Page 70 of The Romance Rivalry

... and I walk away.

Epigraph

You all know I can accept just about anything in a book as “romance reasons” as long as it serves the relationship arc. But I hate to say it—secret baby might just be my one no-go. I think it’s actually dethroned enemies-to-lovers as my least favorite trope. Some secrets you just can’t be forgiven for keeping.

—@irene.loves.love.books

Wow. The author did something really special here. She made me sympathetic to Stacia, even after keeping their son from Arick, and helped me understand why she did it. Sometimes secrets serve a purpose for the time the truth remains covered. And when revealed, the truth is more powerful than it ever could have been before. This love story is going to haunt me for a long time to come.

—@aidentheguyreadsromance

Sixteen

secret baby

I sit with my head down, forehead pressed against the pages of my statistics book, begging for the concepts to sink in. I’ve been studying for hours, trying to distract myself from overthinking, overanalyzing everything that happened with Aiden today.

Thing is, he’s right. Together, we can knock out the lit extra credit easily. I have to get over the hurdle of making it so hard on myself for no reason at all. I have to take accountability for fucking up and letting Aiden and my professor down. And I have to take the help offered me to do the work.

But where does all of this leave me and Aiden? He must be so sick of having to help me, having to save me. All I wanted was to be the main character of my life. But the role I seem to be settling into is the damsel in distress. Maybe that’s whatAiden finds attractive in me. Maybe that’s the reason he’s interested.

I don’t want to be the girl who needs saving. I want to be the one who can save herself.

For now, I face the next item on my List of Woes—statistics. Aka, a foreign concept told in gibberish that will never make sense to me. Which leads me back to being unmotivated. Which makes me not take the time necessary to learn it so that it does make sense to me. And the cycle goes on and on.

I lift my head and drop it back down on the book.

“Not today, Satan,” I say, lifting and dropping.

“I will overcome your attempt to bring me down, Mr. Statistics.” Lift. Drop.

“By the power of Grayskull.” Lift. Drop. Onto a soft pillow of a hand. I look up and Jeannette is standing there, hand on my book, cushioning my self-punishment.

“It’s gonna leave a mark,” she says.

I sigh, deeply.

“I don’t want to do this...” I whine.

“Here’s something that helps me: Whatdoyou want to do right now?” she asks.

I pucker my lips, pushing them out as far from my face as I can as I think about what I want to do in this moment. “WHAT do I want to do? What do I WANT to do? What do I want to DO?”

“I fear you might be a lost cause.”

“I know what I want to do! I want to log in online and check my accounts and reply to comments,” I say.

“You have a twisted view of fun. But okay, now that you know what you want to do, use it as your motivator. A carrot. Study a little statistics, and then you get to read a comment. Ten minutes of studying, ten minutes of reading. Back and forth. The reward system.”

“Huh.” I think it over. “That could work. I’m gonna give it a try.”

Jeannette gives a satisfied nod and goes back to her own desk to study. I wonder what her carrot is.

I open up my laptop and log into the account where I posted my most recent review. Two hundred and twenty notifications? I wonder if some of these are comments people wanted to leave about the Live Aiden and I did the other night. I’m itching to read them all. But this is my reward. First...

I pull my open Stats book closer.

I read the book to my left.The normal curve... aka bell curve, aka normal distribution... data near the mean is more frequent than data far from the mean...

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