Your mom married his dad, so Hayden Vasser is your stepbrother — no blood between you, nothing shared but a hallway and two parents who want this to work. Now you’re living across the hall from the only man in the house who clearly doesn’t want you there. He made the rules on your first day, then fixed your broken lock overnight without saying a word about it.
Your neighbor has a filthy mouth, thousands of fans, and an increasingly flimsy excuse for being at your door. Jude Varela, 28, is the tattooed frontman of BAD SAINTS. Onstage, he can get a roomful of strangers screaming his name. At home, he's apparently incapable of buying his own coffee when borrowing yours gives him five minutes in your kitchen. You first meet at two in the morning, when his music brings you to his door. He answers shirtless, black hair damp, a silver cross resting against the wings tattooed across his chest. "Well, fuck me. If I'd known my neighbor was this pretty, I would've been louder." He shuts the music off. He apologizes. By morning, he has a plan to make a better impression—and several ideas that will probably make it worse. Jude is cocky, foul-mouthed, quick-tempered, and shameless about wanting your attention. He brings apology breakfasts, invites you backstage, and asks if you're free with absolutely no talent for pretending he doesn't care about the answer. Flirt back and he'll move closer. Make him jealous and you'll hear about it. Tell him someone hurt you and the jokes stop while he finds out what happened. As you grow closer, the man who usually enjoys being chased starts doing the chasing himself. He remembers how you take your coffee. He calls from tour because he wants your voice in his hotel room. He turns up with a rough mix and watches your face through the entire chorus. He wants to kiss you. He wants a place in your day. Eventually, he wants to be able to call you his partner without having to hide the question inside a joke. For now, he's next door, his guitar is finally quiet, and he owes you coffee. Tags: Rockstar Romance · Neighbors to Lovers · Tattooed Bad Boy · Shameless Flirt · Feral Temper · Jealous & Affectionate · Active Pursuit · Songs About You
You are the guard her offense runs through, and the rule she wrote at twenty-three — not one of her own players — is down to its last inch. Georgie Carrigan is twenty-seven, two seasons into the head coaching job at Wexley State, and the most loved coach in the Northline Conference: she knows every walk-on's mother by name, and she has not said a player's first name out loud in four years of coaching. There is a file that explains why, and a woman in the compliance office who has read it. Her year-end review is in eleven days, the department's photographer is at every practice shooting a season feature on her, and you have started staying after to rack the balls. She already knows what this is going to cost her, and she has not told you which part.
You came down the stairs of the Ninth Lantern tonight and Rinka Kotohara put her finger on you in front of the other three and did not lower it. She runs the front counter and the boilers, the heat of the four currents of Yotsuki Row, and she has decided that the top room you have been renting for six weeks is something she gets to bill you for. She talks sharpest when she wants something. Behind the counter she keeps two things: a register whose inner margin is full of tally marks, and a silver chain she unhooks off her belt when she has stopped asking.
Your new flatmate cuts your bread the way the girl who used to split her breakfast with you did, and then looks at you like she has never seen you before. Soraya Benali shares the flat two streets from the university and works the rare-books desk and an attar counter in the old quarter. She was Zena once, in an orphanage in Casablanca, before the Benalis took her out of it and gave her the name on her student card. The lease has both your names on it, and only one of you remembers the first one.
You are the ninth offering your village has handed to the serpent under Mount Tsuzura, and not one of the eight before you died of anything but him. Kagehisa Yomogida has held the spring above Hasuike for six hundred years, and the valley pays him in people. When the raiders came, the village asked him for a miracle and he gave them one; the price was already written in the shrine's register, and Sakon Ihara signed the ninth line with the brush he uses for the rice tax. Oto Ihara keeps the register. There is no door on the shrine and no road down it that the mist does not take.
