I had loved him since I was sixteen years old.
It was pathetic, really. Embarrassing. The kind of thing I would never admit to anyone, not even Claudette.
I remembered the first time I saw him. I was a sophomore in high school, sleeping over at Claudette’s house for the first time, nervous and out of place in their enormous home with its high ceilings and gleaming floors. Claudette’s parents had been polite but distant, clearly unsure what to make of the scholarship kid their daughter had befriended. And then Jack had walked in.
Tall and golden and so effortlessly confident. He barely glanced at me—I was just his little sister’s friend, a child, beneath his notice—but I couldn’t stop staring.
“Earth to Pauline.” Claudette had waved a hand in front of my face. “You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Fine,” I’d squeaked. “I’m fine. Totally fine.”
From that moment on, I was doomed.
Claudette never knew. At least, I was pretty sure she never knew. There had been close calls—so many close calls—like the time she’d walked into her room while I was staring at a picture of Jack on my phone, and I’d fumbled so badly trying to switch screens that I accidentally liked a photo from three years ago and spent the next hour in a cold sweat praying he wouldn’t notice.
Or the time she’d been gushing about Michael Ashford, her own hopeless crush, and had asked me if I had anyone I liked, and I’d said “no one” so quickly and so loudly that she’d given me a look that said she knew I was full of shit.
“You’re a terrible liar,” she’d said.
“I’m an excellent liar. I’m lying right now and you can’t even tell.”
“You make even lying sound weird.” She’d thrown a pillow at me and let it drop. But I’d spent the rest of that night convinced she was going to figure it out, that she was going to realize her best friend had been secretly pining for her brother like some kind of lovesick cliché.
She never did. Or if she did, she never said anything.
And then college happened.
I got into the same university as Claudette—scholarship, thank God, because there was no other way I could have afforded it—and suddenly Jack wasn’t just a face in photographs or a voice drifting down from upstairs.
He was there. On campus. Walking past me in the quad. Sitting three tables away in the library.
I’d spent two years perfecting the art of pretending I didn’t notice him. Of keeping my head down and my heart locked up and my stupid, pointless feelings buried so deep that no one would ever find them.
And then the pool party happened.
It was the summer after my freshman year. Some kind of party where everyone was beautiful and wealthy. I wasn’t supposed to be there—I’d only come to drop something off for Claudette—but she’d insisted I stay, and I hadn’t been able to think of an excuse fast enough.
So there I was, hiding in a corner with a book, trying to make myself invisible, when I felt someone watching me.
I looked up.
Jack was standing by the pool, surrounded by people, but he was looking at me.
At me. Not through me, not past me, but directly at me, with an expression I couldn’t read.
Then he smiled.
And started walking toward me.
My heart nearly stopped. I actually looked behind me to see if there was someone else he could be approaching, because surely there had been a mistake, surely he wasn’t?—
“What are you reading?”
He was standing right in front of me—Jack Specter, three feet away, smelling like chlorine and sunscreen. Looking at me like I was interesting enough to worth crossing a crowded party to talk to.
“Um,” I said brilliantly. “A book.”
“I can see that.” He grinned, and my stomach did something acrobatic. “What book?”
