All Chapters of The Boy I Wasn't Supposed To Want. : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Ivy smoothed the hem of her sweater for the third time in two minutes and told herself to stop."You look fine," her mother said, not looking up from the visor mirror as she checked her lipstick. "Better than fine.""I didn't ask.""You didn't have to. You've been picking at that sweater since we got in the car."Ivy dropped her hands into her lap. Diane snapped the visor shut and turned in her seat, and for a second she looked less like a mother running late for dinner and more like a woman about to walk into something that mattered to her more than she was letting on."I just want tonight to go well," Diane said. "That's all.""It's dinner, Mom. Not a court appearance.""It's not just dinner." Diane's smile flickered, quick and a little nervous. "Marcus is important to me, Ivy. I want you to like him."Ivy had heard the name Marcus for four months now, dropped into phone calls and casual mentions the way a person drops something they're testing the weight of. She'd met him twice, b

Ashford State's quad was loud with the first-week energy of a new semester, tables set up for club recruitment, music drifting from someone's speaker, the smell of coffee carts working overtime. Ivy cut through the middle of it with her bag strap cutting into her shoulder, already running through her schedule in her head."You look like someone who needs caffeine and a distraction," Priya said, falling into step beside her out of nowhere, the way she always did. "In that order.""I look that bad?""You look like you spent your whole winter break somewhere your body was but your brain wasn't." Priya squinted at her. "Also you're doing the thing where you chew your lip when you're thinking hard about something you don't want to talk about."Ivy stopped chewing her lip immediately, which only made Priya grin."It's nothing," Ivy said."Sure. Nothing. Great. Coffee's on you then, since nothing's bothering you and you clearly have room in your budget for guilt spending."They got in line a

The invitation came from Priya, who slid into the seat across from Ivy in the dining hall with the particular energy of someone about to propose something she already knew would get an argument."Delta Row's doing a welcome mixer Friday," Priya said. "Open to non-members. Free food, decent music, and it's basically the only way to get invited to anything good for the rest of the semester if you go to at least one.""Absolutely not.""Ivy.""You want me to willingly walk into Reagan Cole's house.""I want you to stop letting Reagan Cole own an entire building on this campus." Priya stole a fry off Ivy's tray without asking, the way she always did. "Look, I get it. She's awful. But if you skip every single thing she's connected to, you're going to spend the next three years hiding in your dorm room, and that's not a plan, that's just losing slower."Ivy chewed on that along with her food for a minute. Priya wasn't wrong, exactly. Reagan ran wide enough through the social ecosystem here

Callum sat in his father's study long after everyone else in the house had gone to bed, boxes of family photos spread across the desk in the mess Marcus had left behind after digging through them for wedding slideshow material. He wasn't looking for anything in particular. He was looking for a reason not to go up to his room yet, not to lie awake again running the last two weeks over in his head, Ivy's name on his phone screen, the sound of her voice when she thanked him outside the department office like he'd done something remarkable instead of the bare minimum.He almost missed it. A manila envelope, unlabeled, wedged between two photo albums his father hadn't opened in years. He pulled it out mostly out of habit, the same restless curiosity that had made him a mediocre student and a decent researcher, and tipped the contents onto the desk.Class photos. Ashford Hills High, junior year homeroom, the kind every student got herded into once a year and then forgot existed.He almost s

Callum was at her window in under two minutes, climbing the trellis at the side of the house the way boys had probably been doing since houses had trellises, quiet and quick, like some part of him had already known this was coming.Ivy pushed the window higher to let him through, and for a moment they just stood there in her dark bedroom, the house asleep around them, close enough that she could hear him breathing."What's wrong?" he asked, voice low.She didn't answer right away. She crossed to her desk, picked up her phone, and held it out to him instead, the photo still open on the screen.He went very still."Where did you get this?""Someone sent it to me tonight." Ivy watched his face carefully. "I don't know who. The number's gone now."Callum stared at the photo for a long moment, jaw working, something moving behind his eyes that he clearly wasn't ready to let out yet."Reagan," he said finally."That's what I thought too." Ivy sat down on the edge of her bed, suddenly tired i