Blurb:
Tessa and Hardin’s love was complicated before. Now it’s more confusing than ever.
Just as Tessa makes the biggest decision of her life, everything changes. Revelations about her family, and then Hardin’s, throws everything they knew before into doubt and make their hard-won future together more difficult to claim. Tessa’s life begins to come unglued. Nothing is what she thought it was. Not her friends. Not her family. Hardin – the one person she should be able to rely on – is furious when he discovers the massive secret she’s been keeping. And rather than being understanding, he turns to sabotage…
Tessa knows Hardin loves her and will do anything to protect her, but there’s a difference between loving someone and being able to have them in your life. This cycle of jealousy, unpredictable anger, and forgiveness, is exhausting. She’s never felt so intensely for someone, so exhilarated by someone else’s kiss – but is the irrepressible heat between her and Hardin worth all the drama? Love use to be enough to hold them together. But if Tessa follows her heart now, will it be… the end?
Rating: 4/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Contemporary Romance
- 3rd book in the After series
- Highly recommend for 16 years and above
- TW: explicit language, abusive behaviour, references to drug/alcohol/substance misuse, sexually graphic scenes
- Romance Tropes: Strangers to lovers, good girl bad boy, toxic romance
Book Quotes:
- “I have come to learn that the people who pretend to care the least actually care the most.”
- “There is a big difference between not being able to live without someone and loving them.”
- “Nobody is a lost cause. They just think they are, so they don’t even bother to try sometimes.”
- “You’re my better place, Tess.”
- “It was the way she looked at me the whole time. That look said more than she ever could and, in turn, scared me more than her words alone ever could.”
- “No tears come, only memories. Memories and regrets.”
- “Far from a normal-functioning relationship, but normal has never been our thing.”
- “I’m finally beginning to realize that you can only fight with someone over the same thing so many times before you’re burned out.”
- “Women do too much shit to impress men who can barely tell the difference.”
- “He has to see what he has. He has to know that you’re serious this time. You have to let him miss you.”
- “Sometimes it’s faith that people hold on to. Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough, you can confide in someone else and trust them to pull you out of the pain before you dwell in it for too long. Pain is one of those hideous places that, once visited, you have to fight your way out, and even when you think you have escaped it, you find that it has permanently marked you. If you’re like me, you don’t have anyone to depend on, no one to take your hand and assure you that you’ll make it through this hell. Instead, you have to lace up your boots, grab your own hand, and pull yourself out.”
- “I have decided that the hot, burning, inescapable pain is the worst. This pain comes when you finally begin to relax, you finally breathe, thinking that some issue is yesterday’s problem, when in fact it’s today’s problem, tomorrow’s problem, and the problem of every day after that. This pain comes when you pour everything into something, into someone, and they betray you so completely—so seemingly on a whim—that the pain crushes you and you feel as if you’re barely breathing, barely holding on to that small fraction of whatever is left inside of you begging you to go on, to not give up.
- “You’d have to be insane to give up Seattle for someone who loves more than anything but is only willing to show it half of the time.”
- “Pain . . . such a simple word, but so packed with meaning. I have come to learn that pain is the strongest emotion one can feel. Unlike every other emotion, it’s the only one every human being is guaranteed to feel at some point in their life, and there is no upside to pain, no positive aspect that can make you look at it from a different perspective . . . there’s only the overwhelming sensation of pain itself.”
- “I have so much faith in that man that I will take every single tear, every single pointless argument, I’ll take it all just to be around for the day when he has faith in himself.”