ABOUT THIS BOOK:
Growing up, Devaney Diamond and Chase Mackenzie promised to go to college together. But it’s been two years since the summer that changed everything between them, and their friendship hasn’t recovered.
Now, Dani is faced with all the challenges of her freshman year of college—navigating rush week, making new friends, and living on her own—which is both exhilarating and intimidating. In high school, Dani was homecoming queen and head cheerleader. She should be able to handle the pressure, but college has been more overwhelming than she expected.
Chase, on the other hand, is living the dream. It’s his senior year of high school, his football team is hoping to go undefeated, and he’s being heavily recruited.
When Dani returns home for a weekend, she realizes why college feels so overwhelming—she doesn’t have Chase to share it with. In hopes of salvaging their friendship, she repeats an old tradition—sneaking over to his room with pizza after his game. But instead of fixing their friendship, they end up sleeping together.
Chase is thrilled that Dani is back in his life, but being friends with benefits when feelings are involved is more complicated than Chase imagined.
Will Chase and Dani work through their feelings for one another, or will their childhood promise be shattered when Chase announces what college he will commit to?
Saturday, August 17th
The boy I used to love.
Devaney
Damon and I roll into the house, arms filled with bags. Our mom insisted on taking us back-to-school shopping. Now, we both have wardrobes full of hip designer clothing. My brother is totally into it. The flashier it is and more logos on it, the better as far as he is concerned. I like nice things, but I guess I fall somewhere in between him and my mom.
Damon sets most of the bags on the dining room table and then goes into the family room, where our stepmother, the actress Jennifer Edwards, is sitting on the floor, playing with our two half-sisters and our dog, Angel.
I follow him.
“Looks like you managed to find a few new things,” Jennifer teases. She knows what our mom is like. How much she cares about appearances.
“We did,” Damon says as two-and-a-half-year-old Weston jumps into his lap, calling out Day-Day, her nickname for him.
“We brought you a present,” he says, causing her eyes to get big. He pulls a bag out from behind his back and hands it to her. The bag is pink and has pastel ribbons streaming from it.
“My birfday! My birfday!”
“It’s not your birthday, sweetie,” Jennifer says. “It’s just a fun surprise.”
“Surprise!” She pushes her hand under the glitter tissue and then pulls out the cutest stuffed unicorn. Its fur is a soft white plush, and it has bright green eyes, pink hooves, a silver lamé horn, and a sparkly rainbow mane and tail.
“It’s bea-u-tee-ful!” she screams, hugging it against her chest tightly and running in circles, the dog hot on her tail.
“She looks like Damon after he scores a touchdown.” A deep voice chuckles from behind me.
It’s the voice of the boy I used to love—will probably always love—my neighbor and former lifelong best friend, Chase Mackenzie.
I turn around.
And holy hell.
Speaking of clothes, Chase is wearing very few of them. Just a pair of swim trunks with what appears to be a new shell necklace.
“Oh, hey, Chase,” I manage to say, trying not to visibly drool over his naked chest.
Since we stopped being best friends, every time I talk to him, I feel like my voice is stuck in my throat, my heart ready to beat out of my chest. A few summers ago, on one amazing three-week family trip to the Ozarks, we went from being BFFs to something much more—before it got all screwed up.
Why did it get all screwed up? Because I’m an idiot. Mostly.
And I wish I knew how to fix it. Fix us. Fix, at a minimum, our friendship.
I still see him all the time. He still lives next door. He and my brother are still best friends. We are together often because our families are close and we went to the same school. We are cordial with each other, like he is being now. But since that day on the football field, when an older guy surprised me with a homecoming proposal and Chase thought I’d said yes, we haven’t been best friends. We haven’t been close. And it’s really hard. It’s one thing to miss someone you don’t see. It’s another to miss them incredibly and have to see them all the time. It’s like a daily reminder of how badly you screwed things up.
Chase and my brother couldn’t be more different. He wears nice clothing, but there’s nothing flashy about him. While Damon chases the spotlight, Chase seems to prefer avoiding it.
But I get it. Damon is almost a full year younger than Chase despite their being in the same grade, and he’s had to work extra hard to keep up. To excel. He’s always been fast and always loved to run races—well, win races—and in football, he likes the glory of scoring. My dad—now-retired three-time-champion quarterback, Danny Diamond—always tells the same story about why his son didn’t follow in his footsteps. Basically, it’s that when they were little, Damon always wanted to run and would get Chase to throw him the ball. Usually, instead of throwing it back, he’d run it back, hand it to Chase, and tell him to throw it again. And it’s sort of how it worked out. Chase became the quarterback and Damon his best receiver.
“What’s with the necklace?” Damon asks Chase while Weston continues to run in circles, although now, she’s prancing like a pony—or a unicorn, I suppose.
When she bops her baby sister, Easton—who was happily playing with an educational toy—in the head, Easton starts screaming bloody murder, causing Jennifer to pick her up and take her into the other room to calm down.
While Weston has been an adorable terror since the day she was born and is now a precocious toddler, Easton, who is a year younger, is much more easygoing. She entertains herself, gives the sweetest hugs, and does just about anything we ask.
To a point.
And once she reaches said point, you’d better watch out. A full-on meltdown is coming. I’m assuming since Jennifer removed her from the room, it means this isn’t the first time Weston has been messing with her.
“Oh,” Chase says, touching the necklace and rolling his eyes.
I squint mine, wondering what he means, but my brother goes, “Ah, Lacey’s back from Hawaii. Gift?”
“Yeah,” Chase replies and then quickly changes the subject. “How was shopping?”
Chase isn’t one of those guys who will rub your face in his relationship and try to make you jealous. If anything, he downplays whatever it is he has with Lacey. They’ve been dating for almost a year now, although I know he won’t commit to a relationship.
I overheard Lacey talking about it at cheer practice last spring. The girls on the squad told her she needed to lock that boy down. But she told them she didn’t care what their status was as long as he was always on her arm and in her bed. Which made me want to throw up.