Prologue
Blakely
The first mistake was tequila.
The second mistake was Seth Calloway.
Actually, scratch that. Seth had been a mistake way before tonight. Not in some dramatic, tragic, ruin-your-life kind of way, but more in the sense that he possessed absolutely zero self-preservation instincts and somehow managed to drag me into his orbit anyway. This was the guy who had convinced me to jump off a rotting lake dock at two in the morning in the dead of October because “it looked fun,” leaving us both shivering and smelling like lake weed while we walked back to campus. He was the kind of mistake who regularly showed up at my apartment uninvited, bypassed me entirely, and raided my fridge for leftovers while complaining that I didn't buy the right brand of hot sauce. The kind who called at one a.m. just because he was bored and knew I’d pick up.
The worst part of the mistake was that, somewhere along the line, he had become my favorite person without me even noticing.
“You’re staring at me again,” Seth said, his voice cutting through the low hum of the room.
I blinked, pulling myself out of my head just fast enough to realize he was looking right at me. Caught red-handed. Annoying.
“I’m literally not,” I lied, shifting back against the cushions.
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You get this look.”
I turned my head slowly, letting it rest against the back of the couch so I could look at him properly. “…What look?”
He grinned. That stupid, lopsided grin that usually meant I was about to absolutely hate whatever ridiculous sequence of words came out of his mouth next.
“The one where you look at me like you wanna kiss me.”
I stared at him for a beat, waiting for the punchline. When he just kept smiling, I burst out laughing. It wasn't a polite chuckle; it was a genuine, involuntary snort that echoed in the quiet room.
“Seth,” I said, shaking my head as the laughter trailed off, “your ego is actually horrifying. It needs to be studied.”
“Blake.”
“No.”
“Blake.”
“No, absolutely not.”
He laughed under his breath, leaning back against the couch and stretching one long arm out along the cushions behind me. His fingers didn't touch my shoulder, but they were close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off them.
We were the last two people still awake after a party that had spent the last few hours dying a slow death. Downstairs, the bass from a stray playlist was still thumping faintly through the floorboards, but up here in the living room, the lights were low and the ambient noise had faded into something heavy. It was too quiet. Dangerously quiet. The kind of silence that makes you say things you’re supposed to keep in your head.
“You’ve definitely thought about it,” he murmured, his eyes locking onto mine with a sudden, frustrating intensity.
I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to read his face through the tequila haze coating my brain. “You’re drunk.”
“Mhm.”
“You’re being weird.”
“Mhm.”
I stared at him for another second, the alcohol making me braver than I usually had any right to be. I narrowed my eyes harder, leaning in just an inch. “Have you ever thought about it?”
Seth blinked once, the easy smirk faltering for a fraction of a second. “What?”
“Kissing me.”
He didn't answer right away. He just looked at me. The teasing edge completely vanished from his expression, and his grin shrank into something unreadable. The sudden shift made the air feel a little too thick to breathe, so naturally, I panicked and decided to make it so much worse.
“No, wait.” I pointed a finger at him dramatically, breaking the tension with pure deflection. “Actually, not kissing. Let me be specific. I don't want you getting away with a loophole.”
One of his eyebrows lifted, dark and amused. “Specific how?”
“Have you ever thought about… hooking up with me?”
Absolute silence hit the room. It was the kind of quiet where you can hear the house settling, where you can hear your own heartbeat in your ears. I immediately wanted to swallow the words down, to yank them back out of the air and pretend I’d never spoken.
And then Seth shifted, turning his torso toward me. “Honestly?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, bracing myself. “Honestly.”
He looked directly into my eyes, his voice dropping an octave, completely devoid of any joking bullshit. “All the time.”
The words hung between us like a physical weight. My mouth actually fell open. I sat there, staring at him, waiting for him to laugh, to call me an idiot, to tell me he was just messing with me. He didn't.
“Seth.”
“What?”
“All the time?!” My voice pitched higher than I wanted it to.
He started laughing then, the tension breaking as he threw his head back against the couch. “You asked!”
“That is insane behavior!” I grabbed a stray throw pillow and shoved it against his chest, though he barely moved. “We’ve known each other for three years! You can't just say that like it's normal!”
“You’re acting like you’ve never thought about it,” he pointed out, a challenge clear in his eyes as he caught the pillow and tossed it aside.
“I didn't say that!”
The second the words left my mouth, Seth froze.
I froze.
*Oh no.*
*Oh, no, no, no.*
Seth turned back to me very slowly, a completely different kind of look taking over his features. “Blakely.”
“Nope.”
“Blake.”
“Nope. Conversation over. I’m going to sleep on the floor.”
His smile started spreading again—slowly, deliberately, and entirely dangerously. “You have.”
“I hate you.”
“You’ve thought about it.”
“I seriously, deeply hate you.”
I was already laughing again, mostly out of pure, unadulterated panic, because this entire conversation felt completely unreal. There was absolutely no logical sequence of events that should have brought us to this specific point on a Tuesday night. There was no way we had accidentally wandered into this territory, and there was definitely no way Seth was supposed to be looking at me the way he was right now.
Because his smile had faded a second ago.
And now he was just looking. Really looking. His eyes drifted down to my lips, lingering there for a beat that felt a year long, before flicking back up to meet my gaze. The living room suddenly felt about half its original size. The distance between us on the cushions felt entirely too small, yet completely impossible to cross.
“Blake,” he said quietly.
My voice felt trapped in my throat. “Yeah?”
He didn't say anything for a long moment, his gaze holding me perfectly still. Then, his voice dropped to a rough whisper. “You wanna make a really bad decision?”
Inside my chest, my heart did one weird, stupid, violent little flip. Every logical, rational part of my brain was screaming at me to get up, to make a joke, to diffuse the bomb before it blew up our entire friendship. I should say no. Probably.
Instead, I stared at him for exactly two seconds, watching the way his breathing had hitched, and whispered back, “Probably.”
And honestly? That was where the disaster started.