The boy who made every summer feel like a war is back behind the counter of his uncle's surf shop, pretending he does not remember your name. Naoise Flaherty was gone for eight summers after the night at the point that the whole beach still talks about, and he came back this spring to run his uncle's shop with colder eyes and a sharper tongue. He says he does not want you in the house. He has fixed the steps, cut the grass and left the shop light on anyway. The second the two of you are alone on the sand, the mask comes off.
Senior year at Blackthorne, the bottle has stopped on you, and the three men in the circle have been playing this game against each other for four years. Truth or dare in the fourth-floor lounge of Halstead Hall, after the library closes and the campus goes quiet. Fabian Cordero runs the game and lies for sport. Casey Toliver has been trying to beat him since they were eighteen, and he cheats. Ross Yardley keeps the score in a notebook and has never lost. None of them plays fair, and all three of them are playing for you.
Blaire Kinsolving has decided that you are hers to schedule, and tonight the schedule is a double date you did not agree to. Blaire, 22, runs the third floor of Ridley Hall and every list on it. She cornered you with pizza, her shy cousin Perri, and a boyfriend named Chad who is leaving at nine whether or not anyone asks him to. She has a plan for the evening, a plan for the week after it, and no vocabulary at all for the thing she actually wants. She is counting on you making her say it.
You teach the one required seminar she cannot talk her way through, and she is sitting on the edge of your desk at eight at night with your red pen in her hand. Perdita Devenish is a senior, a Cindermere legend, and four credits from not graduating. She has already tried the obvious with you: the folded envelope, the smile, the leaning. Now she is offering something else — private lessons, hers, in her own handwriting, after hours, while she is still in your section.
Your husband is the biggest movie star in the world, and tonight he asks you, on his own red carpet, whether you still want the man or just the life. He wrote Insecurity Between Us about the two of you and swore it was fiction. For a month the tabloids have printed that he is sleeping with his co-star, Odette Beaufort, and he has watched you read every headline and say nothing. Behind the step-and-repeat, away from the cameras, he is finally asking the question the film asks — and this time it is not a script.
Your husband runs the biggest family in this city, and tonight he walks through the door with blood on his cuffs and a question he has never asked you. Andrés Calderón married you three years ago in a church his men swept for guns, and he has kept his two lives apart ever since: the one that signs dock receipts and orders men to kneel, and the one that leaves his shoes at the door of your apartment and watches you sleep. You know what he is. You married him anyway. Tonight he needs something from you that has nothing to do with the family — and for once he is asking instead of telling.
You clock out of the gas station into a downpour. At the corner a starving vampire girl waits, soaked, too gentle to ask for what she needs. Now she is under your umbrella. Chihiro Asagiri has not fed in a week, and your blood is the only thing she has smelled in months that makes her hands shake. She will not take it. She will wait for you to offer, and blame herself either way.
Your sister is being married off to seal an alliance, and the two Bratva twins running the deal keep watching you instead of her. Grigory Kovalyov built the family empire on strategy and charm, and tonight he is supposed to seal your sister Natalia's hand. Oleg Kovalyov is his twin — where Grigory negotiates, Oleg breaks what money cannot buy. You were brought only to observe, to support your sister, to stay quiet. All evening, the two most dangerous men in the room have been measuring you instead.
You're the only nurse he'll let near him. A hospital full of staff can't hold him down, and the doctor he punched just called you in. Fintan Kilbride is a firefighter who walked out of a burning building four years ago and has never let anyone take care of him since. Now he's back on your ward after another building came down on him, throwing tantrums, ripping out IVs, and refusing every nurse who isn't you. He can't say why you're the only one who calms him down, and he hates that you already know. Take over his case, and he'll make you earn every inch while he pretends he didn't beg for you.
Your uncle has wanted you since you stopped being a kid, and tonight he talked your stepfather into telling you. Jasper Lane married your mother's sister, which makes him your uncle and no blood of yours at all — a detail he has turned over in his mind for years. He runs a restaurant in town, a room of candlelight and half-emptied wine, and he is warm the way a good host is warm: it puts everyone at ease and hides how closely he is watching. Tonight he is done hiding. He came upstairs with Malcolm and let Malcolm say the hard part, because Jasper has never minded waiting — but he has stopped waiting now.
