Keep reading for a preview of Jessica Joyce’s next romance!
Prologue
I hate thinking about the way it ended, but sometimes I think about the way it began: with me walking through the door of someone else’s house without knocking.
This has always been a typical move of mine, wandering latchkey kid that I was in my early years. But in every other way, the beginning is an atypical day.
When I let myself go there, I watch it in my head like a movie. I let it feel like it’s happening now instead of thirteen years ago, where the real moment belongs, where fifteen-year-old me is turning the doorknob on a house I’ve burst into hundreds of times before. I find no resistance, because by my sophomore year of high school—when this memory takes place—my open invitation into the Cooper-Kims’ home is implied.
My best friend of five years, Adam Kim, is somewhere in here, probably still sweaty and gross from track practice. At least I went home and showered.
On the day it all begins, I greet Adam’s three rescue dogs, Gravy, Pop Tart, and Jim, my ears perking up at the dulcet tones of a video game played at full volume, two male voices rumbling below it. I make my way toward the den with the dogs trailing behind me, the tags on their collars jingling, a sound that’s as familiar as my own heartbeat.
Adam’s house is warm and sun-filled, often noisy, with a lingering, faint vanilla scent I’ve never been able to figure out the source of. The first time I walked in here, something unraveled in my chest: it felt like home, not a place where two people lived with sometimes-intertwining lives. My house is quiet and often empty at fifteen, just as it was when I was ten and five and all the years in between. The times my dad and I do sync up are great; he asks me tons of questions and tells me what a great kid I am, how easy I’ve been, how proud he is of my grades, and he listens to every story that tumbles out of my mouth, his phone facedown on the dining room table while it buzzes and buzzes and buzzes. Eventually the phone wins, and I’m left craving more time.
It’s why I’ve made a habit of making other people’s houses my home, and why I love the Cooper-Kims’ house best.
In this memory, I’m turning the corner to the den, wondering who Adam has over. I sincerely hope it isn’t Brent; I keep telling Adam what a douche he is.
With the power of hindsight, I know what’s going to happen seconds before it does, so I always hold my breath here.
I charge through the door and run face-first into a broad chest. It has so little padding it makes my teeth rattle.
“Whoa,” a voice breathes above me, stirring the hairs at my temple. Warm, strong hands grip my arms to keep me upright.
I look up . . . and up, into a face fifteen-year-old me has never seen before.
Whoever this is, he’s beautiful. He’s tall （obviously） and broad-shouldered, with limbs he hasn’t grown into. In this moment, I don’t know that he’ll fill out in a painfully attractive way—his chest will broaden and tighten to become the perfect pillow for my head. His thighs will grow just shy of thick, mouth-wateringly curved with muscle, the perfect perch for me when I sit in his lap.
But the eyes I’m looking into won’t change. They’ll stay that hypnotic mix of caramel and gold and deep coffee-brown, framed by sooty lashes and inky eyebrows that match the wavy hair on his head. They’ll continue to catch mine the way they do in this movie moment—like a latch hooking me, then locking us into place.
“Oh. Hello,” I say brilliantly.
His mouth pulls up; it’s wide and meant for the toothy smiles I’ll discover he doesn’t give away easily. He’s more prone to quiet ones, or shy, curling ones, like the one he’s giving me now. “Hey.”
I step back, my heart flipping from our crash and the warmth his hands have left behind on my skin. “Sorry, I didn’t know Adam had someone over.”
“Never stopped you before, Woodward,” Adam calls distractedly, his eyes glued to the TV screen.
I roll mine, turning back to this stranger. “I’m that doofus’s best friend, Georgia.”
“Like the peach,” he says, his voice lifting at the end. It’s not a question, but a tentative tease. In my life, I’ve heard that joke a million times and I hate it, but in this moment, I like the way he says it, as if he knows how ridiculous it is and is in on the joke.
I grin, and in my mind when I’m watching this, I think about how open it is, how guileless and full of sunshine. “Good one. No one’s ever said that to me before.”
There’s a beat where his eyes narrow, like he’s trying to figure me out. I make note of how quickly he does, a tendril of belonging curling around me when he laughs. “You’re joking.”
“Yes,” I laugh back.
He pretends to look disappointed. “So I’m not the first?”
“More like lucky number ninety-nine,” I shoot back, and he grins. A toothy one. “Should I call you by the number, or do you have a name, too?”
“That’s Eli—motherfucker,” Adam shouts.
My gaze slips from the stranger’s—Eli Joseph Mora, I’ll find out soon—to Adam, whose tongue is sticking out while he furiously pounds on a game controller. A second one lies next to him, a decimated bag of Doritos next to that.
When I direct my attention back to Eli, our eyes click. I hear it in my head, feel it in my chest, both in the memory and for real. Whenever I let myself think about the beginning, I want to get out of this moment as much as I want to wallow in it.
Fifteen-year-old me smiles up at fifteen-year-old him. “Hey, Eli. I hope you’re not the motherfucker.”
“Not that I’m aware of,” he says with a laugh. His eyes spark with amusement and other things, and the spark transfers to me, burrowing somewhere deep. It’ll wait there for years while we go from strangers to friends to best friends. It won’t catch fire until our junior year of college, when he joins me at Cal Poly after his two-year stint at community college.
“Who are you, then? Other than a stranger, until”—I look down at my watch, a Fossil one I bought with the cash my dad gave me for Christmas because he didn’t want to get the wrong one—“three minutes ago.”
“The new guy, I guess?” I notice his nose is sunburned along the bridge when he scrunches it. “I just moved from Denver, started at Glenlake two days ago.”
He doesn’t tell me now, but he will later—his parents moved him and his little sisters to Glenlake, a city in Marin County just north of San Francisco, to live with his aunt after his dad lost his job and they lost their house. He’s sleeping on a pullout in his aunt’s rec room. I always notice the way his shoulders pull up toward his ears, maybe wondering if I’m going to ask questions. He doesn’t trust me with all of his heavy stuff yet, but eventually he’ll trust me with a lot of it. I’m the one who’ll hide my heaviness away.
“And Adam’s already got you in his clutches?” I raise my voice. “You work fast, Kim.”
Adam grins, but doesn’t spare us a glance.
Eli looks over his shoulder at his new friend, then back at me, rubbing the nape of his neck. His expression is bashful, a little bewildered. “Yeah, I think he kind of adopted me.”