CHAPTER 1 - REJECTED BY MY BEST FRIEND

I'd been in love with Caleb Park for four years.

Four years of sitting in hockey stands screaming his name. Four years of making him playlists, remembering his allergies, dropping everything when he called. Four years of being the girl who was always there – steady, reliable, waiting for him to turn around and finally see me.

The scrapbook took me three weeks. Hand-trimmed photos. Captions in my best handwriting. Ticket stubs from his first collegiate goal. A pressed carnation from the gas station bouquet he bought me for my birthday. Every inside joke, every memory, every moment I thought meant something – bound together and organized chronologically because that's what I did. I turned my feelings into something pretty and hoped it would be enough to make someone want them.

The love letter was in the back sleeve. Two pages. Nine drafts. Sienna – my roommate – had approved it with a nod: "If he doesn't kiss you after this, I'll kiss you myself."

Zara had read it over FaceTime with her jaw tight. "Don't give him this."

"Why?"

"Because Caleb Park has been eating your devotion like a free buffet for four years and the only tip he's ever left is you're like a sister to me. Don't hand him your heart on paper so he can set it next to his protein shake."

I didn't listen to Zara. I never listened to Zara about Caleb.

But that was about to change.

The Valentine's party was at the hockey house as usual. I'd gone every year since freshman year – always beside Caleb, always in jeans and his spare hoodie, always pretending the ache in my chest was just nerves.

This year I wore a dress. Black. Short. Sienna flat-ironed my hair. I put on red lipstick – the shade Caleb once said was "a bit much" on another girl, which I'd filed away the way I filed away everything he said, sorting his opinions into a map of who I should be.

I walked in at 9:17 PM.

Found him in three seconds. I always found him in three seconds or less.

He was leaning against the kitchen island, red cup in hand.

His other arm was around Jade – my cousin. Head cheerleader. Blonde, long-legged, laughing at something he'd said with her hand flat on his chest. His hand was on her hip. Thumb hooked in her waistband like it belonged there.

The room didn't stop. The music didn't cut. Nobody gasped. There was just me, holding a gift bag full of four years of devotion, staring at the boy I loved with his hand on my cousin's body.

I should have turned around. But I was loyal. I was committed. I'd spent three weeks on that scrapbook and four years on this boy, and I was going to see it through.

Loyalty. That's the word I used. The real word was something sadder.

I walked up to them.

"Hey."

"Nomes! You came." He glanced at Jade. "You know Jade, right?"

He was asking if I knew the girl I grew up with and introduced him to.

"Hey, Jade."

Jade smiled. Glossy and precise. "Love the dress. That's so brave for you."

I ignored her and held out the gift bag. "Happy Valentine's Day."

He pulled out the scrapbook and flipped it open.

I watched his face – watched three of his teammates lean in, watched the dawning realization that this wasn't a card. It was a confession.

He laughed. Short. Tight. Just air escaping.

"Naomi, this is... wow. This is a lot."

A lot. Not beautiful. Not thoughtful. A lot. Like I'd handed him a suitcase and asked him to carry it.

Jade leaned over his shoulder. Flipped to the page with the pressed flower. Raised one eyebrow.

"That's, like... middle school sweet."

Teammates snorted. Caleb's mouth twitched – not quite a smile, but not even close to a defense. He closed the scrapbook. Set it on the counter next to a half-empty bottle of Fireball and someone's vape.

"Thanks, Nomes. This is really… yeah. Thank you." He squeezed my shoulder. One-handed. The way you'd pat a dog. "I'll look at it more later, yeah?"

He turned back to Jade.

I stood there for four seconds that lasted a century. Then I picked up what was left of my dignity – there wasn't much, but it was mine – and walked toward the door. Didn't run. Didn't stumble. Kept my shoulders back and my chin level and my eyes dry until I made it outside and the February air hit me like a wall of ice.

I sat on the front steps of the hockey house in a dress that was too short for winter and heels that were already cutting into my ankles. The cold concrete bit through the thin fabric. I could hear the party thumping through the door behind me – bass and laughter and the muffled roar of people having the time of their lives while mine quietly imploded.

The tears came. I let them. Mascara running down my cheeks in dark rivers, lipstick probably smeared where I'd bitten my lip too hard. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.

Four years. You spent four years on someone, and this is how it ends. Not with a conversation. Not even with a proper rejection. Just this is a lot and a pat on the shoulder and your scrapbook next to a bottle of Fireball.