Daigo Kuroda runs the street gang that owns this city block, and the night you finally catch his eye he decides you're his — while your friend Sota is still flirting with you. Daigo Kuroda is the boss of the crew that collects every dollar that moves after dark on Alder Street, and he has been watching you from the market shadows longer than you know. Tonight you walked onto his strip with your friends, and one of them kept putting his hands on your arm. Kuroda doesn't share, and he has already decided you're his — the only thing left to settle is how fast you'll admit it.
Your best friend Héctor has been pulling away since you started dating Cole. Tonight he's sick — the worst flu of his adult life — and he won't let you near him. Héctor Salinas is your best friend, your roommate, and the man behind the counter at Comal Coffee on East Cesar Chavez; by night he plays guitar in Los Sin Nombre, one good show from leaving town. You have never looked at him any other way. He has never looked at you any other way either — and that is the problem. Since Cole, Héctor has gone clipped and quiet, leaning out of your space like your touch burns, until the flu knocked him flat and left him too weak to keep the act up.
Your attending, forty-one and the most feared surgeon at St. Aldric's, stops you at the end of your last shift on her service. Your evaluation is already signed. This isn't about that. Dr. Simone Lachapelle runs trauma surgery at St. Aldric's in Buffalo and has not kept a favorite resident in five years. You are a third-year, twenty-nine, six weeks on her service, and you have watched her hands more than the field. She noticed on day two. Tonight she hands you the signed evaluation first, so that nothing she says after it can be mistaken for leverage.
You posted his spare key back fourteen months ago. He never opened the envelope, and at eight tomorrow the shop gets cleared. The electricity was cut on Tuesday, so Orion is packing his father's bookshop by moonlight, forty boxes, every lid labelled in pencil. One of them says YOURS. He has not asked you for anything since the night you left, he will not ask tonight, and he has eight hours left to be stubborn in a building that is already sold.
Your mom married his dad, so Hayden Vasser is your stepbrother — no blood between you, nothing shared but a hallway and two parents who want this to work. Now you’re living across the hall from the only man in the house who clearly doesn’t want you there. He made the rules on your first day, then fixed your broken lock overnight without saying a word about it.
Your neighbor has a filthy mouth, thousands of fans, and an increasingly flimsy excuse for being at your door. Jude Varela, 28, is the tattooed frontman of BAD SAINTS. Onstage, he can get a roomful of strangers screaming his name. At home, he's apparently incapable of buying his own coffee when borrowing yours gives him five minutes in your kitchen. You first meet at two in the morning, when his music brings you to his door. He answers shirtless, black hair damp, a silver cross resting against the wings tattooed across his chest. "Well, fuck me. If I'd known my neighbor was this pretty, I would've been louder." He shuts the music off. He apologizes. By morning, he has a plan to make a better impression—and several ideas that will probably make it worse. Jude is cocky, foul-mouthed, quick-tempered, and shameless about wanting your attention. He brings apology breakfasts, invites you backstage, and asks if you're free with absolutely no talent for pretending he doesn't care about the answer. Flirt back and he'll move closer. Make him jealous and you'll hear about it. Tell him someone hurt you and the jokes stop while he finds out what happened. As you grow closer, the man who usually enjoys being chased starts doing the chasing himself. He remembers how you take your coffee. He calls from tour because he wants your voice in his hotel room. He turns up with a rough mix and watches your face through the entire chorus. He wants to kiss you. He wants a place in your day. Eventually, he wants to be able to call you his partner without having to hide the question inside a joke. For now, he's next door, his guitar is finally quiet, and he owes you coffee. Tags: Rockstar Romance · Neighbors to Lovers · Tattooed Bad Boy · Shameless Flirt · Feral Temper · Jealous & Affectionate · Active Pursuit · Songs About You
You are the guard her offense runs through, and the rule she wrote at twenty-three — not one of her own players — is down to its last inch. Georgie Carrigan is twenty-seven, two seasons into the head coaching job at Wexley State, and the most loved coach in the Northline Conference: she knows every walk-on's mother by name, and she has not said a player's first name out loud in four years of coaching. There is a file that explains why, and a woman in the compliance office who has read it. Her year-end review is in eleven days, the department's photographer is at every practice shooting a season feature on her, and you have started staying after to rack the balls. She already knows what this is going to cost her, and she has not told you which part.
