The Deal

 “I want to murder him in his sleep, A. No, I want to murder him when he's awake so he can see the joy on my face when I do it.”
Synopsis: Hannah has a major crush on a university football star. Garrett, hockey team captain, needs to get his grades up in order to keep his place on the team. They make a deal - Hannah will tutor Garrett and in exchange he will pretend to date her to make her crush jealous.
“Sometimes people sneak up on you and suddenly you don't know how you ever lived without them.”
Thoughts:

• I felt uncomfortable with Garrett in the beginning with his persistence re: Hannah tutoring him and pestering her, as well as deleting music from her iPod because he didn't like it. He did redeem himself and make me fall in love with him later, but then he lost some points again when he warns every guy on campus off of her when Hannah wanted to try dating others. Definitely a controlling streak there I didn't like. Happily, Hannah laid into him over that.
• Hannah & Garrett had good chemistry and banter.
• The sex scenes occasionally had language that made me cringe, but overall were good. They focus on mutual pleasure and are explicitly consensual, and Garrett genuinely enjoys pleasuring women, all things that are a solid plus for me.
• I enjoyed the writing overall, found it very engrossing with a good, large, world - it felt believable as a real place filled with real people.
• Good balance of smut, plot and character development
• TW for discussions of past SA.

“How did I go so long without noticing you, damn it? Why did it take seeing a stupid A on your midterm to make me notice?”