Rule No 1: No Strings Attached

Summer's POV

Brooks Hunters had the messiest apartment known to man.

I'd said that a hundred times and I'd say it a hundred more, because every single time I walked through that door, it proved itself true again. A jersey was thrown over the back of the couch. Shoes were kicked off near the entrance but never inside the shoe rack.

"I don't understand how he functions," Ali muttered from across the room, holding up a damp towel she'd found draped over the kitchen counter. "Like genuinely, Summer. How is he not living in filth?"

"He functions because people like me keep cleaning up after him." I pulled a stack of books off the shelf and started arranging them again. "Hand me that mug, please."

She passed it without looking away from the towel.

Brooks had texted me that morning, saying he just landed, and had stopped by to drop things, and I knew what that meant. The apartment would look exactly like this. So Ali and I had come over, the way we always did, because some habits don't care how many years have passed. I'd been showing up to clean up after Brooks Hunters since I was seventeen years old, and some small, stubborn part of me had never once stopped to ask why.

Then two weeks ago, he'd broken up with Taylor.

He hadn't said much about it. But he'd called me late that night, and I'd known something had changed, the way you know a storm is coming before the sky actually breaks. He just said, "I ended things," and I said, "Okay," and neither of us talked about what it meant. I'd hung up the phone and sat on the edge of my bed for a long time afterward, my heart doing something reckless and hopeful that I didn't let myself name.

"Summer."

Ali's voice pulled me back. She was standing in the centre of the room. She sounded amused.

She held up her hand. In it was a small velvet box. My brain didn't process it immediately.

Then Ali pressed her lips together like she was holding in a scream and crossed the room to me in three fast steps.

"Sit down," she whispered. "Sit down, sit down...."

She pushed the box into my hands and I opened it.

Inside was a simple diamond ring.

For a second I couldn't breathe around it. My whole chest went tight and hot, like something had reached in and squeezed.

"Okay." Ali was using the voice she used when she was trying very hard to be calm and failing completely. "He went on a trip. And he came back with a ring."

"And he broke up with Taylor before the trip," I said slowly, the words tasting strange in my mouth, like I was afraid saying them out loud might undo them.

"And he's been calling you more." She started counting on her fingers. "He told you he had something to tell you tonight and you shouldn't be late."

Well, Brooks had texted me saying he had something to tell me tonight.

"Summer." Her voice dropped. "He bought a ring."

Something moved through my chest, warm and dizzy and terrifying all at once, three years of wanting condensed into one small velvet box.

"We don't know what it's for," I said carefully, even as my hands had already started to shake.

"He broke up with his girlfriend and came back from a trip with a diamond ring and has been attached to you for two weeks." She stared at me. "What else could it be for?"

I closed the box slowly, and set it back exactly where she'd found it, my fingers lingering a beat too long against the velvet.

I'd spent three years keeping these feelings locked somewhere behind my ribs, tucked so far down I'd half convinced myself they didn't exist anymore. I always thought Brooks would never, ever look at me that way. I'd built my whole life around the safe distance of maybe someday. And now there was a ring, and a text that said *don't be late*, and every wall I'd spent three years building was coming down at once, faster than I knew how to feel it.

Wait. Was Brooks going to propose to me?

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, willing them still, willing my heart to slow down enough that I could actually think.

"I'm going to confess," I said, quieter than I meant to. "Tonight. Whatever he wants to tell me, I'm telling him too." I held Ali's hand, jumping up, my pulse roaring so loud I could barely hear myself say it.

Ali's face broke into the widest grin I'd seen in months.

The rest of the afternoon was hers. She picked the dress. She practiced conversations with me, playing Brooks, feeding me lines and waiting while I found the words, my voice cracking every time I got close to the real ones. She did my hair, and told me to breathe at least six times, and every single time, I forgot to.

I wrote down what I wanted to say. Three years of it, folded into three pages, my handwriting getting messier the closer I got to the parts that actually mattered. I was finally going to confess to him. My hand had cramped twice from how tightly I'd been gripping the pen, like the paper itself might get away from me if I loosened my hold.