Then I heard them.

The window above me was cracked open – the kitchen window, letting out the heat from sixty bodies packed into a living room. Voices floated down, clear and unmistakable over the music.

"Bro, look at this page. She pressed a flower." Laughter. Pages turning. "Dear Caleb, from the first moment–" More laughter. They were reading it. The letter. My letter. The nine-draft, two-page, every-honest-thing-I'd-ever-felt letter was being passed around the hockey team's kitchen island like a joke.

"She actually wrote 'you make the world feel less loud.' What does that even mean?"

"It means she's down bad, bro. Catastrophically."

I stopped breathing.

Caleb didn't stop them. Didn't say that's enough or give it back. He just let them read, let them laugh, let them hold every private thing I'd ever felt up to the light and turn it into entertainment.

Then his voice. Not laughing – but not defending either. Tired. Almost annoyed. Like I was a problem he'd been tolerating.

"She's suffocating. I've tried to give her space to grow up but she doesn't get the message. She's too soft for real life."

Suffocating. Too soft.

The words landed on my chest and pressed down.

A teammate – I couldn't tell which one, they all sounded the same when they were drunk and cruel – said something crude. Something about my body. Something that made the rest of them laugh in that low, ugly way.

Caleb's response came fast. Casual. Like he'd thought about it before and already had the answer loaded.

"Nah. I'd break her."

I sat there on the steps and let every word sink in like stones into water.

Suffocating. Too soft. I'd break her.

Four years. Four years of sitting in stands screaming his name. Four years of making him playlists and remembering his allergies and dropping everything when he called. Four years of being the girl who was always there, always steady, always waiting for him to turn around and see me.

And he saw me. He'd always seen me. He just didn't want what he saw.

Something inside me shifted. Not broke – I'd expected breaking. This was different. Quieter. Harder. Like a door I didn't know I had, closing. A lock I didn't know existed, clicking shut.

I stopped crying.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing mascara across my knuckles. I looked at it for a second. Then I stood up.

I didn't go back inside. Didn't collect the scrapbook. Didn't text Sienna or call Zara or do any of the things the old Naomi would have done.

I walked.

Heels clicking on cold pavement. Arms bare. February wind cutting through the dress like it wasn't there. I didn't know where I was going until I was already there – a bar three blocks off campus that I'd never been to, with a neon sign buzzing in the window and a door that was heavier than it looked.

I sat down at the bar. Ordered a vodka cranberry because it was the only cocktail I knew by name. The bartender didn't card me. I looked old enough tonight. Grief aged you.

The drink came. I wrapped both hands around the glass and stared at it like it had the answers. The bar was half-empty – a Tuesday night, Valentine's Day, the kind of place where people came to avoid exactly the holiday I'd just been destroyed by.

I took a sip. It was too sweet and too strong and I didn't care.

I was halfway through the glass when a hand slid another drink in front of me. Darker. Amber. Something that smelled like it could strip paint.

"You look like you're about to either cry or kill someone."

The voice was low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that didn't ask for your attention – it just took it.

"Either way, you need something stronger than that."

I looked up.

Steel grey eyes. The kind of grey that wasn't soft – wasn't misty or gentle or any of the words people used to make grey sound pretty. This grey was a knife edge. A frozen lake. The color of something that could cut you if you touched it wrong.

A scar split through his left eyebrow – thin, pale, deliberate-looking, like someone had tried to mark him and he'd worn it like a dare ever since. Dark hair falling over his forehead. A bruise on his cheekbone, fresh, turning purple at the edges. His knuckles on the bar top were split and swollen.

He was the most dangerously beautiful person I had ever seen in my life.

And he was looking at me like he already knew exactly what had happened tonight – not the details, but the shape of it. The wreckage. Like he recognized it.

I should have looked away. Should have said no thanks and gone back to my sad vodka cranberry and my shattered pride and my mascara-streaked face.

But the old Naomi – the soft one, the suffocating one, the one who was too much and never enough – she was sitting on the steps of a hockey house three blocks away. And whoever was left in this chair had nothing to lose.

I looked at the drink he'd set in front of me. Looked back at those steel grey eyes.

"Which one do you think?" I asked. "Crying or killing?"

He didn't smile. But something in his expression shifted – a flicker of interest, sharp and immediate, like I'd said the first interesting thing he'd heard all night.

"Guess I'll stay and find out."