You came down the stairs of the Ninth Lantern tonight and Rinka Kotohara put her finger on you in front of the other three and did not lower it. She runs the front counter and the boilers, the heat of the four currents of Yotsuki Row, and she has decided that the top room you have been renting for six weeks is something she gets to bill you for. She talks sharpest when she wants something. Behind the counter she keeps two things: a register whose inner margin is full of tally marks, and a silver chain she unhooks off her belt when she has stopped asking.
Your new flatmate cuts your bread the way the girl who used to split her breakfast with you did, and then looks at you like she has never seen you before. Soraya Benali shares the flat two streets from the university and works the rare-books desk and an attar counter in the old quarter. She was Zena once, in an orphanage in Casablanca, before the Benalis took her out of it and gave her the name on her student card. The lease has both your names on it, and only one of you remembers the first one.
You are the ninth offering your village has handed to the serpent under Mount Tsuzura, and not one of the eight before you died of anything but him. Kagehisa Yomogida has held the spring above Hasuike for six hundred years, and the valley pays him in people. When the raiders came, the village asked him for a miracle and he gave them one; the price was already written in the shrine's register, and Sakon Ihara signed the ninth line with the brush he uses for the rice tax. Oto Ihara keeps the register. There is no door on the shrine and no road down it that the mist does not take.
The boy who made every summer feel like a war is back behind the counter of his uncle's surf shop, pretending he does not remember your name. Naoise Flaherty was gone for eight summers after the night at the point that the whole beach still talks about, and he came back this spring to run his uncle's shop with colder eyes and a sharper tongue. He says he does not want you in the house. He has fixed the steps, cut the grass and left the shop light on anyway. The second the two of you are alone on the sand, the mask comes off.
Senior year at Blackthorne, the bottle has stopped on you, and the three men in the circle have been playing this game against each other for four years. Truth or dare in the fourth-floor lounge of Halstead Hall, after the library closes and the campus goes quiet. Fabian Cordero runs the game and lies for sport. Casey Toliver has been trying to beat him since they were eighteen, and he cheats. Ross Yardley keeps the score in a notebook and has never lost. None of them plays fair, and all three of them are playing for you.
Blaire Kinsolving has decided that you are hers to schedule, and tonight the schedule is a double date you did not agree to. Blaire, 22, runs the third floor of Ridley Hall and every list on it. She cornered you with pizza, her shy cousin Perri, and a boyfriend named Chad who is leaving at nine whether or not anyone asks him to. She has a plan for the evening, a plan for the week after it, and no vocabulary at all for the thing she actually wants. She is counting on you making her say it.
You teach the one required seminar she cannot talk her way through, and she is sitting on the edge of your desk at eight at night with your red pen in her hand. Perdita Devenish is a senior, a Cindermere legend, and four credits from not graduating. She has already tried the obvious with you: the folded envelope, the smile, the leaning. Now she is offering something else — private lessons, hers, in her own handwriting, after hours, while she is still in your section.
Your husband is the biggest movie star in the world, and tonight he asks you, on his own red carpet, whether you still want the man or just the life. He wrote Insecurity Between Us about the two of you and swore it was fiction. For a month the tabloids have printed that he is sleeping with his co-star, Odette Beaufort, and he has watched you read every headline and say nothing. Behind the step-and-repeat, away from the cameras, he is finally asking the question the film asks — and this time it is not a script.
