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Tessa arrives at Washington Central University with a meticulous plan for the next four years, a plan polished by her mother’s exacting standards and by her own habit of doing everything right. She unloads boxes with Noah, her gentle high school boyfriend, who believes—as Tessa does—that discipline and kindness will carry them both safely through adulthood. When Tessa meets her roommate, Steph, the dorm room fills with a different kind of energy: purple hair, tattoos, loud friends who come and go with the swagger of people who live for the next party. Among them is Hardin Scott—a British accent, inked arms, a permanent frown—who looks at Tessa’s cardigan and careful smile as if they were a dare. His contempt is immediate; her dislike is instant and equally fierce.
Steph pulls Tessa to her first college party, where the air smells like beer and bad decisions. The game is Truth or Dare, the circle tight with people who all seem to speak a language Tessa doesn’t know. Hardin goads her, calling her “innocent” like it’s a flaw, then refuses a dare to kiss her, as if rejecting her is a sport. Embarrassed and angry, she leaves early, aware of two truths she can’t quite reconcile: she can’t stand Hardin, and he’s somehow lodged in her thoughts. The next day she stumbles into him in a hallway and they argue about literature—of all things—Hardin defending the stormy, doomed love in Wuthering Heights while Tessa bristles at the cruelty of it. It is the first time she matches him without flinching; it will not be the last.
Noah visits, and the campus looks different with his familiar hand in hers, but the difference inside Tessa is impossible to ignore. She sees Hardin everywhere—on a bench reading, at another party, in Steph’s room leaning against a wall—and the sight is like a small electric shock. They clash and circle and clash again. Landon, the kind, steady guy from her literature class, becomes her refuge. He tells her that Hardin is complicated, that his father Ken is a dean at the university and that their relationship is a battlefield. Landon is also about to become Hardin’s stepbrother; their parents are together, weaving an awkward family map that Hardin refuses to read. The more Tessa learns, the more layered Hardin appears: not just rude, but wounded; not just arrogant, but restless.
The slow pull between them becomes impossible to resist. In stolen moments—behind a closed door, at the back of a party, in the quiet of a library—Hardin softens, and Tessa discovers a version of him no one else seems allowed to see. He can be tender and strangely careful, then brash and cruel the next breath. He wants her, he pushes her away, he wants her again. The push-pull becomes their language. When Noah surprises Tessa by dropping in unannounced and finds her in Hardin’s bed—fully clothed, but asleep side by side—the truth shatters the fragile correctness of her old life. Noah leaves with tears in his eyes. Tessa, sick with guilt and relief, knows there’s no going back to the girl who arrived on campus with color-coded notebooks and a tidy future.
Tessa’s mother reacts with fury. She drives to campus, calls Hardin trash, and threatens to yank support if Tessa doesn’t come home and forget this entire detour. Tessa refuses. She chooses the uncharted road, and in the days that follow she is exhilarated and terrified by what that choice requires. She leans on Landon and on a surprising opportunity: an internship at Vance Publishing, earned by her diligence and her love for books. It becomes an anchor as she and Hardin try to name whatever it is that’s been growing between them. Hardin insists he doesn’t do relationships, then bristles when Zed, one of his friends, starts flirting with Tessa. He snarls at the attention she gets at work, then shows up after hours, pacing outside like he can’t stand his own skin unless he’s near her.
There are moments that feel like the beginnings of something good. Tessa meets Hardin’s mother when she visits from England, a woman whose warmth is a balm on Hardin’s rough edges. Tessa plans a small surprise—candles, dinner, a clean room—to give Hardin the kind of gentle family evening he’s rarely had. For a few hours things are simple: Hardin laughing, his mother telling stories, Tessa glowing at the sound. But after his mother leaves, the old darkness creeps back. Hardin drinks too much. He hurls words like weapons. One night he tears through their space in a fit of rage, breaking what they’ve tried to build, leaving Tessa shaking with fear and confusion. He apologizes in the morning, eyes rimmed in remorse, vowing to do better; she believes him because she wants to, because the good moments keep feeling truer than the rest.
Their lives begin to knit together anyway. Tessa spends more nights at Hardin’s off-campus place. They study in uneven peace, fight in spectacular bursts, and make up as if they’re both starving. Landon watches with worry but keeps offering quiet kindness. Ken, Hardin’s father, reaches out and is met by his son’s cold refusal. The past sits heavy on Hardin: memories of a violent man Ken used to be before sobriety, memories that hardened Hardin into someone who trusts fists and sarcasm more than love. Tessa, who believes in the possibility of people becoming better, tries to thread a bridge between father and son, but Hardin swats it away and accuses her of choosing sides.
The friend group around them—Steph, Molly, Zed, Jace, and Nate—watches the drama like it’s entertainment, encouraging parties that always end in trouble. Molly especially needles Tessa, smiling with a hint of malice whenever Hardin stumbles. Zed keeps offering a softer alternative, showing up with easy conversation and an unthreatening smile; Hardin’s jealousy spikes, then crashes into apologies. The cycle becomes a storm pattern Tessa learns too well: the heat of Hardin’s attention, the crash of his temper, the stillness of his regret, the promise that they will figure it out, that this messy thing they are making is worth the bruises.
