He Kissed Me First

Stefan Rodriguez is seventeen, gay, bookish, and quietly invisible — and that's exactly how he likes it. When his mother accepts a job transfer, he's uprooted from everything familiar, including the only boy he ever loved, and dropped into a city that owes him nothing.

The new school is predictable in all the wrong ways: the same hierarchies, the same indifference, the same particular loneliness of being somewhere no one knows your name. Then Bia sits across from him at lunch — loud, warm, wonderfully unhinged — and decides, without consulting him, that they are going to be best friends.

The problem with Bia is her brother.

Nicolas Bennett. Dark-eyed, sharp-jawed, and effortlessly unbearable. The kind of person Stefan can identify as trouble from across a hallway. The kind of person he keeps ending up in the same room with anyway.

What begins as friction slowly becomes something harder to name. A look that lingers. A conversation that neither of them meant to have. A tension that hums beneath every moment they spend pretending to tolerate each other.

Stefan has spent his whole life being careful — careful with his heart, careful with his hope. Nicolas is everything that carefulness was meant to protect him from.

He Kissed Me First is a story about the cities we're forced to call home, the friendships that find us when we've stopped looking, and the kiss no one saw coming — except, perhaps, everyone did.