Blaise has mastered the art of keeping people at a distance. At twenty-three, her life is simple or at least that's how she likes it. She works at a local skate shop, spends her free time getting high, losing herself in video games, and finds more comfort in her pet snake than she does in most people. Beneath the laid back nerdy exterior is a girl carrying wounds she refuses to let anyone touch. Ever since eleventh grade nothing had been the same for Blaise. Keese already has two girlfriends, a relationship he's convinced himself and others is everything he could ever want. Lately, something feels missing. After crossing paths with Blaise, he becomes intrigued by the girl who seems completely uninterested in being figured out. The more he learns about her, the more convinced he becomes that she could be the missing piece in his life. There's just one problem: Blaise wants no part of sharing a man. What starts as Keese trying to pull Blaise into a life she never asked for quickly becomes something neither of them expected. Blaise challenges everything he thought he wanted, while Keese slowly discovers that the girl he thought he could fit into his world might be the one forcing him to question it. Sometimes the person who wants nothing to do with you is the person who changes everything. STARTED ; JULY 5th, 2026 PUBLISHED ; AUGUST 11th, 2026

𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊 𝐓𝐖𝐎 ⌖ 𝙨𝙖𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙩𝙞𝙚 𝙭 𝙘𝙝𝙧𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙧𝙤𝙬𝙣. ❦ | 𝐔𝐑𝐁𝐀𝐍 𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 . ᶜʰʳⁱᵃᵐᵒⁿᵗᵉ ʳᵉᵃˡ ᵍʰᵉᵗᵗᵒ Five years ago, Iris walked away from the wreckage with blood on her hands & survival on her mind. Loving Jasiah had been like standing too close to a fire-warm at first, until the flames started to reach for her throat. When the law finally took him, she mourned him like someone dead, convinced that whatever they once shared was too dangerous to ever be resurrected. To save herself, she didn't just leave him behind-she buried the love entirely, believing some things had to be killed before they killed you. In the years that followed, Iris rebuilt. She built a life that was quiet, more structured, & way more safe with her husband & two growing children. A life where Jasiah Syncere Brown existed only in court records & steel bars. Prison was supposed to be a long sentence, guaranteed that the past would stay where it belonged. But the past didn't stay buried. Jasiah returned home years earlier than anyone expected, his arrival shattering the order Iris painstakingly built. But he didn't come back kind-he came back ruthless, upending everything in his path. Old wounds ripped open, & the man she once loved, the man she hated, the man she never truly escaped, was suddenly real again, standing back in the same city, back breathing the same air.