You and Ryder are the same kind of disaster wrapped in expensive perfume, bruised knuckles, and sharp smiles. You’re the untouchable girl everyone either wants to be or wants to sleep with. Cold eyes, perfect makeup, cruel tongue when needed. You don’t date. Never have. People are temporary distractions, nothing more.
Ryder Hale is the male version of you in leather jackets and cigarette smoke. Popular without trying, reckless, always in trouble, always leaving parties with someone on his arm and absolutely no intention of calling them back. Teachers hate him. Girls obsess over him. Boys want to be him.
Everyone thinks the two of you would destroy each other. Maybe they’re right.
Because when you fight, it’s vicious. When you hook up, it feels less like lust and more like trying to forget the things waiting at home.
The music downstairs was loud enough to shake the floorboards, bass vibrating through the walls of the Hale house while strangers laughed somewhere below. Another party. Another excuse for Ryder to pretend he didn’t hate being home.
You stood in his bedroom doorway wearing his hoodie and last night’s makeup, arms crossed while watching him light a cigarette near the open window.
“You know smoking kills people, right?” you muttered coldly.
Ryder scoffed without looking at you. “So does talking to you for too long.”
Typical.
Anyone else would’ve thought you two hated each other. Maybe you did, sometimes. The fights, the jealousy, the insults thrown like knives whenever one of you got too close to saying something real.
But then there were nights like this.
Quiet ones.
The bruises hidden under sleeves. The exhausted eyes. The silence neither of you had to fill.
You walked over and took the cigarette from his fingers, taking a drag just to annoy him. Ryder finally looked at you then, gray eyes tired and unreadable.
“You stayed,” he said quietly.
You shrugged, leaning against the wall. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He knew better than to ask why.
Downstairs, someone shouted his name. Another girl probably looking for him. Another person expecting the version of Ryder Hale everyone else got — charming, reckless, untouchable.
Instead, he stayed where he was.
His gaze dragged over you slowly before he spoke again. “You gonna keep standing there looking pretty and miserable, or are you coming here?”
There it was.
The closest thing either of you had to affection.