Off Balance

Genevieve "Gen" Brown was never supposed to fit into Briar University's chaotic hockey world, not after last time that ended badly a broke heart. An Art History major with a sharp tongue hidden behind soft-spoken elegance, Gen preferred quiet cafés, annotated novels, and late nights spent buried beneath oversized sweaters and museum essays. With her porcelain features, pale green eyes, and calm, unreadable demeanor, most people assumed she was delicate.

They were wrong.

Where Hannah Wells burns bright with stubborn independence and Allie Hayes wears her heart openly, Gen is the steady center between them-the girl who notices everything and says just enough to leave people speechless. She has a habit of dismantling egos with a single deadpan sentence, which becomes a problem for Dean Di Laurentis the second they meet.

Because Dean thrives on attention.

He's loud, charming, reckless, and impossibly magnetic-the Briar hockey team's resident golden boy with a grin that usually gets him whatever he wants. Girls fall for him easily. People orbit him naturally. Dean knows exactly how to light up a room.

And Gen? Gen barely looks up from her coffee.

Completely immune to the infamous "Dean effect," she sees through the flirting, the confidence, and the party-boy reputation almost instantly. She's been there before...but.

What starts as playful banter quickly turns into something far more dangerous that scare her: lingering looks across crowded parties, late-night conversations in quiet libraries, stolen coffees, unspoken comfort, and the slow realization that the only person capable of calming Dean Di Laurentis down might be the one girl who never tried to impress him in the first place.

But beneath Gen's composed exterior lies someone who carries her emotions silently, someone who's spent years convincing herself that needing people is weakness. That dating jocks? Wasn't it if she wanted another broken heart...