Degrees Of Honesty
She submitted the wrong manuscript.
Not the polished one, not the safe one, she spent two weeks curating for the most prestigious undergraduate literary prize in the country. The other one. You know, the private notebook full of poems about a woman she has never named, about desire she has never spoken aloud, about the version of herself she has spent twenty-one years learning to hide.
By the time Seren Vale realizes what she has done, the submission window is closed. And by the time she gets the midnight email from Dr. Elise Chen's office, the most brilliant and terrifying professor in the department has already read every word.
Now Seren is sitting in Dr. Chen's seminar trying to win a prize that could change her life, trying not to think about the way Dr. Chen looks at her when she thinks Seren isn't paying attention, and trying to figure out why the student body president keeps showing up at her café with a copy of her favorite poet and a smile that feels like a door she forgot she left open.
Julian Cross is everything Seren is not: visible, unguarded, golden. He is also hiding the one thing that could destroy the prize Seren needs and the future she is building.
The problem is not choosing between them but that Seren has never let herself want anything fully, and now two people are standing on either side of the wall she built around herself, and neither one is willing to let her pretend it isn't there.