Mia Cole's best day turned into her worst in five minutes flat.
She got into her dream university. Then she caught her boyfriend, Jake, in bed with another girl.
Heartbroken and furious, Mia did something wild. She walked into a bar, locked eyes with the most dangerously handsome man she had ever seen, and let one electric night erase all her pain.
She never got his name. She never planned to see him again.
But when Mia walks into her very first college class, her heart stops cold. Standing at the front of the room, in a sharp suit with those same dark, unforgettable eyes, is him, Professor Ethan Cross. Her new literature professor. The man she slept with the night before.
Now they are stuck in the same room, three days a week, pretending that night never happened. But the more Ethan tries to push her away, the harder Mia falls. And the more Mia grows into her own power, the harder Ethan fights to keep his walls up.
One wrong move and they both lose everything. But the heart does not care about rules.

I know because I am still at my desk grading, or attempting to grade, which mostly means reading the same paragraph from a second-year's essay four times without absorbing a single word and my laptop is open and the notification appears in the corner of the screen and I see her name before I can decide not to look.


I finished it. I think the ending was a cop-out. They should have


I look at the second-year's essay. The paragraph is about symbolism in The Sun Also Rises and it makes a point I've read twelve variations of in twelve years of teaching and I have written the same note in the margin push further, what does this mean for the larger argument so many times that my hand moves to write it automatically.


I lie in the dark for forty-five minutes.


Chapter 19 - "The Cost of Everything"