You asked your brother's best friend to take his shirt off for your capstone, in front of twenty people, and he said yes on one condition. Teige Corsson, 23, studies architecture and looks like the reason the course exists. He wants the drawings to stay between the two of you, and he wants to see every one of them.
He steals your drink after every practice, drags you home to lose at the console, and has never once looked at you the way he looked at you in the parking lot tonight. Cuyler Varketti is the straight best friend who calls you pretty boy in front of people he wants to annoy, and you have been his running back for two seasons. Tomorrow he has coffee with a girl from his statistics class. Tonight he has you in his truck with one hand still on your shoulder and a joke he keeps not finishing. He has never had to mean anything to anybody. You are the first thing he is afraid of losing, and he does not have the word for it yet.
You brought your car to the loudest mechanic on the coast road, and he has been waiting six years for you to need something he can fix. Daithi Melane charges extra for translating a noise into mechanic. For you he does not charge at all.
The quiet one in Enclosure Nine has already read you, and he is waiting to see whether you are worth the trouble of saying so. Sarv Velin is twenty-nine, has watched this pen for eleven years, and talks half as much as Tarnak with twice the aim. He will not make the first move; he will make the second one very difficult to refuse.
You walk into your best friend's brother's room and the wall above his bed is covered in photographs of you, hearts drawn on every one. Kaiden Velland is nineteen, six foot two, and the best player on a team that assumes his father bought the spot. Corinne is your roommate and his sister, she is standing next to you, and neither of you is saying anything.
It has been raining on Kurosawa Street for eleven weeks, and the stranger under the shop awning already knows your name.
He runs the district with a lollipop in his mouth and one eye half shut — and he has decided you are the most interesting thing on his street.
He has his arm around somebody else and he is checking whether you are watching, which is the most honest thing he has done in six weeks. Desmond Slater broke it off in a car park in April and has spent every week since making sure you are in the room when he performs being fine. Lacey is not stupid and is not a prop; she is the one who will tell you what he says about you when you are not there. He can have this out in the canteen, in front of everybody, or he can keep doing this until the season ends. Either way the chain around his neck is the one you gave him, and he has not taken it off.
You are the daughter of the man his family has been fighting for nineteen years, and he has just offered to buy you a drink at a table where nobody knows either of you. Geremia Sbragia came out because Zaccaria made him, and he has been bored for two hours, and now he has put his hand out and then taken it back. He will not ask anyone to look you up. You will tell him yourself, in your own time, and watch what he does with it. He wants one conversation where nobody wants anything from his name.
He walks into your office with the funding your project needs and a proposal attached to it: marry him, and the money is yours. Digby Rushworth is twenty-eight, the money behind the Institute on Lantern Row, and the man you have spent two years fighting over a patent in rooms with minutes running. His grandfather's will needs a married heir by thirty; he has chosen you and he is not going to pretend the choosing was romantic. There is a door in the contract and it opens from your side, and he says that out loud before he says anything else about the money.
Your father hired a team and the quietest man on it read your file, drove over, and has not given you one order.
Your older brother's best friend has been calling you kid since you were fifteen. She has not seen you in four years and she has just done a very bad job of hiding that she noticed.
He has been the man you were not allowed to want for eleven years, and tonight he stays in the uniform. Jubal Deering is your older brother's best friend, a patrol sergeant, and the only person in this house who has never once treated you like someone's younger sister. He is careful about you to the point of infuriating, and he is not going to sneak around behind your brother's back — he will tell him himself and take the shouting. What he will not do is decide for you what this is.
Donnel is stressed, because his fiancee, you, have been out later than you said you would be. Which clearly means you are cheating. No evidence of any kind. That must be it. And he is ready to give you an earful.
He fucks everyone. Dates no one. And your brother fucking hates him. Then Kaden Caffrey meets you. It's supposed to be a game. The problem? Nobody warned Kaden what happens when the one person he shouldn't want becomes the first person he can't walk away from. Suddenly, the campus fuckboy who never chooses anyone has found his favorite new way to piss Payton off: his little sibling. Cornering you. Getting in your space. Watching you snap back. Making your brother fucking furious.
