: Chapter 12

Over the next two days, I read eight different contemporary romances with a pen in one hand so I can underline particularly good lines of dialogue and take notes in the margins.

“You know,” Nina says while we’re curled up on opposite ends of the couch, “this whole birthday party thing doesn’t have required reading. You can just get drunk and show up.”

“Like you did with your Spanish final?”

“I’m a native speaker, and the foreign language requirement at this school is bullshit.”

To be fair, I do feel a bit like I’m studying for an exam—except it’s somehow more stressful than any final I’ve taken, because it feels like I missed the lecture where I was supposed to learn how to have a crush without letting it consume me body and soul.

I want to have fun. I want to stop overthinking it. Plenty of people have flings in college. Surely, I’m not so much of an outlier that I can’t do the same. I’m determined to try. Even if all goes terribly—even if the magic I felt that night in the library is gone, even if I do something embarrassing, even if Vincent flat-out turns me down in front of my friends—failure will be a hell of a lot better than spending the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t been too proud and too scared to try.

I’d rather have one night with Vincent than nothing at all.

“I need to prepare,” I admit. “I want to know what to say.”

“Well, that’s easy.”

“Please don’t—”

“Ask him to take off his pants and—”

“Nina.”

I blame her for planting the seed of depravity in my head. Because in the late hours of Wednesday night, in what I can only describe as a moment of weakness, I look up highlights from the basketball team’s last season on YouTube. And fine. Maybe I pause the videos more than a few times to get a clear shot of Vincent, his face glimmering with sweat under the bright lights of the court. Maybe I smile to myself like a dork when he sinks a game-winning buzzer beater from beyond the three-point line. And maybe I’m four minutes deep in one of Vincent’s postgame interviews when I notice something in the column of recommendations below.

The video of Vincent getting ejected from last year’s big game.

It’s only three minutes long. With my heart in my throat, I click on it.

Jabari has the ball. He’s dribbling, dribbling, and passes—lightning quick—to another Clement player, who sinks a three. The camera briefly tracks the celebration. But then, in the corner of the screen, I catch the other team’s point guard ram Jabari with his shoulder. The guy’s face is twisted into a horrible snarl. His lips move, but I can’t make out what he says.

Jabari’s expression tells me all I need to know, though.

And then, a few feet away from them, Vincent Knight turns on his heel, takes two long strides toward our rival point guard, and delivers one swift right-handed uppercut before the guy even realizes it’s coming.

The trash-talker crumples immediately, clutching his already dripping nose.

Admittedly, I read a lot of romance novels with strong, violent, touch her and you die love interests. But that’s fiction. In my real life, I’ve never been attracted to aggressive men with short tempers; it’s impossible for me to reconcile the fantasy with the reality of a man who might turn that anger and strength against the people he claims to love. But Vincent doesn’t look out of control or unhinged or bloodthirsty. It’s deliberate. It’s quick. And if the shock on Jabari’s face is any indication, it isn’t something Vincent makes a habit of.

I’m on my fourth or fifth rewatch of the video when I realize I only have one hand on the phone. The other, which seems to have developed a mind of its own, is straying dangerously close to the waistband of my underwear.

“Oh my God,” I whisper-hiss, slipping my arm back out from under the covers and smacking myself in the cheek. “What is wrong with you?”

Even as I ask the question, the answer comes with striking clarity.

I’m always skeptical about nonfictional men. They are, as Nina puts it, garbage. And I know that’s a generalization, but it’s scary to be a straight woman when you never know if your new crush might actually be a closeted racist, a serial killer, or a cryptocurrency enthusiast. So, yeah. Seeing Vincent Knight deck a guy really does it for me—not because I have a thing for violence and aggression or the white knight trope, but because I know now that Vincent and I share some of the same values: we stand up for our friends.

He’s one of the good ones.

I think. It might be a bit of a jump to make the conclusion based on a three-minute YouTube clip, but maybe I’m blinded by the pretty brown eyes and the memory of his mouth on mine.

Someone needs to put me out of my suffering.

Tomorrow can’t come quickly enough.

