JASON
I was leaning back against the brick wall outside the lecture hall, half-dead from the professor’s voice still droning in my skull, when Lori dropped the kind of bomb people usually save for, I don’t know, a text. She just looked at me, cool as anything, and said, “My parents are coming to see you, it's my Dad’s idea.”
I blinked at her, slow. “Come again?”
She tied her curls up in that messy ponytail she somehow made look deliberate, like she’d just walked out of some magazine shoot instead of three hours of boring classes, and she shrugged. “You heard me. Properly this time. Not like last time.”
The last time flashed in my head, she was right—not ideal boyfriend-introduction material. I pushed myself off the wall, cracking my knuckles one by one like I was preparing for battle.