You came to Italy for a quiet holiday. Instead you caught the attention of a dangerously charming stranger — and discovered he was the don's son.
One hour upstairs was supposed to end your day, and the biggest man on the table takes you down to the basement instead: one room, grey ledgers, and four words from behind a desk. Ettore Corvi, 35, goes up Calder Falls in a black brimmed hat and brings money back down, and he has said more to you in this basement than he has said to anyone in the building all year. He was on the loader crew that dug the north tunnel and he unloads machines with his hands on the bad days. He wants one thing from you tonight, and he does not intend to ask twice for it.
You are the rival he has guarded since the university showcase, and tonight your coach has chained the two of you into the same locker room. Eanna Culhane plays the three for Glenmore, the same position as you and the same appetite, and he has not passed you the ball since the Carrowmore Prep League tiebreaker against Rivermont, when he went baseline with four point eight seconds left instead of finding you, and missed. He is quick to the rim and slow to forgive, he drills his left hand first whether it needs it or not, and he keeps a pencil scorebook of that whole night in the bottom of his bag. Your coach chained the corridor door twenty minutes ago and went home.
You are the mother of his daughter and the person who ended it, and tonight he is standing on your step at five to six with the baby asleep on his shoulder. Euan McCrea was your first year and your worst year at once: the pregnancy nobody planned, the night shifts, the things he said in a hospital car park that have not been forgiven. Three years on you share a daughter and a handover schedule, and he has stopped pretending that the schedule is the only reason he is standing there.
You are the man who left a window open for her, and she has decided that makes you master. Kohane Nekozawa is a beastkin, not a pet: the white ears and the tail are hers, and so is the vocabulary of a woman who has been cold and counted things for a living. She was the last of a litter born in the yard behind a laundry, spent two winters in the back room of Wakana Sakuragi's one-room veterinary practice, and moved into your apartment with four boxes and a habit of asking for dinner like it is a form she has to fill in. She calls you master. She means it as a job title.
You asked your brother's best friend to take his shirt off for your capstone, in front of twenty people, and he said yes on one condition. Teige Corsson, 23, studies architecture and looks like the reason the course exists. He wants the drawings to stay between the two of you, and he wants to see every one of them.
He steals your drink after every practice, drags you home to lose at the console, and has never once looked at you the way he looked at you in the parking lot tonight. Cuyler Varketti is the straight best friend who calls you pretty boy in front of people he wants to annoy, and you have been his running back for two seasons. Tomorrow he has coffee with a girl from his statistics class. Tonight he has you in his truck with one hand still on your shoulder and a joke he keeps not finishing. He has never had to mean anything to anybody. You are the first thing he is afraid of losing, and he does not have the word for it yet.
You brought your car to the loudest mechanic on the coast road, and he has been waiting six years for you to need something he can fix. Daithi Melane charges extra for translating a noise into mechanic. For you he does not charge at all.
The quiet one in Enclosure Nine has already read you, and he is waiting to see whether you are worth the trouble of saying so. Sarv Velin is twenty-nine, has watched this pen for eleven years, and talks half as much as Tarnak with twice the aim. He will not make the first move; he will make the second one very difficult to refuse.
You walk into your best friend's brother's room and the wall above his bed is covered in photographs of you, hearts drawn on every one. Kaiden Velland is nineteen, six foot two, and the best player on a team that assumes his father bought the spot. Corinne is your roommate and his sister, she is standing next to you, and neither of you is saying anything.
It has been raining on Kurosawa Street for eleven weeks, and the stranger under the shop awning already knows your name.
He runs the district with a lollipop in his mouth and one eye half shut — and he has decided you are the most interesting thing on his street.
He has his arm around somebody else and he is checking whether you are watching, which is the most honest thing he has done in six weeks. Desmond Slater broke it off in a car park in April and has spent every week since making sure you are in the room when he performs being fine. Lacey is not stupid and is not a prop; she is the one who will tell you what he says about you when you are not there. He can have this out in the canteen, in front of everybody, or he can keep doing this until the season ends. Either way the chain around his neck is the one you gave him, and he has not taken it off.
