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Chapters (48)
  1. Cover
  2. PRAISE FOR ALEXA MARTIN’S PLAYBOOK SERIES
  3. Titles by Alexa Martin
  4. Dedication
  5. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  6. Prologue
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. Eleven
  18. Twelve
  19. Thirteen
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-one
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Epilogue
  46. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  47. About the Author
  48. What’s next onyour reading list?

“Fucking hell. Q told me you were a little wet behind the ears but this is fucking unbelievable.” He takes a hand off the steering wheel and undoes the top button of his shirt. “It’s some old-school, racist bullshit that Black athletes can’t be quarterbacks because they aren’t smart enough. That all they’re good for is hitting people and running fast.”

I purse my lips, trying to come up with another explanation, but I can’t think of anything. “Not everything is racist.”

“Yeah, not everything is racist, but this is.” A vein on Donny’s head I didn’t notice before is all of a sudden very pronounced. “I don’t get it, aren’t you Black?”

“I’m biracial.” I don’t mean to snap, but I hate this conversation.

I’m fully aware that I didn’t inherit my dad’s blue eyes or freckled skin and that I look like my mom instead. Something my dad thanked god for all the time, never missing an opportunity to tell me how beautiful he thought I was. With my full lips, espresso eyes, and wide nostrils, I know I don’t look like what most people see as “mixed.” So when people make the assumption that I’m Black, they aren’t wrong, but they aren’t right either.

I know they don’t mean any harm, but what those people don’t see is a lifetime of feeling like I was just on the outside of everything. Always wanting to feel accepted, but never feeling like the world ever truly would. Always being made to feel like I had to pick one side over the other, but at the same time, being forced to pick the side that I resembled . . . not the side who actually raised me, the side that for some reason nobody can understand me connecting to.

“You know what?” Donny reaches over and turns back on the sports radio he was listening to. “As a person with some real fucked-up issues, I can recognize them pretty easily in other people. And if I know one thing, your problems aren’t with me . . . or even Q.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do,” he says. “I just hope that you can put aside whatever issues are fuckin’ with your head and start seeing Q for the man he is, not the man you think you’re supposed to see.”

I don’t respond to that. I can’t.

And thankfully for the throbbing starting to creep into my brain, Donny drops it.

All I know is this box better be the fanciest fucking box on the planet to make today worth it.

Twelve

The box is everything I expected and so much more.