All Chapters of BOUND TO THE BILLIONAIRE CAPTAIN: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Justin’s POV In three years of playing the student union, no girl had ever put a flat hand against my chest and moved me backward, and I was so stunned by the novelty of it that I sat there for a full second with my mouth slightly open, like a guy who'd been tagged in a photo he hadn't approved. "I'm sorry," Clara said, already sliding to the edge of the couch and tugging the strap of her borrowed dress back onto her shoulder. "I shouldn't have come." "You came to my apartment at night, in that dress, after I told you to wear something nice," I said, "so I think we can agree you had some idea of how the evening was supposed to go." "I did have an idea, and it was wrong." She was looking at the floor when she said it, her fingertips still orange from the Takis dust, and she didn't look the way girls usually looked when they were being dramatic, which was the part that bothered me most, because she looked calm. I had spent six months noticing the way Clara Hayes tucked her hair beh

Clara’s POV The grades went up on a laminated sheet taped to Professor Helen's door at 9:03 on Thursday morning, and I stood in front of it for ninety seconds without managing to find the last four digits of Carter's student ID, which I had typed into a tutoring sign-in sheet forty times, because my hands were shaking harder than they ever had on any stage. Above the sheet someone had stuck a sticker that read CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION, BUT IT DOES WINK SUGGESTIVELY, and I read it three times to avoid reading the list, since I had spent three weeks of my life and most of my sleep on a man who had once asked me whether Freud was a band, and I told myself that being more nervous than he was counted as the occupational hazard of tutoring and nothing else. I found 4471 on the third pass, and beside it, in Professor Helen's severe red ink, was the number seventy-one, and I put both hands over my mouth and made a sound that I was not proud of. "Don't tell me," Carter said behind me,

Clara’s POV The Rock Contest committee hit my inbox at 7:14 a.m., shouting FINAL NOTICE: PARTNER CONFIRMATION in all caps. By noon, I’d already read it nineteen times—like rereading a bad horoscope, hoping the meaning might change if I squint at it long enough. The form wanted two names or a solo declaration. I only had one, and I wasn’t about to write it down. Didn’t have a song to put it on anyway.Practice room four had the best piano on the third floor—an upright that’d seen better days, keys heavier on the left, a B-flat that stuck like glue, and the telltale brown ring of a coffee mug on the music stand. I’d been sitting there since ten, notebook open on my lap, chasing scraps of verses that never turned into a chorus. Big letters: CHORUS? staring up at me, my handwriting getting angrier each time I looked. I hadn’t managed a chorus since August. Justin had thrown that fact at me like it was a stone meant to break something. August. Start of the semester. Also when my bank bala

Clara’s POV "You can't say locker room," Mr. Tran said from behind the counter, where he had no business eavesdropping, and jabbed a finger at Carter like an usher at a sentencing hearing. "Not to the father. The father hears locker room, he hears naked." Carter and I turned to face him, in unison so smooth it had taken three weeks of loathing to perfect, and Mr. Tran shrugged and went back to his stockpot. "I have three daughters," he said. "I know fathers." It was one in the morning in the only pho shop within a mile of campus that was still open for the hockey team's late-night snacking, and we had claimed the booth under a yellowing poster of a beach in Da Nang, with a legal pad on the table between us that I'd split into three columns with purple ink: WHAT WE SAY, WHAT'S TRUE, WHAT HE CAN CHECK "Question one," I said. "Where did we meet?" "The locker room." Carter said it with a small shrug of a man who knew he'd already lost. "It's the truth, and the truth is the easie

POV: Carter The official Briar Athletics Friendsgiving sign-up sheet had been taped to the front door of the hockey house refrigerator since the very first day of November, and Clara Hayes was standing in front of it in her thick wool socks, reading through the handwritten names with the exact, critical expression of a senior corporate attorney examining a hostile business contract. "Ice," she read aloud, running her finger down the paper, her voice ringing clear against the quiet tile of the kitchen. "Graham. Paper napkins and plastic forks, assigned to Dean. Macaroni and cheese, assigned to Jaxson, with the bold words do not trust under any circumstances scribbled right next to his name in what I strongly assume is a completely different handwriting." "That's Dean's handwriting," I said, reaching over her head to take the red highlighter straight out of her small hand because she had spent the last three minutes pointing it directly at my chest. "Jaxson made the macaroni for the