The neon sign of The Daily Puck buzzed overhead, casting a warm glow over the damp sidewalk. I stood just outside the campus diner, my fingers nervously smoothing down my dark green skirt for the fifteenth time in the last two minutes, my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to get out ahead of me.

"Ali, I look ridiculous," I muttered, staring at my reflection in the glass door. The skirt was a little shorter than what I usually wore. "I should have gone home and changed into my old flannel. This isn't me."

Ali rolled her eyes, grabbing my wrists to make me stop fidgeting. "Summer, shut up. You look stunning. That skirt shows off the legs you usually hide under baggy sweatpants. Trust me, it's perfect. It's exactly what a guy wants to see when he comes back from a long trip."

I swallowed the lump in my throat, glancing down at my black ankle boots. "I just feel exposed."

That wasn't entirely a lie. It wasn't the skirt. It was the letter folded up small in my bag, three years of wanting somebody flattened down into a handful of paragraphs, and the terrifying, thrilling possibility that in the next hour I might not need it at all.

"The only person who's going to look at you is Brooks, and he's going to realize what a total idiot he's been for the last three years," Ali said firmly, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. She adjusted her own purse strap.

I took a deep breath, my eyes scanning the room, searching for the one face I actually wanted to see. I spotted him across the room before Ali could point him out. Brooks Hunters was easy to find. Tall, looking relaxed, wearing a grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. Then he laughed at something the person beside him said, and the sound of it, even muffled through glass, did something helpless and familiar to my chest.

"There he is," Ali whispered, pointing toward a booth in the far corner.

My heart did a violent dance against my ribs. He looked happy, exactly like the boy next door I had spent a lifetime yearning for, and for one dizzy second I let myself believe this could actually be the night everything I'd been carrying finally set itself down.

"Go get him," Ali whispered, giving me a gentle push forward. "I'm going to go sit at the counter. Good luck, Sum."

Something in me pulled toward him the way it always did, an old, worn groove I'd walked a thousand times before.

"Go," Ali said quietly. "I'll be right here."

He saw me coming and his face shifted into that easy smile, and I felt it land somewhere under my sternum the way it always had, warm and stupid and entirely out of my control.

"Summer!" Brooks slid out of the booth, stepped forward and wrapped his massive arms around me, pulling me into a heavy hug. "Wow!! You look....good."

A shy smile spread across my face. I had to hold my skirt tight. "Thanks. I just wanted to look different tonight."

"Well, it suits you," he gestured for me to sit across from him. "Sit. Man, I've missed you."

I slid into the vinyl booth, my pulse still not settling. As much as I was nervous, seeing Brooks' face made me feel relieved, the way it always did, like something in me finally exhaled after holding its breath for weeks.

"So, I heard what happened between you and....Taylor," I said, as soon as I sat down. I slid back a strand of hair that fell off behind my ears, buying myself half a second I desperately needed.

"Oh, yes. It was really a hard decision though. We were just going around in circles, toxic as hell....."

This was it. The door was wide open.

I swallowed hard, my heart hammering against my ribs so loudly I was almost certain he could hear it from across the table. I squeezed his hand back before he pulled it away, three years of practiced silence cracking right down the middle.

"Actually." He started again. "Taylor and I...."

"Brooks....I...I have something to tell you. Something I've been...." I said, cutting him off, my voice shaking on every word, three years finally spilling out of me all at once. Just before I could proceed, someone behind me lurched, and I felt the cold hit before I understood what was happening.

Someone had poured a champagne down the back of my dress.

"Oh, my God, I'm so so sorry." The waitress apologised, bending down to clean it off, but I stopped her halfway.

"It's.. it's fine. I'll just go clean it off in the bathroom," I stood up, my whole body still buzzing with everything I hadn't finished saying.

I excused myself and found the bathroom, working at the fabric with paper towels under the harsh lights, telling myself it was fine. The fabric would dry. My hands were shaking again, and this time it had nothing to do with the cold champagne soaking through my dress. I stared at myself in the mirror, at the girl who had almost said it, who had gotten close enough to taste the words, and I told her to breathe.

Few minutes later, I went back out.

Something about the room had shifted - the light, the mood of the crowd. People were looking toward the centre of the diner and I followed their gazes.