At Vance Publishing, Tessa begins to bloom. She meets Christian Vance, sharp and fair, and a colleague named Trevor, who is cautious and precise where Hardin is reckless and fierce. Tessa proves herself with long hours and thoughtful work, and for the first time she sees a future that is hers alone: not her mother’s, not Noah’s, not even Hardin’s, but a path lit by her own effort. Hardin doesn’t know what to do with that light. Sometimes he’s proud; sometimes he’s threatened. He picks fights on the nights she stays late and pretends not to notice the small, satisfied smile she wears when she talks about the office. Tessa tries to hold both worlds, to be the steady worker and the person who can love Hardin well enough to help him love himself.
There are gentler chapters, too: mornings with coffee and the sunlight soft on Hardin’s face, afternoons spent arguing about characters and fate, evenings where they fit together without the ache of fear. Hardin begins to speak about nightmares and old wounds; Tessa learns to listen without trying to fix every broken piece. He tells her he wants them to be real, to belong to each other, and even if he can’t say the word love without choking on it, the promise rings in the air between them. She forgives more than she should. He tries harder than he knows how. For a brief stretch, it seems the two of them might bend the world to make a space where they can both be safe.
But the world they live in includes a hidden rot. Long before Tessa arrived, Hardin accepted a cruel dare among his friends, a bet wrapped in mockery and arrogance. He had boasted that he could charm the new, studious girl, draw her into his bed, and prove it afterward. What began as a game for him turned into something real he didn’t expect, something he refused to name because naming it would mean confessing what he’d done. He convinced himself that the truth would dissolve if he just kept moving forward, if he kept giving Tessa new memories to make the first ones less sharp. The secret remained, pulsing like a bruise under every sweet moment.
The reveal comes the way disasters always do: too fast to stop and in front of everyone. At a party crowded and loud, Molly smiles with that cutting, victorious expression and lays it out in front of Tessa—how it began, what Hardin said, what he kept as proof. Zed’s face is conflicted; Steph looks away. Jace and Nate snicker like boys. Tessa feels the room tilt. She hears Hardin’s voice somewhere behind the rush in her ears, saying it isn’t like that, that it was before, that he didn’t mean—words crumbling under the weight of what they cannot erase. She sees the pride in Molly’s eyes and the shame in Hardin’s, and the two images fuse into something she will never be able to forget.
Tessa leaves. She doesn’t scream; she doesn’t throw anything. She moves through the crowd as if pushing through water, up the stairs, out the door, into the night air that bites her lungs. All the small kindnesses that had stitched her to Hardin—his hand at the small of her back, his voice soft when no one else could hear, the way he memorized her coffee order—come undone in a single pull. Hardin follows, begging, ragged with panic, swearing that he didn’t understand what he felt back then, that he only wanted to win until he met her, that he fell and kept falling, that none of the rest matters, that it’s her, it’s always been her. She looks at him and sees two Hardins at once: the boy who held her face like it was fragile, and the boy who treated her like a dare.
In the days that follow, Tessa moves through campus like a ghost of herself. She goes to work because work makes sense; the words on the page, the deadlines, the tasks—those can be finished, checked off, completed. People at Vance notice the shadows under her eyes. Landon tries to coax out the story; she cannot bear to say it aloud. Her mother calls and Tessa keeps the conversation short; there is nothing her mother could say that would help. At night she lies awake, replaying every early moment with Hardin, searching for signs, wondering how she missed them, wondering if she wanted to miss them because hope felt better than suspicion.
Hardin is everywhere, and then nowhere. He sends messages she doesn’t read. He waits outside buildings she no longer exits alone. He writes, for once, because talking only makes everything worse; he writes pages that try to explain, that try to begin again, that try to build a bridge from the truth he hid to the feeling he can’t give back. He talks to Ken and drinks less; he talks to Landon and hears advice he doesn’t like. He sits with his own history—his anger, his fear, his selfishness—and for the first time begins to separate the pain that made him from the pain he inflicts on others. None of it fixes what he broke, and he knows it.
Tessa doesn’t forgive him. Not then. She goes to class, to work, to the quiet corners where she once read for pleasure and now reads to keep from spiraling. She thinks about Noah, about the version of herself who never would have let a stranger pull her into chaos, and she admits—only to herself—that she does not want to be that girl again either. She wants the version of her who found a voice, who argued about books and futures, who asked for more. But she wants it without humiliation, without betrayal, without the cold knowledge that the first time she gave away the most private parts of herself someone had already made it a story for other people to tell.
When Hardin finally reaches her in person, it is not with a grand gesture but with a halting honesty. He says he is trying to be different and that he doesn’t know if he can be, not the way she deserves, not quickly. He says she can hate him; he already hates what he did. He asks for a chance she can’t bring herself to give. She listens, and for all the hurt, a tremor of what they were moves through her. It is not enough. She tells him she needs space, time, distance—the simple things he never learned to offer. He nods like the world is ending and lets her go, a thing he has never done with anything he cared about.
The term turns. The campus shifts from heat to cold, from newness to routine. Tessa keeps showing up for the life she is building. She rises early. She writes well. She discovers that her heart can beat and hurt at the same time. Hardin keeps his distance, mostly. He reads more and drinks less. He stops pretending he can undo what’s done and starts asking himself who he is when no one is watching. Neither of them knows what comes next, only that the road ahead is not the one they imagined.
And yet, in the quiet between classes and the minutes before sleep, Tessa remembers moments when she felt seen in a way she didn’t know she needed. In a different season, with different choices, maybe there could be a future that doesn’t require her to shrink. For now there is only the truth: trust, once broken, is rebuilt slowly or not at all. She folds the lesson into herself like a page marker and closes the book on this chapter without certainty, without promises, with only the knowledge that she will choose herself first. Somewhere across campus, Hardin stares at a blank page and tries to write the first honest sentence of his life.