• • •

When I get home from my women’s literature seminar the following evening, there are clothes draped over the couch and an open bottle of pink lemonade on the kitchen counter. Rap music drifts from Nina’s open door. It sounds like she’s doing that phone-in-a-cup thing, which means her portable speaker must be out of charge again. The whole apartment smells of perfume, extra-strength deodorant, alcohol, and hair that’s been pulled through a straightener.

This can mean only one thing: my roommates are already pregaming for Vincent Knight’s birthday party.

“It’s not even seven!” I holler into the apartment. “You guys have zero chill!”

Nina pops out of her bedroom in her fluffy pink dressing gown (pausing to strike a pose in the doorway) and comes padding into the living room. She has a child’s paper party hat on her head. It’s way too small, and the elastic band looks like it’s strangling her, but there’s a delighted smile on her face and a flush to her cheeks that tells me she’s already too drunk to care about something as trivial as breathing.

“Zero chill, yes,” she says, “but mucho tequila. How was class?”

“Violently feminist, as usual. Where’d you get the hat?”

“They had them at the liquor store!” Harper calls a split second before she pops out of her own room in jeans and a bralette.

Harper is also wearing a party hat, although hers has had the string cut off and is held in place with an aggressive number of bobby pins. Her corkscrew curls have been painstakingly straightened into one long, silky, jet-black curtain. I’m so distracted by how gorgeous she looks that I don’t notice the enormous handle of tequila cradled in her arm like a newborn baby until she hoists it up onto the kitchen island. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of wines and spirits, but I recognize this particular brand as one that’s usually kept high up on a locked shelf at our local grocery store.

“Holy shit,” I say. “Why did you guys buy the good stuff?”

“Because it’s your boy’s birthday,” Harper says.

“He’s not my—”

“And because your virginity deserves a proper send-off,” Nina adds.

Rather than argue the second point, I steer the conversation elsewhere. “I’ve never been to the basketball team’s house. What should I be expecting there? Is it more of a wine and weed sort of kickback vibe, or a little tailgate party, or should I expect, like, fifty people?”

“Fifty?” Harper repeats with a laugh. “That’s cute, Kenny. You should expect half the fucking school to show up. Knight’s turning twenty-one. People go fucking feral when starters turn twenty-one. The basketball team dropped two grand on alcohol for tonight, and I know for a fact that every student athlete at this school is gonna be there. Also, I heard someone invited the slam poetry club, and you know how those artsy kids go wild.”

Nina nods. “True. We’re heathens.”

“The slam poetry club?” I repeat, my fingertips tracing the hollow of my collarbone.

That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

“Wait, who’d you hear all this from?” Nina asks.

Harper shrugs and picks at the label on the tequila bottle. “I may or may not have matched with Jabari Henderson on Bumble.”

Nina and I both gasp.

“What?” Harper demands, instantly on the defensive.

“Don’t girls have to message first on Bumble?” I ask.

Nina gasps again, louder. “What was your opening line?”

“I’m not talking to you right now.”

“Ooh, I like it. Keep him on the hook. Show him who’s boss.”

“I meant you, bitch.”

Harper storms back into her room with a shouted declaration that she’s taking off the hat and it better not have left kinks in her hair, because she doesn’t want to go to the trouble of heating up her flat iron again. I slide up onto one of the stools at the kitchen island. Nina shuffles to the other side and grabs a hand towel off the oven handle, draping it over one shoulder before she reaches for the plastic bag of red cups by the sink.

“What do you want, Kenny?” she asks. “I’m playing bartender.”

“I might as well just have a shot. We’ve got the good stuff, right?”

We turn on a pregame playlist that has Harper’s favorite dance music (and Nina’s favorite Spanish rap that she knows all the words to) and we each have a shot (and then another) before we move the party to Nina’s room. She lets me borrow her lucky going-out shirt—a long-sleeved black bodysuit with a plunging V-neck that dips right down to my sternum—and Harper gives me free rein over her extensive collection of makeup (except the foundations and concealers, since those are nowhere near my shade). I swipe on winged eyeliner and red lipstick like it’s battle armor, because I meant what I said to Vincent Knight the night we met.

I’m not a coward.