My Fake Boyfriend Is the School Bad Boy novel Chapter 37

Chapter 37 A Favorite Book Found Unexpectedly

I immediately averted my eyes, staring hard at the black screen of my dead laptop.

“Come on, he ordered, walking past the table. “I don’t know where it is in the mess. You can help me look.”

🙂

I hesitated. Going upstairs meant leaving the massive, open spaces of the first floor. But without the laptop, our progress was dead in the water. I grabbed my phone off the table and followed him.

The sweeping staircase was made of thick glass panels and dark steel. My loafers made virtually no sound as we climbed, while Ryder’s heavy boots landed with a solid, echoing thud on every step.

The second floor was a long corridor lined with closed, pristine white doors. It looked like a luxury hotel hallway. Completely impersonal.

Ryder walked to the very last door at the end of the hall and pushed it open.

I stepped into the doorway and stopped.

The absolute, clinical sterility of the house ended at this threshold. Ryder’s bedroom was a completely different universe.

It wasn’t a pristine museum exhibit. It was deeply, undeniably lived in. The walls were painted a dark, stormy charcoal. The king-sized bed in the center of the room was unmade, a tangle of heavy gray sheets and a thick black comforter trailing onto the dark hardwood floor.

In the far corner, a heavy leather punching bag hung from a steel bracket bolted to the ceiling. A pair of worn red boxing gloves sat on the floor beside it. The desk near the large window was covered in scattered papers, loose guitar picks, and empty water bottles.

But the most overwhelming difference was the smell.

The lemon cleaner and ozone of the downstairs was gone. This room smelled intensely, entirely of him. It was a thick, intoxicating mix of cedarwood, clean sweat, old paper, and that sharp trace of peppermint. The air was warmer up here, wrapping around me like a heavy

blanket.

Ryder walked straight to the cluttered desk, opening the top drawer and digging through a tangle of cords and headphones.

I stayed near the door, keeping my hands clasped tightly in front of me. I felt like an intruder. This space was private. It was the only place in the entire fortress where he allowed himself to actually exist, and the raw intimacy of standing inside it made my heart hammer a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

I let my eyes wander, absorbing the details. He didn’t have any posters on the walls. He didn’t have trophies or photographs.

My gaze drifted toward the dark wood nightstand sitting next to the rumpled bed.

A small, brass reading lamp cast a warm circle of light over the surface. Sitting directly beneath the lamp was a stack of books. They

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12:49 Fri, Jul 10

Chapter 37 A Favorite Book Found Unexpectedly

weren’t glossy school textbooks or required reading for English lit.

I took a slow, quiet step closer.

:))

The book sitting on the very top of the pile had a faded, torn blue cover. The silver foil lettering on the spine was peeling and flaking away from age. The corners of the pages were severely dog-eared, the spine cracked down the middle from being opened entirely too

wide.

My breath caught in my throat.

The Glass Desert.

It was a completely obscure, out-of-print dystopian novel written by an unknown Russian author in the late nineties. It wasn’t famous. It

wasn’t a classic. The Crestview library didn’t even carry a copy.

I knew that because I had spent three weeks tracking down a used paperback version online during my sophomore year. I had become completely obsessed with it, reading it during every free period, hiding it inside my biology textbook during lectures. I had carried it everywhere for an entire month, completely consumed by the strange, lonely world inside the pages.

I took another step toward the nightstand.

I reached out, my fingers trembling slightly, and traced the peeling silver letters of the title. It was the exact same edition I owned.

Why did Ryder Steinmann have a battered copy of a deeply unpopular sci-fi novel sitting on his nightstand? The guy who supposedly threw his homework in the trash and only cared about motorcycles and fighting.

“It’s a good translation.”

The low, rough voice came from right behind me.

I gasped, snatching my hand away from the book and spinning around.

Ryder was standing less than two feet away. He held a white charging cable loosely in his left hand. His hazel eyes were dark, tracking the sudden, panicked spike in my breathing. He hadn’t made a single sound walking across the hardwood floor.

“You read this?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. I pointed a shaking finger at the faded blue cover.

I read a lot of things, Petrova, he replied smoothly, though the muscle in his jaw ticked.

But this. I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. “This book is impossible to find. No one knows about it. I did a free-read report on it last year in Mr. Harrison’s class, and the entire room fell asleep.”

Ryder didn’t say anything. He just watched me, the expression on his bruised face completely unreadable.

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Chapter 37 A Favorite Book Found Unexpectedly

The memory hit me with the force of a physical blow.

:))

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