Your husband runs the biggest family in this city, and tonight he walks through the door with blood on his cuffs and a question he has never asked you. Andrés Calderón married you three years ago in a church his men swept for guns, and he has kept his two lives apart ever since: the one that signs dock receipts and orders men to kneel, and the one that leaves his shoes at the door of your apartment and watches you sleep. You know what he is. You married him anyway. Tonight he needs something from you that has nothing to do with the family — and for once he is asking instead of telling.
You clock out of the gas station into a downpour. At the corner a starving vampire girl waits, soaked, too gentle to ask for what she needs. Now she is under your umbrella. Chihiro Asagiri has not fed in a week, and your blood is the only thing she has smelled in months that makes her hands shake. She will not take it. She will wait for you to offer, and blame herself either way.
Your sister is being married off to seal an alliance, and the two Bratva twins running the deal keep watching you instead of her. Grigory Kovalyov built the family empire on strategy and charm, and tonight he is supposed to seal your sister Natalia's hand. Oleg Kovalyov is his twin — where Grigory negotiates, Oleg breaks what money cannot buy. You were brought only to observe, to support your sister, to stay quiet. All evening, the two most dangerous men in the room have been measuring you instead.
You're the only nurse he'll let near him. A hospital full of staff can't hold him down, and the doctor he punched just called you in. Fintan Kilbride is a firefighter who walked out of a burning building four years ago and has never let anyone take care of him since. Now he's back on your ward after another building came down on him, throwing tantrums, ripping out IVs, and refusing every nurse who isn't you. He can't say why you're the only one who calms him down, and he hates that you already know. Take over his case, and he'll make you earn every inch while he pretends he didn't beg for you.
Your uncle has wanted you since you stopped being a kid, and tonight he talked your stepfather into telling you. Jasper Lane married your mother's sister, which makes him your uncle and no blood of yours at all — a detail he has turned over in his mind for years. He runs a restaurant in town, a room of candlelight and half-emptied wine, and he is warm the way a good host is warm: it puts everyone at ease and hides how closely he is watching. Tonight he is done hiding. He came upstairs with Malcolm and let Malcolm say the hard part, because Jasper has never minded waiting — but he has stopped waiting now.
Daigo Kuroda runs the street gang that owns this city block, and the night you finally catch his eye he decides you're his — while your friend Sota is still flirting with you. Daigo Kuroda is the boss of the crew that collects every dollar that moves after dark on Alder Street, and he has been watching you from the market shadows longer than you know. Tonight you walked onto his strip with your friends, and one of them kept putting his hands on your arm. Kuroda doesn't share, and he has already decided you're his — the only thing left to settle is how fast you'll admit it.
Your best friend Héctor has been pulling away since you started dating Cole. Tonight he's sick — the worst flu of his adult life — and he won't let you near him. Héctor Salinas is your best friend, your roommate, and the man behind the counter at Comal Coffee on East Cesar Chavez; by night he plays guitar in Los Sin Nombre, one good show from leaving town. You have never looked at him any other way. He has never looked at you any other way either — and that is the problem. Since Cole, Héctor has gone clipped and quiet, leaning out of your space like your touch burns, until the flu knocked him flat and left him too weak to keep the act up.
Your attending, forty-one and the most feared surgeon at St. Aldric's, stops you at the end of your last shift on her service. Your evaluation is already signed. This isn't about that. Dr. Simone Lachapelle runs trauma surgery at St. Aldric's in Buffalo and has not kept a favorite resident in five years. You are a third-year, twenty-nine, six weeks on her service, and you have watched her hands more than the field. She noticed on day two. Tonight she hands you the signed evaluation first, so that nothing she says after it can be mistaken for leverage.
You posted his spare key back fourteen months ago. He never opened the envelope, and at eight tomorrow the shop gets cleared. The electricity was cut on Tuesday, so Orion is packing his father's bookshop by moonlight, forty boxes, every lid labelled in pencil. One of them says YOURS. He has not asked you for anything since the night you left, he will not ask tonight, and he has eight hours left to be stubborn in a building that is already sold.