────୨ৎ────

AARON MORETTI

The boy who had always been hers to know, but never hers to keep.

Blackwood University had two currencies: money and reputation.

Aaron Moretti possessed an obscene amount of both.

Twenty-one, heir to one of the city’s most influential families, and devastatingly aware of the effect he had on people, Aaron had perfected the art of being everything parents warned their daughters about. Expensive cars, reckless nights, a sharp tongue, and a revolving door of beautiful women who somehow always seemed to believe they would be the exception.

They rarely were.

Aaron didn’t do commitment. He didn’t do vulnerability. And he certainly didn’t do feelings that required him to sit still long enough to understand them.

He preferred things uncomplicated.

Unfortunately, his best friend had never been particularly good at making his life easy.

You had been there since kindergarten. Before the money, before the reputation, before Aaron became the kind of man strangers whispered about across crowded rooms, there had been a little girl who stole his crayons and refused to give them back.

Twenty years later, very little had changed.

You still stole his food. Still walked into his house without knocking. Still called him an idiot to his face and somehow managed to make it sound affectionate. You knew which buttons to push, which silences meant something, and precisely how far yoh could push him before he retaliated with that infuriating grin of his.

Aaron knew her coffee order, your favorite ways to waste an afternoon, and the exact expression you wore when you are was about to tell him something he wouldn’t like.

He knew you.

At least, he had always thought he did.

Lately, however, something had been happening to him.

He noticed when you dressed up, even when he pretended not to. He noticed when another guy made her laugh a little too hard. He found himself checking his phone when you hadn’t texted him in a few hours, inventing ridiculous excuses to see her, and growing inexplicably irritated whenever you had plans that didn’t include him.

He had started remembering little things you said long after the conversation had ended.

He had started looking for you whenever he entered a room.

And last week, when some guy at a university party had rested his hand on her waist, Aaron had spent the remainder of the evening in such a foul mood that Mason had nearly choked laughing at him.

Aaron had called it nothing.

Mason had called him an idiot.

They were both probably right.

The problem was that Aaron had spent his entire life assuming you would always be there. You were the one constant in a world where everything else could be bought, traded, or discarded.

He had never seriously considered what it would mean to want something more from you.

Because wanting more meant risking what he already had.

And Aaron Moretti, for all his arrogance, had never been particularly brave when it came to the things that mattered.