There were neon lights, and candles on tables that hadn't been there before. Flowers along the bar in small white vases. The whole atmosphere was rearranged.

Brooks was standing in the centre of the room.

He was facing my direction, and for one suspended second, everything in me went perfectly, achingly still. I thought.... I believed he was going to propose to me. My whole body braced for it, that strange, weightless mix of terror and hope, three years of waiting collapsing down into a single held breath.

Then, a woman walked past me. Her perfume trailing behind her as she walked, toward the centre of the room, and toward Brooks.

Confusion moved through me, slow and cold, like water finding a crack.

Taylor.

That was Taylor, walking through the candlelight toward Brooks, who stood in a room full of flowers with his hands at his sides and his eyes on her.

Brooks reached into his jacket pocket, and he dropped to one knee.

Brooks was on one knee with a ring box open in his hand, and Taylor was walking toward him, and I was standing at the edge of the room holding a folded piece of paper in my bag with all the things I'd wanted to say to him, my whole body suddenly, terribly numb.

My brain refused to pick up what was happening.

What was Brooks doing on his knee with a ring box in his hand while his ex-girlfriend approached him?

Summer's Pov

"Taylor, would you make me the happiest man alive, and marry me?" Brooks said while on his knees.

I watched Taylor press her fingers to her lips, and then she extended her hand and Brooks slid the ring on. I had held that ring. And I had thought - even for just a second - about what it would feel like on my own finger. Now I stood there and watched it happen to someone else, and something in my chest folded in on itself.

The room erupted. Applause, cheering. Brooks pulled Taylor in and kissed her in the middle of all those candles and flowers while everyone watched and celebrated something that was quietly breaking me apart from the inside. I smiled. I don't know how. My face just did it on its own, some old, well-trained reflex that knew how to perform even when the rest of me had stopped working.

I still had the letter in my hand.

I hadn't realized I'd been gripping it the whole time. My knuckles were pale around the folded paper, the edges crumpled from how tight I was holding on. Three pages of everything I'd spent three years not saying, tucked into my bag earlier. I felt absurd now, holding it, like I was standing at my own funeral holding a speech no one would ever hear.

I watched Taylor show the ring to the woman beside her, tilting her hand so the diamond caught the light.

That should be me in her place.

*Keep it together. Just keep it together.*

I stood at the edge of the room and watched all of it, because if I moved, something would break, and I didn't trust myself to know what shape the pieces would land in.

Someone nearby laughed at something and the sound scraped against me wrong, and I felt my eyes sting, hot and sudden, and that was when I knew I had to leave. My throat had gone so tight it physically hurt to swallow.

I moved toward the exit, keeping close to the wall, not looking at anyone. I just needed air and distance and somewhere I could fall apart without an audience.

I almost made it.

My foot caught on a cable running along the floor that was part of the setup keeping the romantic lights alive. I lurched forward, grabbed at the nearest surface, found nothing, and then everything happened at once.

The music stopped, and the neon lights died.

The room dropped into a sharp, jarring quiet, and I was standing in the middle of it with one hand braced against a stranger's table and the cable pulled loose from the wall behind me, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my ears.

Every person in that diner turned to look.

I was suddenly visible in a way I had never wanted to be, every ounce of the invisibility I'd built over three years of standing quietly at the edges of Brooks's life stripped away in one humiliating second.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I tripped, I'm so sorry..."

Someone near the bar laughed. A murmur rolled through the room, and heat crawled up my neck and into my face, so fierce it felt like a physical burn.

"Summer?" Brooks's called. He was already moving, stepping around the people between us, his brow pulled together, Taylor's hand dropping from his as he came toward me. "Where are you going?" Brooks asked, looking up in surprise. "You just arrived."

"I just remembered I left a textbook locked in the athletic department office," I stammered, pulling my purse strap over my shoulder, the lie coming out shakier than I wanted it to. "The building closes in fifteen minutes, and I...I absolutely need it for my eight-a.m. lecture tomorrow. I'm so sorry to run out on you guys."

"Let me walk you out to your car at least.." Brooks said, thrown by the sudden exit.

