"𝐒𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫, 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐥 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐚 𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐛𝐚𝐞"

In which Aspen navigates her feelings for her childhood best friend, while watching her go through a toxic relationship.

She broke Aspen's heart when she left. Now she's back-and neither of them know how to let go. Old love. Old secrets. New pain. As the truth about Aspen's past threatens everything, Summyah must decide if she can trust the girl she never stopped loving. Because there's no safe place to love someone... but maybe there's a place worth staying.

Summyah Marie had always been the party girl type. After moving across the country, she chose to make ends meet working as a dancer to support herself and her little brother back home. As a result, she found herself picking up a few bad habits. Sucked into club life and the allure of fast money, Summyah lost herself without realizing it. In the attention, the drugs, the money, the atmosphere - all of it. The club life became her world, and she'd believed that world was enough... until she stumbled into Aspen Kartier's tattoo shop on a random Friday night. __ Aspen Kartier had always been an artist. Ever since she could hold a pencil she'd been sketching. It was no surprise at all that she wound up tattooing for a living once she came to the States. And now with her own successful shop, Brutality Ink, and the freedom to do whatever she pleased, Aspen had it all. Until she met Summyah Marie - performing as Cookie on stage - the walking embodiment of temptation and sin. With her long curly black hair usually pulled into playful pigtails, lightskin Black and Haitian features that glowed under the club lights, and that full sleeve tattoo on display, Summyah was impossible to forget. Especially when she walked into Aspen's shop late one night, still glittering from her shift, wearing a tight blue bodycon dress and sky-high heels.

Two girls whose lives couldn't be more different... yet somehow collide in ways neither of them saw coming. Aspen Renée Kartier is the definition of hidden strength. On the outside, she's the quiet, intelligent girl who excels in every classroom she steps into maintaining a 4.5 GPA, earning straight A's, and carrying the kind of academic pressure most people would crumble under. But behind closed doors, Aspen's life tells a completely different story. Raised in a broken home with divorced parents, she's been forced to grow up faster than she should've. Her mother's drug addiction drained the family financially and emotionally, leaving Aspen's older brother to step into a role he was never prepared for. With college dreams slipping further out of reach due to money, Aspen finds herself quietly battling reality while maintaining the image of perfection. What no one knows is that Aspen's life extends far beyond school walls. She hides a painful home life, a secret that could ruin the image she's carefully built. She's also living a double life one tied to the streets, one tied to survival. Then there's Summyah Zuri Marie. Summyah lives a life Aspen can only imagine. Wealth, luxury, status, and attention follow her everywhere she goes. She has the cars, the lifestyle, and the name that opens doors but her academic life tells a different truth. With average grades sitting around a C-, she constantly falls short of her parents' expectations. Her parents are determined to push her toward success, even threatening to send her back to Los Angeles to live with her grandmother, Mrs. Tasha, if she can't improve. What starts as a simple academic arrangement quickly becomes something much deeper, more complicated, and far more dangerous than either of them expected. As their worlds begin to intertwine, secrets threaten to surface, emotions begin to blur boundaries, and the weight of who they are versus who they pretend to be becomes impossible to ignore.

𝐀𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐱 𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐲𝐚𝐡

" im the drug in your veins" - the weeknd.

hold me tight, let me go heal my heart, hurt my soul.