Novel-novel oleh Ivy Rose

Jace's POV I told myself the whole walk back to my car that it didn’t mean anything.She’d looked exhausted. That was all. Any halfway decent person would have done the same thing, seeing someone that clearly running on fumes at one in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the window at the library, nothing to do with whatever I’d sat there feeling watching her work a counter she had no business still standing behind after the day she'd already had. It was food. It was only a sandwich and juice. It didn't mean I was beginning to care about her more than I wanted to. I almost believed myself by the time I got home.The problem, and I recognized it even as I sat there on my couch rethinking it, was that one act like that wasn’t going to satisfy whatever had actually shifted in me watching her through that window. I knew myself well enough to know this wasn't just a one-time act of kindness I'd forget about. I was going to want to do it again. And I could not, unde

Roselle's POV By the time my shift ended at half past midnight, my legs had stopped feeling like they belonged to me in any useful sense, and I locked the front door of the coffee shop behind the last customer and stood there for a second just breathing, the way you do when your body finally gets permission to stop pretending it isn’t running on empty.I still had a paper due Monday I hadn’t started. I still had tutoring at 8:47, unmovable, because showing up late even once felt like handing Jace exactly the kind of ammunition he’d been hunting for since day one. I did the math in my head without meaning to, the way I always did lately, four hours of sleep if I skipped the reading, five if I skipped eating breakfast instead, and none of the options felt like it should be a real choice a person should have to make on a Thursday night in September.I made it about two blocks from the coffee shop before my body simply stopped negotiating with me.It wasn't dramati

Jace's POV The video was already circulating by the time I got to the locker room, half the team watching some slowed down replay of the fall on a phone somebody was holding up like it was a highlight reel worth studying, and I sat down at my stall and started unlacing my skates without saying a word, because I can’t even talk my way out of this one.“Man, you went down like a folding chair,” Eli said, sitting down next to me, not even bothering to hide the grin. “Full send. Arms out and everything.”“I’m aware.”“I’m just saying, if you’re gonna eat it, at least commit to the bit like that. Very dramatic.”“Are you done?”“Not even close, but I’ll spare you for now.” He nudged my shoulder, easier than the room deserved, and lowered his voice enough that it stayed between us. “You good, though? Actually good, not just embarrassed good.”I thought about it longer than the question probably warranted. My back ached in a low, dull way that had nothin

Roselle's POV The first shot came in the form of my coffee order, somehow, impossibly, arriving from the campus café with a note taped to the cup that read tutoring session cancelled, when I had never once cancelled anything and definitely hadn’t asked anyone to relay that information anywhere.I found out it wasn’t true only because Dez texted me confused about where I was, and by the time I got to the study hall fifteen minutes late, three of Jace’s teammates were already lounging around with their feet up, having apparently been told the same thing.“Cute,” I said, dropping my bag onto the desk hard enough to make a point. “Very cute.”Jace was leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, doing an extremely poor job of looking innocent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”“Someone called the front desk and cancelled my sessions in my name.”“Strange. Maybe you should be more careful with your own scheduling.”“Careful. Right.” I sat down at

Jace's POV Brooke’s apartment always smelled like the same candle, something like vanilla, and I’d learned a long time ago not to think too much about fact that I could recognize it blind.The room settled into silence, broken only by the sound of our breathing as the last traces of heat slowly faded. Neither of us said anything when it was over. We never did. Words had never been part of whatever this was.Afterward, she stayed curled against my side for exactly as long as either of us ever stayed like that, which was never very long, both of us having long since settled into an arrangement that didn’t require lingering to feel complete. She reached for her phone on the nightstand, scrolling through something with one hand while her other stayed loosely draped over my chest, and I lay there staring at the ceiling fan doing its slow, useless circles, the specific quiet after that never quite felt like peace, just absence of noise.“You’re doing the thing,” she

Roselle's POV The team event was being held in the athletics building’s function room, the kind of space that clearly existed for exactly this purpose and no other, fold out tables lined with cheap catering trays and a banner overhead welcoming families for parent weekend, and I was there strictly in a work capacity, checking off names against a roster while players’ families filtered in looking for their sons among a sea of matching team polos.“You must be the new tutor everyone’s talking about.”I turned, and the girl who’d said it was warm in a way that felt immediate, easy, the kind of warmth that didn’t feel fake even on first meeting. She was maybe my age, holding a plate she hadn’t touched yet, watching me with open curiosity rather than the wary appraisal I’d half braced myself for after two and a half weeks of being campus gossip.“Depends on the version of talked about you mean,” I said. “The flattering one or the other one.”She laughed genuinel