"No!" I blurted, a little too loudly. Taylor's eyes flashed. I softened my tone and took a step back. "No, really, stay. Eat. You guys just got reunited, don't let me ruin it. I'll text you tomorrow, Brooks. Welcome back. And congratulations. To both of you." I forced a smile, and it cost me more than I had left to give.

Before he could protest, I spun on my heel and marched toward the exit.

"I'm sorry," I apologized once more. I didn't wait for Brooks, and walked out as fast as I could without breaking into a run, my vision already starting to blur at the edges.

*I can't let him see me like this. I'm such a fool.*

The cold hit me the moment I stepped outside. I made it to the bottom of the steps and kept walking, not knowing where I was going, just needing to be gone. The letter was still in my hand. I didn't even know why I was still holding it. Every step felt heavier than the last, like my whole body had finally caught up to what my mind hadn't let itself understand yet.

*I feel completely invisible. Why can't anyone choose me? I hate myself*

"Summer."

Taylor stood at the top of the diner steps, still wearing that ring. She came down slowly and stopped a few feet away, looking me over. "Jealousy really isn't a good look," she said pleasantly. "Just so you know."

"I tripped. It was an accident." *Why can't she just leave me alone, let me cry in peace?*

*Not here, Summer. Not now.* I held back the tears building up, my whole throat aching with the effort.

"You tripped and killed the lights and the music, right as he kissed me." She tilted her head. "Sure, Summer."

"I'm sorry for interrupting the moment..."

"Stop apologizing." She said it like the apology itself was the problem. "You've spent your whole life apologizing and look where it's gotten you. Still watching from the edges."

I said nothing. There wasn't anything I could say that wouldn't confirm exactly what she already knew.

"I've known about how you feel about him for a while now." Something in her expression shifted. "Did you think you were subtle? Always available, always there whenever he calls. It was almost sweet. In a sad kind of way."

"I'm not sorry," she continued. "He was never going to choose you, Summer. You were always going to be exactly what you are to him - the friend. The safe place. The girl he calls when things fall apart." A small, perfectly placed pause. "Not the girl he puts a ring on."

Each word landed with accuracy, finding some soft, unguarded place in me and settling in like it meant to stay.

"You were never going to be enough for someone like Brooks."

Those words dawned on me. I had to swallow hard to stop the tears from coming out. I would never be enough for anyone.

She turned and walked back up the steps and into the warm light of the diner without looking back, leaving me standing there with three years of silence finally breaking open in the worst possible place, at the worst possible time, in front of the one person who would enjoy it most.

I stood on the pavement and didn't move.

Then the first tear ran down, and I pressed my hand over my mouth, and I walked, because if I stopped moving I was afraid I'd simply fold in on myself right there on the sidewalk and never get back up.

My vision blurred and I blinked hard against it, my heels catching on the uneven ground, the letter still crumpled in my fist, three years of hope reduced to something I no longer knew what to do with.

I didn't see him.

I walked straight into something solid, and the impact knocked me back hard enough that the ground came up before I could do anything about it. I hit the pavement. The letter flew from my hand and spun away into the dark.

A figure crouched in front of me, picked it up from where it had landed, and stood back up. He turned it over once in his hand. Then he unfolded it.

"Don't ..." I scrambled to my feet, my knees stinging, my whole body raw and exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the fall. "That's mine, give it back ..."

He tilted the paper toward the nearest light and started reading without so much as glancing at me.

I knew who he was before I fully saw his face. There was only one person on this campus who moved like that.... Ace Hunters. Brooks's half brother. Boxing champion. The person I had successfully avoided crossing paths with for years.

"Ace." I stepped toward him, my voice cracking. "Give me the letter."

He held it slightly to the side without looking up.

I stood there in the cold, humiliated and tearstained, watching a man I barely knew go through the most private thing I had ever written, every word of it something I hadn't even been able to say out loud to the person it was meant for.

He reached the middle of the second page and stopped, and looked up at me with one brow raised.

"Three years. You've been in love with my brother for three years and never said a word?,."

"Give me the letter." My whole face was burning now, humiliation stacking on top of grief until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

"That's embarrassing." he said it simply. "A one-sided thing for three years while he was taken. And you wrote it all down."

