thinking about how hard it would be to pursue a real relationship with Gracie, something tightened in my chest, hard and painful like a pumice stone scratching against the inner walls of my rib cage as my heart beat against it.
When it came to thinking about Gracie's father, and mine, and how we were so interconnected no matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, something sharp and intangible seemed to twist itself around those bones in my chest, whittling them down into drastic peaks of ivory as they curved around the beating organ in my chest.
She might not have known it yet, but she had already stolen something integral and defining from inside of me, something no one had ever yet dared to touch before.
Something so stained and tarnished by what my father had done to me, what he had done to others around me, what he had done to my mother.
So, what was another obstacle in our damn path again? Colby was just yet another in a long line of issues that could very well fuck off for all I cared.
It wasn't until my feet hit the pavement at a running sprint that I realized the severity of what I had done.
Gracie's face, so sweet and pure and so so confused by what I'd told her as I walked away from her, leaving her with him, with Colby, leaving her to deal with the fallout.
