Texas is going to look at Vale and think she’s the next choice.
Vale is going to look at Texas and maybe even want to mean it.
And somewhere under all of it, there’s still another girl sitting like a live wire under the floorboards. But the way Kane look sat Stella--makes me wonder just what in the f is going on.
Kane glances at me.
“What?”
I shake my head and start walking again.
“Nothing.”
It’s not nothing.
It’s the beginning of a train wreck.
And if I’m being honest—which I usually am, at least with myself—the most annoying part is this:
I still want her anyway.
Maybe because she brushed me off.
Maybe because she looked right through me to another man.
Maybe because she called my accent a crime against humanity and made me laugh for real in the span of ten minutes.
Or maybe because even then, before she ever looked at me properly, before she ever needed a way out of heartbreak and gossip and pity?—
I knew.
Saw her first.
Wanted her first.
And some stubborn, ugly, caveman part of me decided right there on that beach that if she was going to get her heart broken by Tristan Vale, I’d be around when it happened.
Not as comfort.
Not as friend.
As the man who was there first.
Still standing when the prince got it wrong.
Chapter Two
ISA
If you askedanyone on campus, they’d tell you Tristan Vale belongs to everybody.
The student section thinks he belongs to Stanford basketball. The alumni think he belongs to legacy and East Coast money. Girls with glossed mouths think he belongs in the passenger seat of their lives, one big hand on the wheel, jaw sharp in the streetlights. Boys think he belongs to some dumb old code about princes and winners.
None of them have seen him the way I have.
Not under bad fluorescent lights at eleven-thirty with his hoodie half-zipped and athlete exhaustion hanging off his shoulders. Not when his face goes still and dangerous after practice, like the game is still in his blood. That version of Tristan doesn’t belong to everybody. That version feels private. That version feels like something I could almost have.
Or at least that’s the lie I’ve been feeding myself for weeks.
