With Any Luck (The Improbable Meet-Cute, #5)

by Ashley Poston

We are fated, like my grandmother, my mother, my sisters, and me, to be the person before. The rebound, the partner at the beginning of rom-coms who is rarely named because they are always what the main character doesn’t need. They are the utterly forgettable Before. “I know it sounds crazy,” I told my soon-to-be best friend the first day we met at college, “but I’m the kiss before you find your true love.”

I already like Ashley Poston’s writing. It’s just ridiculous enough to veer in Emily Henry rom com territory, but not so much that it seems like a child wrote it

I sucked in a breath between my teeth. “Oof, sorry, can’t do, champ. You just friended the wrong girl. This brain? Full of Twilight quotes and omegaverse lore, not math.”