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.
This was the absolute last thing that I should've been doing, but goddammit I couldn't help myself.
Not when it came to her.
Her sweet strands of coiled amber hair tickled the edge of my chin as the sunlight poured in through the curtains.
God, this was so similar but so far away that it made some forgotten part of my chest sting.
There was a physical ache in my ribs from where this image of her waking up in my arms not too long ago flashed behind my eyes, but then I was pushing her away.
In the memory, I was telling her things that were supposed to make her stay away from me forever, not come back with information about my mother in a move so selfless it made my fucking head spun.
In the memory I was betraying her, because I was too much of a coward to tell her to actually stay away from me, to tell her the real reason why.
It was all too much and not enough, and when push came to shove I chose to keep her safe by hurting her anyway.
So what did it all matter anyway?
Because the moment I saw her stricken, tear stained face as she staggered down the sidewalk, I knew it didn't matter.
The only thing that did matter was telling her the truth about why I had acted the way that I did.
And maybe she'd never forgive me for using her family like that, but if it meant keeping her safe I'd sacrifice just about anyone just to make sure she was okay.
And keeping her away from my father, especially knowing the truth about what he'd done to my mother? That was my top priority.
It just seemed we couldn't keep away from each other anymore, though. No matter how hard we tried.
She was like a magnet and I couldn't resist being pulled into her orbit.
She shifted a little on my arm and I couldn't help but remember how she'd fallen asleep on my chest the night before as I rocked her gently beside me.
She hadn't cried anymore.
No, instead she'd done something much worse.
She hadn't made a single sound all night.
The silence scared me more than her fear, than her grief.
The silence meant that she'd started giving up.
I wasn't about to let that happen.
"Ugh, why do I feel like I chugged a bottle of vodka last night?"
"I don't know...did you? Before you came here, I mean."
She gingerly lifted her head up off my chest and glanced around the room as if taking inventory on if anything had changed since the last time she'd been there.