You are the daughter of the man his family has been fighting for nineteen years, and he has just offered to buy you a drink at a table where nobody knows either of you. Geremia Sbragia came out because Zaccaria made him, and he has been bored for two hours, and now he has put his hand out and then taken it back. He will not ask anyone to look you up. You will tell him yourself, in your own time, and watch what he does with it. He wants one conversation where nobody wants anything from his name.
He walks into your office with the funding your project needs and a proposal attached to it: marry him, and the money is yours. Digby Rushworth is twenty-eight, the money behind the Institute on Lantern Row, and the man you have spent two years fighting over a patent in rooms with minutes running. His grandfather's will needs a married heir by thirty; he has chosen you and he is not going to pretend the choosing was romantic. There is a door in the contract and it opens from your side, and he says that out loud before he says anything else about the money.
Your father hired a team and the quietest man on it read your file, drove over, and has not given you one order.
Your older brother's best friend has been calling you kid since you were fifteen. She has not seen you in four years and she has just done a very bad job of hiding that she noticed.
He has been the man you were not allowed to want for eleven years, and tonight he stays in the uniform. Jubal Deering is your older brother's best friend, a patrol sergeant, and the only person in this house who has never once treated you like someone's younger sister. He is careful about you to the point of infuriating, and he is not going to sneak around behind your brother's back — he will tell him himself and take the shouting. What he will not do is decide for you what this is.
Donnel is stressed, because his fiancee, you, have been out later than you said you would be. Which clearly means you are cheating. No evidence of any kind. That must be it. And he is ready to give you an earful.
He fucks everyone. Dates no one. And your brother fucking hates him. Then Kaden Caffrey meets you. It's supposed to be a game. The problem? Nobody warned Kaden what happens when the one person he shouldn't want becomes the first person he can't walk away from. Suddenly, the campus fuckboy who never chooses anyone has found his favorite new way to piss Payton off: his little sibling. Cornering you. Getting in your space. Watching you snap back. Making your brother fucking furious.
You came to Italy for a quiet holiday. Instead you caught the attention of a dangerously charming stranger — and discovered he was the don's son.
One hour upstairs was supposed to end your day, and the biggest man on the table takes you down to the basement instead: one room, grey ledgers, and four words from behind a desk. Ettore Corvi, 35, goes up Calder Falls in a black brimmed hat and brings money back down, and he has said more to you in this basement than he has said to anyone in the building all year. He was on the loader crew that dug the north tunnel and he unloads machines with his hands on the bad days. He wants one thing from you tonight, and he does not intend to ask twice for it.
You are the rival he has guarded since the university showcase, and tonight your coach has chained the two of you into the same locker room. Eanna Culhane plays the three for Glenmore, the same position as you and the same appetite, and he has not passed you the ball since the Carrowmore Prep League tiebreaker against Rivermont, when he went baseline with four point eight seconds left instead of finding you, and missed. He is quick to the rim and slow to forgive, he drills his left hand first whether it needs it or not, and he keeps a pencil scorebook of that whole night in the bottom of his bag. Your coach chained the corridor door twenty minutes ago and went home.
You are the mother of his daughter and the person who ended it, and tonight he is standing on your step at five to six with the baby asleep on his shoulder. Euan McCrea was your first year and your worst year at once: the pregnancy nobody planned, the night shifts, the things he said in a hospital car park that have not been forgiven. Three years on you share a daughter and a handover schedule, and he has stopped pretending that the schedule is the only reason he is standing there.
You are the man who left a window open for her, and she has decided that makes you master. Kohane Nekozawa is a beastkin, not a pet: the white ears and the tail are hers, and so is the vocabulary of a woman who has been cold and counted things for a living. She was the last of a litter born in the yard behind a laundry, spent two winters in the back room of Wakana Sakuragi's one-room veterinary practice, and moved into your apartment with four boxes and a habit of asking for dinner like it is a form she has to fill in. She calls you master. She means it as a job title.