‎POV: Charlotte‎Eleanor called on a Tuesday, which wasn’t unusual but what was unusual was that she called my phone instead of Damien’s.‎I was in the library when it rang, my notebook open but not moving the way it moved on good days, and I looked at the screen and felt the tension that Eleanor’s name always produced in me, the sense of needing to be fully present rather than half in whatever I’d been thinking about before.‎”Charlotte,” she said, when I answered. “Do you have a few minutes?”‎”Of course,” I said.‎She didn’t ask about the foundation or the upcoming calendar or any of the things she sometimes used as the opening of a conversation before she got to what she actually wanted to say. She went straight to it, which told me she’d been thinking about this call for a while before making it.‎”How is he?” she said. “Actually. I don’t want to hear the usual response he use to give whenever I ask him”‎I sat back in the reading chair.

‎POV: Charlotte‎I didn’t tell him what I was going to do.‎That was deliberate. Telling him would have turned it into a conversation, and a conversation would have given him the opportunity to be reasonable about it, to thank me and tell me it wasn’t necessary, to manage the offer carefully and at a distance that kept it from landing anywhere it could actually change something.‎So I didn’t tell him.‎I just got up earlier.‎The first morning I was in the kitchen before Helen, which was unusual enough that when she came in and found me at the counter with his medication schedule open and the doses already sorted she stopped in the doorway for half a second before she continued into the room and said good morning and went to the kettle without commenting on what I was doing.‎I appreciated that about Helen.‎Damien appeared about twenty minutes later, which was his usual time, and he came through the kitchen door already looking at his phone

POV: CharlotteThe building looked different from the inside.I’d built a whole picture of it from the outside over months, the brass plaque, the particular way Damien walked out of those doors with something quieter in him than when he’d gone in, and the inside didn’t match any of it. Clean, softly lit, deliberately unintimidating, and I walked through it beside him for the first time and kept my face easy.Keller was slight, late forties, careful in the way of someone who had delivered difficult news for long enough that precision and gentleness had become the same instinct. He shook my hand and said he was glad I’d come and I believed him, and we sat down and he opened the file.Forty minutes.That was how long it took, and in forty minutes I understood the situation more precisely than I had from months of observation and overheard phone calls and late night conversations combined. Keller spoke in the language of medicine and I stopped him tw

‎POV: Victoria ‎I walked out of the hotel feeling better than I had any right to feel. ‎That was the truth, and I was trying to be honest with myself more consistently these days, it was one of the things I’d decided in Lisbon and had been attempting to maintain with varying success since coming home. So honestly, walking out of that hotel bar after ninety minutes with Sebastian Blackwood, I felt lighter than I had since the evening before. ‎I knew all of that. ‎And I still felt lighter. ‎Because he’d listened. ‎That was the simple, slightly embarrassing truth. He sat across from me and listened to everything I said with rapt attention that made you feel like the person in front of you was actually interested in what you were telling them rather than waiting for their turn, and I had been lacking that since I came back to New York, so much so that ninety minutes of

‎POV: Sebastian‎She was easier to read than I’d expected.‎Not in a way that made her simple, Victoria Whitmore was not simple, I’d done enough research to understand that clearly before I sent the message last night. But she was readable in the way that people were predictable when they were carrying something heavy and hadn’t yet found the right place to set it down. The weight showed in small things, the way she'd held her glass, the slight tightening around her eyes when I said it wasn’t her fault, the specific quality of her silence when I said it, sitting with the sentence rather than deflecting it the way someone without that particular wound would have.‎She’d been hurt last night.‎Not just the rejection, though that was there too, I’d have been able to see that even without the information I already had. Something deeper than the rejection. Something about what the rejection confirmed, about what it told her about her own position in a situation

‎POV: Victoria‎The response came within minutes.‎”Someone who thinks you’ve been treated unfairly. Meet me and I’ll explain.”‎I should have put the phone down.‎Any reasonable version of myself, the version that had spent eight months in Lisbon becoming someone with better judgment than she’d had before, would have put the phone down and blocked the number and gone to bed and dealt with the humiliation of the evening in the private, undramatic way she’d been trying to deal with things lately.‎I didn’t put the phone down.‎I told myself it was curiosity. That was the most defensible explanation for why I agreed to meet a stranger who had somehow heard about a private conversation that had happened less than two hours ago. Curiosity. The itch of an unanswered question that had always been harder for me to resist than it probably should have been.‎We met the following evening at a hotel bar in midtown.‎Neutral ground. Public enough t