Fake yours.

Chapter 1

Zara Adeyemi hated parties that started with “you have to come, it’ll be fun.” In her experience, nothing that needed convincing ever turned out fun.

Still, she stood at the edge of Westbrook University’s rooftop party with her arms folded across her chest, watching bodies move under string lights like she had been dropped into someone else’s life by mistake. Music pulsed through the building and up through the soles of her shoes insistent, sticky, too loud. She adjusted the strap of her tote bag a work bag, not a party accessory, which said everything about why she shouldn’t be here and immediately regretted coming.

“Zara, relax.” Amara appeared at her elbow, leaning in the way she always did when excitement made her immune to personal space. “You look like you’re about to write a complaint letter to the universe.”

“I might,” Zara said. “Start with this rooftop.”

Amara laughed and grabbed her wrist, pulling her forward into the crowd. “One hour. Then we leave, I promise.”

Zara already knew how that would go. One hour would become two, two would become just a little longer, and somehow she’d end up watching people she didn’t know make decisions they’d regret by morning. She didn’t pull away, though. That was the thing about Amara she made even bad ideas feel like affection.

They moved deeper into the party, weaving past clusters of students balancing red cups and bad decisions. Zara kept her head down. She wasn’t here for attention. She wasn’t here to be seen. She was here because Amara had begged, and that, unfortunately, had always been enough.

A loud cheer erupted somewhere near the center of the rooftop. Zara barely looked up. Then Amara went still beside her the particular stillness that preceded bad news and Zara made her first mistake of the evening.

She followed her gaze.

He was hard to miss. Noah Kane stood near the railing with the ease of someone who had never once questioned whether he belonged somewhere. Basketball jersey loose over broad shoulders, sleeves pushed up, head tilted back mid laugh at something someone had said. People surrounded him the way people surrounded a source of heat not quite touching, just close enough to feel it. He wasn’t really part of the crowd. The crowd was part of him.

Campus golden boy. Star player. Walking problem. Zara had heard enough to build an entire case file on Noah Kane without ever speaking a word.

“He’s worse in person,” Amara whispered.

Zara was already turning away.

“Don’t,” Amara said immediately, reading her like a warning sign. “Do not do your ‘I’m above this entire species’ exit move.”

“I wasn’t”

A voice cut through the noise from somewhere in the crowd. “Yo, Kane! You still pretending you don’t read DMs, or are you just selectively ignoring humiliation?”

Laughter followed. Noah didn’t look offended. He barely looked interested. He lifted his drink in a small acknowledgment, a smirk barely visible, and that was the thing Zara noticed from across the rooftop nothing seemed to stick to him. Not insults. Not attention. Not even people, really. Everything slid off.

Then his eyes moved. Not scanning. Not randomly. Directly, and with the particular focus of someone who had already decided where to look before they looked there.

To her.

Zara felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure not painful, just present, impossible to ignore. She turned her head slightly, already composing the dismissal. Except he was still looking. Focused, in a way that made her feel briefly like something that didn’t belong in his taxonomy of the world.

“Don’t start,” she muttered, though she wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

“Oh no,” Amara said softly.

“What.”

“That look. That’s a problem look.”

“It’s a face.”

“It’s a rich-boy-about-to-make-a-bad-decision face.”

Zara finally looked away fully. “Then he can make it somewhere else.”

She turned to leave. That was when someone bumped hard into her shoulder from behind, throwing her off balance a careless collision, the kind that happened a dozen times a night at parties like this. But the red cup left her hand. Someone else’s red cup, grabbed from a passing tray a moment before. Cold liquid arced through the air with a kind of slow, horrible inevitability.

Right into Noah Kane’s chest.

The rooftop went quiet for half a second. Then erupted.

Zara froze.

Noah stood perfectly still. Liquid dripped from his jersey onto the floor. His jaw tightened once just slightly and then his eyes lifted from the stain on his shirt to her face. She expected anger. It would have been easier.

Instead, he smiled. Slow and unhurried, like she had handed him something he hadn’t known to ask for.

“Well,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the music, “that’s one way to introduce yourself.”

“That wasn’t, I didn’t ,someone pushed me.”

He looked down at his shirt again. “So you’re saying this is accidental assault.”

A few people laughed. Zara felt her expression harden into something she recognized as armor.

“Are you serious right now?”

He stepped closer. Not aggressively... just enough. “You know, most girls try talking to me before spilling drinks.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she laughed, once, a short and humorless sound. “Oh,” she said. “So this is your personality.”

Something shifted in the crowd around them a collective leaning-in.

“Excuse me?”

“This.” She gestured vaguely at him, at the audience, at the whole arrangement. “The arrogance. The expectation that everything happening around you is somehow about you.”

Behind her, Amara whispered, “Zara. Stop talking.”

She didn’t.

She stepped closer too, because she had never in her life backed down from something just because it was unwise. “I didn’t come here to talk to you. And I definitely didn’t come here to audition for whatever story you’ve got running in your head.”

“So you do talk,” he said softly.

He wasn’t offended. He was entertained. Worse...he was looking at her like she was a problem he hadn’t encountered before, like she was specifically and personally interesting, and Zara found that far more unsettling than anger would have been.

She turned sharply. “Forget it.”

But the crowd had already rearranged itself. People were watching. Phones raised with the casualness of people who’d stopped thinking of recording as a choice. Whispers spread like something catching.

Noah didn’t move to stop her. He just spoke behind her, unhurried.

“You owe me a shirt, by the way.”

Zara paused without turning. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

His laugh followed her as she pushed through the crowd, quiet and genuine and entirely too warm for someone she had already decided to despise. She told herself it meant nothing. She told herself she’d forget it by morning.

Behind her, Noah Kane watched her disappear, still smiling, still dripping in someone else’s drink, already thinking that this .... whatever this was ...was going to be interesting.