Part of Jake
First published 2013
Nina Kennedy boards a train to Brooklyn for nursing school, white-knuckling every mile. Planes, heights, crowds, trains themselves, the list of things she fears is long and her world has shrunk around it. Then she meets Jake Green, her new roommate, and the careful walls she has built start to crack. He is pierced, tattooed, and casually brilliant, the kind of person who makes Nina feel stupid and electrified at the same time. She does not want to want him. It does not work. When Jake agrees to tutor her, they turn it into a bet, and the terms require Nina to face the fears she has spent years dodging. Jake pushes her, teases her, and somewhere in the middle of all that friction he falls for her harder than he planned. But Jake has been carrying something heavy and private, and when he finally tells her the truth, Nina has to decide whether love built on shaky ground can hold. The story moves between their two voices, his and hers, trading the same events back and forth until the full picture comes clear. What starts as a roommate situation becomes something neither of them is prepared for.
Genres: fiction, romance, contemporary, adult, adult-fiction, contemporary-romance
Vibes: character-driven, emotional, intimate, introspective, tender
Tropes: forced-proximity, friends-to-lovers, slow-burn, tutoring-romance
Setting: Brooklyn, Train
322 pages · Paperback · CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Content warnings: anxiety, mental-illness