Page 1 of Growing Into Love

ONE

CASS

“It’shigh time you tell Jaz how you feel,” Zara declares as she arranges tulips in a vase for one of her window displays.

“Oh yeah, brilliant,” I say, rolling my eyes and plucking a rose from the pile of flowers on the table beside her. I press the soft petals against my nose and inhale their delicate scent. “Hi Jaz, how’re things, by the way, I’ve been in love with you since I was seven.”

Zara wrinkles her nose. “Don’t say it like that.”

“How should I say it then?”

“You know, the normal way that people ask other people out on dates.”

“I don’t ask people out on dates,” I say bluntly.

Zara points a tulip at me. “And therein lies the problem, my darling Cass.”

Zara runs a little flower shop in Stanley Law, a neighboring town of my home in Hart’s Crossing. She and I met at a summer equestrian camp when we were nine—Zara didn’t fancy riding much, but she and I got along like peas and carrots. Been friends ever since.

She’s been nagging me to tell Jaz how I feel for nearly a year now.

“You could always send him a sexy text,” Zara suggests.

I drop the rose. “What?” I yelp, then scramble to pick up the fallen flower.

Zara cackles. “Christ, you should have seen your face. Go on, Cass. Give us your best sext. You can practice on me. I won’t judge.”

“I am not sending Jaz a sexy text!”

I fell for Jasar Taylor-Wexhall the very first day I met him—when he moved to Hart’s Crossing and joined my brother Declan’s class at Breckencross School in year eight. Some kids made fun of him for all the usual, idiotic small-town reasons: he was new in town, his clothes were secondhand, his mum was Lebanese. She’s from bloody Manchester but that didn’t make a difference to the little shits in Dec’s year. Declan punched George Benson in the mouth and told him to bugger off then invited Jaz round the house after school.

I first laid eyes on him when I met Dec and our older brother Virgil by the gates to walk home together. Jaz wore an oversize rugby shirt and a shy smile, all skinny arms and thick black curls falling into his eyes. I knew right then and there that I would love him until the day I died.

All right, that’s a tad dramatic but I haven’t died yet and I haven’t stopped loving Jaz either. I was seven years old then. I’m coming up on my twenty-ninth birthday.

Bit depressing really.

“Don’t be such a prude,” Zara chides me.

“I’m not being a prude.”

“Exactly what a prude would say.” Zara tilts her head. “Let’s see…what about something likeI want your hot throbbing cock inside me.”

I drop the rose again. “Jesus, Zara, do you honestly send texts like that?”

“Everyone does, Cass. It’s normal.”

“Jaz doesn’t.”

“How would you know?”

I frown at her. “Look, he’s still not over Theresa. You know how she keeps popping back in his life whenever she has a row and breaks up with her boyfriend.”

Zara frowns. “Theresa is a problem, I’ll grant you that.”

Problemis putting it mildly. Three years ago, Theresa broke Jaz’s heart and left him for a postman from York. More than once, he spent the night in the guest room at the farmhouse after too many pints at the local pub, the Stag and Deer, drowning his sorrows with Dec.

Now it’s like Theresa won’t be with him but she won’t let him go either. She’ll run back to him for a day or two and then leave again and patch things up with the postman. It’s spectacularly unfair to Jaz.

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