Page 1 of Bachelor

Chapter One

Whitney

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CHRISTMAS WAS ALWAYSmy favorite holiday. I loved the lights, the snow, the warm, fuzzy feeling of sipping hot chocolate and watching a cheesy rom-com with a fire blazing the hearth in the background.

It also really sucked once I got old enough to see the holiday as what my mother thought it was—a chance to pull out all the stops to flaunt our wealth and status among her inner circle. I’d spent the last four Christmases dressed in designer gowns and sipping champagne in our Hamptons mansion, where the only decorations my mother would allow were white. White lights. White trees. White tinsel and candles. The entire house was a shrine to the glitz and glamour she was known for.

There hadn’t been room for warm or fuzzy in her glistening palace.

But at Jessica Lowry’s suburban New Jersey home, the complete opposite had been true.

I smiled to myself as I lifted my excessively heavy suitcase onto my bed, ignoring the strain in my arms and lower back. I’d just returned to my apartment in the graduate dorm building after almost four weeks visiting Jessica and her family in Jersey for the holidays, and my suitcase was full of reminders of weeks spend in that loving but loud house with all of her family...and extended family. Christmas was a whole affair for her half Italian, half Irish household.

Every day had been a new adventure. Jessica’s mom woke us up with breakfast every morning, and her dad took us out to explore the neighborhoods at night, hunting for the streets for the best lights. We drove up to New York City to see the tree at Rockefeller Plaza—twice—and explored the city with snowflakes stuck to our eyelashes and bellies full of pizza and wine. And every night, when I fell asleep on the trundle bed in Jessica’s room, which she’d had since the third grade, I felt like a kid again. Everything was magical. Everything was soft and safe. Everything felt like it was just as it should be.

But there was still an ache in my chest like someone had carved a hole through my heart, and I didn’t know how to heal from a wound like that.

Coming back to Gatlington only made that wound fester and throb.

I unzipped my suitcase, trying to distract myself with the myriad of little gifts Jessica’s parents had sent me back to campus with. A handknit sweater from Jessica’s Nonna. Several plastic bags full of taffy and candy canes. Several books, all steamy fiction novels about the mafia from one of Jessica’s aunts, which had elicited a riotous conversation and eventually, a page-by-page reading done by one her uncles, who I was about eighty percent sure might have actually been in the mafia at some point in time, if not currently.

Each gift, however small, had meaning. Each gift had been hand selected for me with love. Last year, my mother had presented me with a pair of diamond earrings, blissfully unaware that her assistant had picked out the exact same pair the prior Christmas.

I pulled out the handknit sweater, hugging it to my chest, and felt lonelier than ever.

The exposed stone walls and ancient, likely lead-laden windows of the apartment building felt like it was closing in on me all of a sudden. My eyes prickled with the tears I’d refused to shed all winter break.

I’d been dreading coming back for the first time since I ever set foot on campus, all because of Rhys.

“You haven’t even been back for a full day, and you’re already a blubbering mess,” I told myself, putting the sweater down on my comforter and dabbing at my eyes. I sniffed, blinking several times to clear my vision, and willed myself to be numb. Just numb. No tears, no sadness, and most definitely no heartache. I didn’t have time for any of that right now, not when in a few short months, I’d graduate with my Master in Fine Arts degree.

Not sociology. Rhys wouldn’t be in my way, and I wouldn’t be in his.

We wouldn’t cross paths.

At least, I hoped.

Jessica and I had talked about the situation in length late at night while she slept barely a foot away. While what I did—pursuing my professor—was wrong, Rhys did toy with me in turn. Asking me to meet him at the airport before he left from England, and then reiterating that we couldn’t, in fact, do this, felt more like he was rubbing the pain in my face than trying to give us closure.

I was mad at him. Rightfully so, in my opinion. He’d texted me once, a day before Christmas Eve, sounding barely coherent, like he’d been drinking heavily before sending it. I hadn’t texted back, even though my heart leapt into my chest the second his name flashed across my screen.

Having an ocean between us had forced me to try to forget about him, to move on, to think of something other than him, like jam-packed spring semester and applying to doctorate programs. But now that I was back on campus, everything I saw was a glaring reminder of him.

A single knock sounded on my door before Jessica waltzed in. “Hey, checked your email yet?”

“No, why?”

Jessica walked around the little studio with her hands tucked in the pockets of her jeans before leaning her weight against the kitchenette counter. “We have an event tonight, and it’s mandatory.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “What do you mean, mandatory? I thought you weren’t into the party scene, and that’s all that’s going on tonight, I assure you.” I was right. It was the Friday before the start of term, and the campus was flooded with returning students from the break of dawn to the early evening when the parties and socials blared music and chaos all over campus.

“Check your email!” Jessica rolled her eyes to the laptop sitting idle on my desk, wintery sunlight dusting over the screen.

I chewed my lip for a moment, wondering if this had something to do with Bill and his book clubs and card nights, which I would straight-up refuse to go to if invited. I had nothing against Bill. I liked the guy, and I liked him for Jessica. He’d visited for Christmas, and it was obvious he was head over heels for her.

But he was friends with Rhys, which meant I had no business hanging around his bookshop.

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