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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Ever since she died, a small part of me had always known he was the cause of it.
Cancer, they'd said.
Sure, she might've been sick, but one day she was there in treatment, smiling at me as her pale skin gained some of its color back and then the next she was gone, like someone had taken that slowly building flame and extinguished it in its wake.
All that was left of her was the plumes of smoke left in her wake that trailed after me, following me to her funeral, to her memorial, to her gravesite...
I'd always known my father would remarry, but never had I imagined it would've happened so soon.
Pretty soon, it became a fading memory with the smell of smoke lingering in its wake, her perfume clinging to the shreds and scraps of photographs and little knick knacks she'd given me until there was nothing but the quick cut of the realization that I couldn't call up her smile unless looking at a picture or hear her laugh the way I used to be able to do.
My father was good at distracting, though.
Distract, deflect, defense.
It wasn't enough that I had basketball to hold me up, no.
He forced me through prep classes in school, demanding perfection.
Business focused, every single course was chosen strategically to help me pick up the reins of his business after graduation, but I had no plans of ever succumbing to what he wanted.
In the end, I was really in it only for the long game: revenge.
Revenge for the physical and emotional abuse.
Revenge for cheating on my mother with countless women all while she was actively dying in the hospital with cancer.
A deep set of rage had filled me since childhood and had never found an outlet aside from basketball, something that, if I didn't have it, I was sure my life would've crumbled around me already.
It was so easy for me to lose myself in Gracie and forget.
It was too easy.
She was dangerous, someone too sweet and beautiful.
She was the only thing that could make me forget, for even a second, the festering hate inside of me for the man who helped to create me.
My life was eat, sleep, breathe basketball for that very reason--because anything else and there would've been no way for me to achieve the status that I had.
The only way out from under his thumb was through basketball, and if using him to make that happen was what I had to do in order to make that happen, then I would damn sure use his own methods against him and lie to his face with a smile plastered on mine.
It was easy to lie to a snake when he'd already bitten me.
The best revenge against him would be to let his only heir refuse to take up his place in the company he built from the ground up, forcing him to either relinquish his assets later down the road when he was too old to manage anything anymore, or to pass the reins onto someone not in the family.