Something snapped.

I crossed the distance between us, grabbed the letter with both hands and wrenched it from his grip, and slapped him hard across the face.

Summer's POV

The first thing I felt when I woke up was the heaviness.

It was like my body already knew what my half-asleep brain hadn't caught up to yet, a dull, physical weight sitting square in the middle of my chest before I'd even opened my eyes. I stared at the ceiling and for exactly three seconds, I almost didn't remember.

Then it all came back, all at once, like a wave I hadn't braced for.

The ring. The candlelight. Taylor walking towards Brooks, who was on one knee. The sound the crowd made. Me standing at the edge of it all with a folded letter in my hand and nowhere to put it. My whole body ached in a way that had nothing to do with the fall, like grief had a physical weight and I was carrying all of it at once.

I turned onto my side and looked at my phone. There were four missed calls from Brooks. Three from Ali.

I set the phone face down and closed my eyes, wishing, uselessly, that I could just stay in the dark a little longer.

Just before I could go back to sleep, a knock came.

I opened the door and Ali walked straight in, wrapped both arms around me and held on without saying anything first. She just held on, and I stood there with my chin on her shoulder and my eyes pressed shut, and for a moment the tightness in my chest loosened just enough to breathe, just enough that I let myself stop pretending I was fine, even for a second.

"I was so worried about you," she said finally, pulling back to look at me. Her eyes moved over my face, checking for damage. "I kept calling and you weren't picking up and Brooks was blowing up my phone every twenty minutes asking if I'd heard from you ..."

"Brooks was calling you?"

"Non-stop." She steered me gently toward the bed and sat beside me. "He's worried, Summer. He didn't understand why you ran out."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't a version of the truth I could hand her without it costing me something I wasn't ready to give up yet.

"She was there, Ali," I whispered, the dam breaking as a sob escaped. I covered my face with my hands, my shoulders shaking, three years of holding it together finally giving out all at once. "They got back together over the phone. He looked so happy."

Ali pulled me into a tight hug, letting me cry against her shoulder. "He's an idiot. A blind, oblivious, total hockey-brained idiot," she muttered, rubbing my back. "And Taylor is a manipulative little viper."

I sniffled, pulling back and wiping my cheeks, my whole face raw and swollen from how long I must have cried before she got there. "The point is, I lost before I even had a chance to fight. I've spent three years waiting for the perfect moment, and last night, I dressed up like a fool just to watch them kiss and Brooks proposing to her. I feel invisible, Ali. I feel completely invisible."

"You are not invisible," Ali said fiercely, grabbing my face. "You are beautiful, and you are brilliant. If Brooks is too stupid to see what's right in front of him, then he doesn't deserve you. We are going to figure out how you're going to survive this semester without losing your mind."

We sat like that for a moment, my head against her shoulder, letting the quiet do what words couldn't. Outside, I could already hear the campus starting up - footsteps in the corridor, voices, someone's music drifting through the wall, the whole world moving on like it hadn't just ended for me.

"I don't want to go in today," I said.

Ali looked at me.

"I mean it. I can't." I reached up and pressed my fingers against my eyes, the thought of walking through campus already making my stomach curl in on itself. "Everyone's going to be talking about it. The proposal, the engagement - it's going to be everywhere and I can't sit in the middle of it and pretend I'm fine. I just can't do that today."

"I know," she said. "And I get it. I do." She paused. "But if you stay here, you're just going to lie in this bed and replay everything and feel worse. You know that's what's going to happen."

She wasn't wrong and I hated that she wasn't wrong.

"You don't have to talk to anyone," she continued. "You just have to show up. That's it. Show up, get through your classes, come home." She bumped my shoulder lightly with hers. "I'll be with you the whole time."

It took her another ten minutes and the promise of coffee to get me out of the apartment, but she got me there, my eyes still puffy under the concealer she'd insisted on layering over them.

Campus was exactly as bad as I'd known it would be.

It was everywhere. The moment we walked through the main entrance I heard whispers talking about the diner, the flowers, the ring, and every syllable of it landed somewhere sore.

