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...
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After the third trip back to the archives it was getting harder and harder to convince myself that he was just late.
Eight o'clock rolled around slowly, like the ticking hand of a broken watch always a few too many minutes behind.
Maybe it was the naivety mixed with the drunken sheen Kalen had placed on my senses when he reached out and grabbed me across the center console of his car and slipped me onto his lap—or maybe it was temporary insanity for me to actually believe that he was sincere.
This was clearly some revenge fantasy against the daughter of the woman his father had cheated on his mother with. He never intended to take me to dinner—he only wanted to humiliate me in the process of making sure I desired him just as much as he craved his revenge.
Somewhere in the middle of my mother showing back, my father entering back into rehab, filtering through the last remnants of my feelings for Colby and encountering Kalen, I'd let my guard down enough to let him into my mind.
I'd allowed him to crowd around my emotions and cloud my judgement, to distract me and disarm me. I'd allowed far too much.
"Gracie, you're still here? I appreciate the extra help, but you've definitely got better things to do on a Friday night than help out here in these old archives."
"Thanks Greta, I was just finishing off my list before heading out."
Greta, a thirty-something redhead with that classic librarian vibe was assigned as my direct superior with my internship, and as I reached back to grab my hours sheet for her to sign for my credits, she threw me a quick wink and set to grabbing up the rest of my books I'd been planning to take back into the deep archives.
"Oh, you don't have to—"
But she was already gone, hips pushing through the swinging double doors with her arms stacked high with books.
I'd contemplated calling Kalen to see where he might've been, but then decided against it. If he had an emergency, I was sure I'd hear about it the next day, and if it wasn't an emergency well, then, I wasn't about to text him and look desperate and feed into his delusions.
Going through the motions of finding a ride share back to campus and trudging up to my dorm room took more of my energy than I would've cared to admit while the majority of my thoughts were focused on someone who didn't deserve a single ounce of my attention after standing me up for a date that he'd insisted on.
It was only when stumbling into my dorm to find a frantic Franny on the phone pacing back and forth in our room that my scrambled brain screeched to a halt.
"No, no, just stay there. I'm sure they'll be fine, you don't need to go to the hospital for a black eye, quit being dramatic. Well, did they tell you that your nose is broken? No? Okay then, like I said—quit being dramatic, Colby. Okay. Well, where is he now? Really? You really think you can press charges when you're the one who started it? Yes, Colby, I was there. You were being an asshole, so yeah, you kind of deserved it. Make sure you ice it, and I'll see you in the morning. Yes, I'm hanging up on you now."
