The Striker (Gods of the Game, #1)

by Ana Huang

Attraction didn’t count as romance. That was an involuntary, hormonal thing. My body may not agree, but my brain was firmly on board and my heart was safely locked away.

The transition from fully self-sufficient to reliant on others was a difficult one to endure.

“I think you’re capable of more than you give yourself credit for,” I said. “But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself what you’d regret more—trying and failing, or not trying at all?”

After all, there was nothing wrong with staying in. A book and tea were far superior to battling drunken strangers for breathing room in a sweaty nightclub. Right? It’s not about the club. It’s about who’s there.

The way his answering smile made my stomach flip should be illegal.

I swallowed, wishing I had a pair of magic scissors so I could snip my way out of this tangled mess.

people felt the loneliest in a crowd.

But I couldn’t discount the little voice telling me that, no matter how well things were going in the present, they could always go wrong in the future.

We. That one word alleviated my worries more than anything else he could’ve said. We meant we were in this together. I wasn’t alone.

Had I grown so soft that I couldn’t handle a bad day, or was I so hard on myself that I thought a bad day was the end of the world?

That’s my girl. Three words shouldn’t have the power to undo me, but they did.

Sometimes, I remembered the girl I used to be, and I couldn’t believe she existed in the same lifetime as me. She’d been so bright and shiny, filled with hope and stars in her eyes. Rigid when it came to her career but romantic in every other way. Look where that’d gotten her.

Had I really been in love with this man? What had younger me been thinking?

I would rather be selfish with him alive and healthy than selfless with him buried beneath the ground.

Sometimes, merely existing took too much energy, so I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. At that moment, it was all I could do.

I can’t wake up every day wondering if that’s the day your luck runs out, and I’ll get a call saying you’re gone. I can’t lose you.

If I died, I had the relief of oblivion. I wouldn’t experience pain or sadness; I would simply be gone. But if someone I loved died, I’d have to live without them forever.

If he destroyed himself, he destroyed me, and once upon a time, I’d vowed never to put myself in a position where a man would have that type of power over me ever again. Except I had, and he did, and that was on me.

Limbo was better than hell.

“If we think we’re perfect and there’s nothing we can improve on, we’ll never grow. If there’s no growth, we stagnate. And greatness doesn’t come from stagnation; it comes from progress.”

Finding her should’ve been impossible given how many people were jumping and running about, but I spotted her almost immediately. Even if there were seven hundred thousand instead of seventy thousand people here, I would’ve found her just as easily because a part of me would always be connected to a part of her.

Wish men like him existed irl.