I kept my head down and walked, counting the seconds between one breath and the next just to have something to hold onto.

Ali had to break off to handle something with a professor - she squeezed my hand before she left and said she'd find me in an hour - and then I was alone, which was somehow worse.

*Brooks proposed. Did you see? They're engaged. It was so beautiful. Have you seen the ring?*

Every corner. Every conversation I drifted past. The same words turning over and over, each one another small cut I had to walk through smiling.

I told myself that I needed to accept it. Brooks was not mine, had never been mine, was never going to be mine. The sooner I let that settle, the sooner I could stop feeling like this. It wasn't even grief - you couldn't grieve something you never had. It was the quiet death of a hope I should have released a long time ago, and I was surprised by how much a thing that was never mine could still hurt this much to lose.

Accept it. Just accept it and move on.

I turned the corner near the main courtyard and walked straight into them.

Brooks saw me first. His face shifted immediately to the one that used to make my heart do something I'd trained it to ignore.

"Summer." He was already stepping toward me. "Where did you go last night? I called you so many times ...."

"I know, I'm sorry." I made myself look at him normally, forcing my voice into something steady even as everything in me wanted to fold. "I wasn't feeling well. I should have texted you instead of running out like that."

"Are you okay? You looked...." He searched my face. "You don't look like you slept."

"I'm fine. I'm a bit tired." I smiled, and it only cost me everything. "Congratulations, by the way. I mean it. I'm happy for you."

Something moved behind his eyes but he didn't name it. Instead he reached out and ruffled my hair, his hand messing up everything Ali had done that morning with a comb. "Don't go getting sick on me," he said. "I need you to be functional."

There it was. The little sister's voice. The same one he'd always used.

*I need you to be functional.*

Something in me went very quiet at that. Not the friend he loved. Not the girl he chose. The functional one. The one who kept the pieces together for everyone else and was never allowed to fall apart in front of him, not even now.

Taylor came out at his elbow like she'd been standing there the whole time, which she probably had. She lifted her left hand, and turned it so the ring caught the morning sun. The diamond threw a small flash of light across the space between us, and I made myself watch it without flinching.

"Isn't it something?" she said, looking at it rather than me. "The way it catches the light. I keep getting distracted by it. Brooks has excellent taste."

"It's beautiful," I said, because what else was there?

She smiled at that, satisfied, and slipped her hand back into his.

I excused myself before anyone could say anything else, before my face could do something I wouldn't be able to take back.

I found my way to the corridor outside Dr. Harrison's lecture room and stopped to breathe, back against the wall, my whole body finally allowed to sag for a second now that no one was watching.

Ali appeared at my side, slightly out of breath. "Sorry, what did I miss?"

"Nothing. Come on."

We pushed through toward the board. Dr. Harrison's project partner list took up the full page. I scanned down for my name.

Someone stepped back from the board as we approached and nearly walked into me. I moved aside and looked up.

Ace Hunters looked back.

He was already walking away, unhurried as always, hands in his pockets, but he slowed for just a second when his eyes landed on me. Something shifted in his expression.

"Nice," he said, simply. "This should be fun."

Then he kept walking. I stared after him for a second, then turned to the board.

Harrison, Dr. E. - Project Partners, Semester Two.

I found my name halfway down.

Quinn Summer - Hunters A.

I stood there and read it twice, something between dread and disbelief settling low in my stomach.

"Oh my God." Ali was already next to me, reading over my shoulder. I could hear the grin forming in her voice before she spoke. "Summer. Every girl on this campus would actually combust to be in your position right now. Ace Hunters, your project partner? Do you understand what...."

"I slapped him," I said.

There was silence. I turned to look at her. The grin was gone.

"You what?"

"Last night, in the parking lot." I turned back to the board, to my name sitting next to his. "He read my letter without asking, and he said it was embarrassing, so I..." I made a flat gesture with my hand.

Ali stared at me.

"Summer." Her voice had dropped to the careful one she used when something was genuinely bad. "Ace Hunters. You slapped Ace Hunters."

"Yes."

She looked at the board. She looked at me. She pressed her lips together and said nothing for a long moment.

"You're probably doomed."