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 first time I met Colby Hart, he was a scrawny older nine-year-old, nose stuck up in the air refusing to play with his kid sister and her best friend.
He'd been more interested in playing basketball with his friends and was absolutely scandalized at his mother's request to have *gasp* girls join him.
Throughout the years, his indifference to me evolved into friendly playfulness which then extended into teasing mockery, leading into a period of pranks which definitely left me on guard anytime I visited their household.
Then something shifted, dramatically.
His playfulness turned flirtatious in nature and, while he might've denied it, he definitely threw in suggestive innuendos every now and then just to see what color my cheeks would turn and then promptly laugh at my reaction to him.
It was a mortifying turn of events, then, when my heart started fluttering nervously around him.
When my breaths rocked my chest double time whenever he would enter a room.
When I'd find myself focusing more on his eyes and the pit of feeling I'd never had before in my stomach than what he'd actually been saying.
There was a pre-kiss Colby, and a post-kiss Colby.
Pre-kiss Colby would never have spoken to me the way post-kiss Colby had been lately.
And maybe that was my fault, for asking for him to be my first kiss in the first place.
I'd changed the dynamics so thoroughly that we couldn't go back to the way we were before, with the innocence and friendship that came so effortlessly between us.
Or maybe it was his fault, for wanting what he wanted and committing to someone else, or multiple someone's.
Or maybe he just didn't give a fuck at all, and this was all some kind of game to him that he got off on--waiting to see if I would hold out or using me as some kind of placeholder for when he dumped his latest girl.
Whatever it was--it was becoming a problem. It had already been a problem, but now...
Now he was staring at me from across the room during lecture in the class where I was the TA, and half the girls in the class had dated him for at least a week, the current girl hanging on his arm while Kalen shot him daggers with his eyes from the other side of the room.
Because the professor was on the other side of the room. Because it was clear he wasn't looking at anything other than me.
And Kalen...was not happy with this new development.
His hands were clenched tightly into fists in his seat in the big auditorium style classroom built specifically for lectures like these, his navy eyes slated and downcast in obvious anger.
