My One Night: An On My Own Novel by Carrie Ryan (life books to read .txt) 📕

“You are such a goner,” Nessa said.

“A complete goner,” Natalie agreed.

I looked up at my best friend, and Corinne just smiled. “Oh, I’m going to start taking bets on a two-night stand.”

I narrowed my eyes and tossed a throw pillow at her.

“Don’t spill your coffee. I’ll be really annoyed if I have to get coffee stains out of the fabric.”

I kept glaring at Corinne. “No bets.”

“Oh, there will be bets,” she said, laughing. “Now, do we go two nights? Three? Or do we just go straight to wedding bells?”

The girls all started laughing, talking over one another, and I slumped into my chair, sipping my coffee and ignoring them.

My phone was warm against my thigh, and I suddenly wanted to reach out and text him. To say something.

I didn’t. It was important that I didn’t.

But I had no idea what I was supposed to do next.

Chapter 5

Dillon

“And now we’re going to focus on what Dickens was truly trying to convey in Great Expectations.”

I barely resisted the urge to growl. I had thought we’d spent the past forty-five minutes of class trying to convey what the content meant. But I guess I had been wrong. Apparently, we were going to dive deeper, at least in the last five minutes of class. And then I had a feeling our assignment for the evening would be to find the rest.

I was exhausted, couldn’t focus, and already hated this class.

The annoying part was that I wanted to like this one. It was my last English-focused track. Sadly, the creative writing class I had wanted to take had been full by the time I was able to sign up. I would be able to register my schedule on time like everybody else next semester, rather than a little behind like I had this time thanks to late enrollment. Either way, it wouldn’t help me this semester. I’d be taking a couple of additional science classes and labs for the rest of my college career, and then I’d move to the business and accounting track.

I was going for a business management degree specialization with an operations management minor. I had thought about going with project management, but I wanted to stick with what Brendan had done so we could work together when adding onto the Connolly businesses. I’d had my name changed legally over a year ago now, and it was nice to think that I was a Connolly in truth, rather than the last name my mother had given me. It had taken longer than Cameron or I had wanted to get it done, but I’d had to become an adult rather than his ward to make it happen, thanks to legal issues that made my brain hurt.

I’d always thought life was a little unfair with the way I hadn’t gotten to meet my brothers’ foster parents. Jack and Rose Connolly had built their bar and brewery and had made it brilliant. When Rose died, Jack had ended up alone in the bar, getting older and unable to handle it all. My brothers had had a huge fight over me, though they hadn’t known it at the time, and had ended up leaving Jack alone to run things. When Jack died, my three brothers came back, each bitter and angry. Still, they had somehow found a way to communicate with each other and make the brewery even better in Jack’s and Rose’s names.

And, along the way, they had added me to the group, a true brother rather than a tagalong. It’d taken me a long time to realize how I fit in, and now that I had, I was trying to find my way on my own, as well. This was a road I had never known before—one I had never thought to be on. But I needed to find how to be the man I needed to become without my brothers helping me every step of the way. It was as if they wanted to put an entire childhood of being a big brother into one area, and it could sometimes be overwhelming. I wanted to prove that I could do this and make them proud of me. And to make that happen, I’d had to move out. I’d had to work on not having them pay for everything. Hence the scholarship, the new university, and trying to find a major that I liked.

At one point, I’d thought I wanted to be a chef like my brother Aiden. And while I loved cooking, and I loved to cook with him, I wasn’t as inventive when it came to recipes. The kitchen’s high anxiety and heat was exhilarating for a little while, but I didn’t see myself doing it long-term. I had initially gone for a business degree at a different university and had taken cooking classes while learning with Aiden so I could one day be with him in the kitchen. However, it hadn’t worked out, and I was still afraid that Aiden wasn’t completely satisfied with how I had left things. I hoped he would be eventually. I just wasn’t sure exactly how he would ultimately feel.

Our professor kept droning on, mostly about the wonders of all the authors on the reading list.

As every single one was a so-called classic author, meaning there wasn’t a single diverse author on the page—let alone a female—I wasn’t putting too much stock in this. The other class I had wanted to take had a very complex reading list with books from this century, with a focus on things other than what my grandfather might have learned in school.

But here I was, and I would get a damn A, even if it killed me.

The professor ended class, assigning a paper we had to write over the weekend. I held back a groan but knew I had no choice. The assignment was on the syllabus, though the timing of the papers wasn’t. There was just a list of ones we would have