Break Me To Love You

Chapter #1 {Back again}

The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and teenage desperation- a combination I'd somehow forgotten during my seven years away from RoseWater Creek. My sneakers squeak against the linoleum as I navigate through clusters of students who've known each other since kindergarten, their easy laughter and casual touches reminding me that I'm the outsider here. Again.

I clutch my schedule against my chest like a shield, my other hand white-knuckling the strap of my messenger bag. Room 214. AP Literature. If I can just make it to Room 214, I can disappear into the back row and spend the next fifty minutes with my nose in a book, where I'm safest. Where I've always been safest.

My therapist back in North Carolina said I needed to "reframe my narrative" about RoseWater Creek. That I was seventeen now, not ten. That childhood bullies grow up and move on, and I should too.

Dr. Morrison clearly never had someone systematically destroy every book she loved, never felt the humiliation of having her favorite copy of *The Secret Garden* torn apart in front of the entire fourth-grade class, pages scattered across the playground like wounded birds.

She definitely never had her elbow shattered in two places.

I shake off the memory, the sickening crack, the white-hot pain, the way the sky spun above me as I lay at the bottom of the slide. The way *he* just stood there, his face pale, before running away.

My left elbow aches phantom-style, the way it always does when I'm stressed. I'm rolling my shoulder, trying to ease the tension, when I round the corner toward the junior-senior hallway.

And there he is.

Time doesn't stop, that's romance novel bullshit but everything inside me certainly does. My heart, my breath, my ability to form coherent thoughts. They all just... cease.

Ezekiel Weston leans against locker 247 like he owns it, like he owns this entire hallway, maybe the whole damn school. He's talking to two other guys, one I vaguely recognize as Tommy Thatcher, who used to eat paste but I barely register them. Because Zeke has grown into his features in a way that feels like a personal attack.

Life has a sick sense of humor.

He's tall now, probably six-two, with broad shoulders that fill out his faded gray t-shirt in a way that should be illegal in an educational setting. His dark hair is longer than it was in elementary school, falling across his forehead in that effortlessly tousled way that boys like him always manage. Strong jaw. Straight nose. And those eyes.. heck, those eyes are still that impossible shade of green, like sun through honey, like every terrible metaphor I've ever read and rolled my eyes at.

I hate that I notice. I hate that some traitorous part of my brain catalogs these details like I'm the protagonist in one of the romance novels I devour at two in the morning.

He's beautiful and I'm furious about it.

Because beautiful people don't get to be monsters. That's not how this works. Monsters should look like monsters, should have some external indication of the ugliness inside. They shouldn't have dimples and yes, he has a dimple, just one, in his left cheek, and I want to scream.

I should turn around. I should walk the long way to Room 214, even if it makes me late. My feet have other plans, apparently, because they keep carrying me forward, drawn by some masochistic need to just *get this over with*.

Maybe he won't recognize me. I'm different now, taller, my dark hair longer, my body having finally figured out what to do with itself sometime around sophomore year. My glasses are contacts now. I'm not that scrawny, scared little girl anymore.

I'm ten feet away when his gaze slides past his friends and lands on me.

The recognition is immediate. Instantaneous. I watch it happen in real-time, the way his eyes widen slightly, the way his posture shifts, the way his lips part just a fraction. Those green eyes track over my face, and I feel it like a physical touch, like fingers trailing across my skin.

I want to look away. I should look away. But I'm caught, pinned like a butterfly in a collection, and all I can do is stare back as seven years collapse into nothing.

His friends are still talking, oblivious, but Ezekiel has gone completely still. The moment stretches between us, taut and terrible, filled with everything we're not saying. Every book he destroyed. Every tear I cried. Every nightmare I had about coming back here.

The scar on my elbow burns.

Then- and this is somehow worse than anything else, he smiles.

Not a guilty smile. Not an apologetic smile. A slow, devastating smile that starts at one corner of his mouth and spreads like wildfire, revealing that damned dimple, crinkling the corners of those damned eyes. It's the kind of smile that probably makes most girls forget their own names.

It's the kind of smile that says he knows exactly what he looks like. That he can see my reaction written all over my face- the shock, the anger, and yes, the unwanted, unwelcome attraction that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.

"Dakota Rivers," he says, and his voice has changed too, dropped into a low register that seems to resonate in my chest. "Well, damn."

I hate him. I hate him so much that it feels like its own living thing inside me, hot and sharp and righteous. I hate him for what he did to that little girl who just wanted to read in peace. I hate him for never apologizing, never facing consequences, for getting to just move on while I spent seven years in therapy.

But most of all, I hate him for looking at me like that, like I'm something interesting, something worth noticing and for the way my stupid, traitorous body responds with a flutter low in my stomach that I absolutely do not want and did not ask for.

"It's Kota," I say, and I'm proud of how steady my voice comes out, how cold. "Nobody calls me Dakota anymore."

His smile doesn't falter. If anything, it widens, and there's something in his eyes now, amusement, maybe, or challenge. "Dakota," he repeats, like he's testing it out, like he's tasting my name. "You came back."

It's not a question, but it feels like one anyway. It feels like a dozen questions wrapped into two words. Why did you come back? Did you come back for me? Did you miss this place? Did you miss me?

The last thought is so absurd that I almost laugh. Almost.

"Not by choice," I say, and I force my feet to move, to carry me past him, past his friends who are now watching with open curiosity, past this entire nightmare scenario.

But I have to get close to pass him in the crowded hallway, and for one terrible second, I catch his scent, something clean and cedar-like, mixed with laundry detergent and boy. It's infuriating how good he smells. How my hindbrain wants to catalog that too, file it away with all the other details I don't want.

"See you around, Dakota," he calls after me, and I can hear the smile in his voice, can feel his eyes on my back as I walk away.

My hands are shaking. My elbow is aching. My heart is pounding so hard I'm surprised it's not audible.

I make it to Room 214 with two minutes to spare, slide into a desk in the back corner, and pull out my worn copy of Jane Eyre- a replacement for the one he destroyed in fourth grade. I open it to a random page, but the words blur together, meaningless.

Because all I can think about is Ezekiel Weston’s smile, and how much I wish it didn't make me feel anything at all.

All I can think about is how this year is going to be so much worse than I imagined.

And how some small, secret part of me, the part I'll never admit to, not even under torture, is almost glad to see him again.

I hate that part most of all.