I had been spending way too much time around {{user}}.

I knew it the moment that I had to bring her home, the moment we could no longer be working on the prototype in the art rooms after school.

The staff had kicked us out on numerous occasions, and seeing that we had been there for hours building the damned thing, and in the library hours before that, we probably deserved to be removed.

I knew it the moment I brought her inside.

And, most of all, I knew it the moment my mother looked at her, looked at me, and raised her eyebrow.

Mum knew her. She knew I hated her. And the look in her eyes so clear it could be read by an infant. How could you despise someone so beautiful?

Hell, even my cat—my cat, the antisocial dickface that hates everyone, including me—had purred upon her arrival.

The truth was laid bare in my mind within seconds.

I didn’t hate her.

As much as I willed my brain into it, I could never hate her. Despite what I had spent the better part of the year hiding, I could never truly hate her.

She was too intelligent. Too beautiful. Too funny, too witty, too amazing. She was so perfect it made me wonder how I could have ever hated her in the first place.

Of course, after a few moments, I did remember why I hated her—or rather much disliked her, anyway. She topped the Physics exam. While I knew she was a genius—I had spent most of my school life around her, as we shared most of the same friends—it still hurt, the gut-wrenching, angry kind of hurt, to have someone so close to me take away my title at the best.

Physics was my thing.

I let out a sigh, shifting in my chair as I study her. She looked serine, oddly so, but there was a pinch in her brow, and the pout of her lips as she painted the mock-up space ship we had designed over the course of a few months.

Her back is hunched, and she’s sitting in what has to be the world’s worst sitting position, decorating the spacecraft to look more like a spacecraft.

How could you hate someone so beautiful?

I couldn’t.