Chapter 1 Off Limits

Star

Everyone had an opinion about me.

I never asked for a single one.

“Star, I’m just saying.” Mia fell into step beside me, her curls bouncing with every stride she took. “You could at least look at him when he’s talking to you. Like actually look. Not the phone thing.”

“I looked.”

“You looked at your phone.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not the same thing and you know it.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me to a hard stop in the middle of the courtyard. Around us Crestwood University moved the way it always did. Loud and performative, packed with people who needed a crowd just to feel like they existed. I had never understood it. I had stopped trying to.

“His name is Dre,” Mia said, turning to face me fully. “He is pre-med. He volunteers at the campus animal shelter every single weekend. He has been trying to get your attention for two weeks and you have given him nothing. Not even a full sentence.”

“I gave him three words.”

“What three words?”

“I’m not interested.”

She stared at me. “Star.”

“Mia.”

“You didn’t even give him a reason.”

“I don’t owe him a reason.”

“You could give him five minutes.”

“I gave him zero minutes for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“I don’t owe you that one either.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it again because she knew I was right and that was the part that frustrated her most. Mia had a big heart and she genuinely believed that every person deserved a fair chance. I respected that about her. I just didn’t share it. I had spent nineteen years learning exactly who I was and exactly what I wanted and I had never once confused the two. That wasn’t coldness. That was just clarity. Hope asked for too much. Clarity never asked me for anything at all.

She caught up with me before I’d taken four steps.

“He’s not a bad guy,” she said, softer now.

“I never said he was.”

“You just don’t want him.”

“Correct.”

She was quiet for a moment and then she laughed, that helpless, surrendered laugh she had when she knew the argument was already over. I loved her most when she did that. Six years of friendship and Mia was still the only person at Crestwood who didn’t look at me like a problem that needed solving. Everyone else had that look. That particular combination of curiosity and arrogance that said, I’ll be the one. I’ll be the exception. I’ll be the one she finally lets in.

Nobody ever was.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice the attention. I noticed everything. I noticed the way conversations dropped half a register when I walked past, the way certain guys rehearsed their opening line three times before they got close enough to use it. I just didn’t see the point in pretending any of it moved me when none of it actually did.

We cut across the main lawn toward the humanities building. The afternoon sun sat low and warm over the campus. I had a paper due Thursday, a reading I had not touched since Monday, and a study session I needed to schedule before the weekend. My head was already running through all of it when I heard the voices behind us.

Low. Male. Relaxed in that particular way that meant they owned whatever space they were standing in.

“Yo. Is that Star Davis?”

I kept walking.

“That’s her? That’s actually her?”

I kept my eyes straight ahead.

Mia’s hand found my wrist. “Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Your jaw.”

I released the tension in my jaw. “Better?”

“A little.” She slowed slightly, just enough. “Star. That’s the football team.”

“I know.”

“Like the actual first string.”

“Mia.”

“Alexander Carter is standing right there.”

I stopped.

Not because the name meant something to me. Because of how she said it. Because of how everyone at Crestwood said it, like it was supposed to land somewhere important inside you, like you were expected to rearrange yourself around the sound of it. I had been hearing that name since orientation week and I was already completely exhausted by the mythology people built around it.

I turned around slowly.

Four of them near the fountain. Unhurried, comfortable, filling the space around them the way boys like that always did. Marcus Webb was one of them. I recognized him from the paragraph he sent to my DMs in September and the silence I responded with. He caught my eye and looked away first.

Then there was Alexander Carter.

He was already looking at me. Not the way Marcus had looked, hungry and hopeful. Not the way Dre looked, careful and rehearsed. Alexander Carter looked at me the way you look at something you have already decided on. Calm. Certain. Like the conclusion had been reached before the conversation even started.

He was tall. Built the way four years of division one football builds a person. A face that had probably never heard the word no and genuinely had no framework for what it would feel like. Even from this distance I could see it, the particular ease of someone who had never had to fight for a single thing in his life. It should have made him forgettable. It didn’t, and that irritated me more than anything else about the entire exchange.

I held his gaze for three full seconds. Long enough to notice things I didn’t want to notice. The way he didn’t smile to soften it. The way he wasn’t performing for the boys around him the way most guys did the second a girl finally looked their way. He just watched me like he already had all the time in the world to wait me out.

Then I turned around and walked away.

“That’s it?” Mia jogged to match my pace. “That is your entire reaction to Alexander Carter looking at you like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you were the answer to something.”

“He looks at every girl like that.”

“He really doesn’t,” she said. “I’ve been watching that man for two semesters. He really doesn’t.”

I pushed through the doors into the humanities building. The courtyard noise dropped away instantly. Cooler air, fluorescent quiet, the distant sound of a lecture bleeding through a closed door down the hall.

“You do this every single time,” Mia said behind me.

“Do what?”

“Decide it’s nothing before it has a chance to be something.”

“It is nothing.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know men like him.” I started up the stairs without slowing. “They look until you look back the way they expect. When you don’t, they move on. It’s that simple.”

She didn’t answer right away. On the landing she fell into step beside me and I could feel her thinking, weighing it, deciding whether to push.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay?”

“Okay. You know him. You’ve got it all figured out.”

Something in her tone made me glance over. She was smiling but it wasn’t the surrendered smile. It was the other one. The one she only used when she knew something I didn’t.

“What?” I said.

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Mia.”

“I said nothing, Star.” She pushed open the door to the second floor hallway and held it for me, still smiling. “Absolutely nothing.”

I walked through and let it go.

I should have asked what she knew. I didn’t ask. I told myself it didn’t matter.

It mattered more than anything else that semester.