I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life (The RaineFall Trilogy #1)

1.

Chapter one

Nalini

“Ms. Rana, my mom said you’re a liar.”

It was first period on the second day of school. I had no idea what this child’s name was, let alone what I possibly could've lied about. All we did yesterday was a get-to-know-you activity and a summary of this semester’s syllabus.

“Can you please explain why?” I asked, taking a long drink of my coffee and trying my best to get caught up on a conversation I hadn’t been a participant in.

I'd struggled to get ready this morning, giving up on my goal of wearing makeup every day.

I'd put my long black hair into a messy ponytail and called it good. My second cup of coffee hadn’t hit yet, and while I was sipping on the third, I was starting to think it was a five-cup kind of day.

Maybe more if students were going to continue to drop me into random conversations three minutes into the school day.

“You said yesterday the most interesting thing about you was that you had a snake,” the girl said as I tried to remember her name.

Cosima? Lexus? I had no clue, as half of my girls were blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and weirdly named.

“But you dated Jack Raine. The rockstar. He wrote a whole song about you! And you chose a boring old snake?”

Oh. That.

I swear, Jack was trying to ruin my life when he named his song after me.

It wasn’t enough that our breakup became song inspiration.

No, he had to get back at me in the most public way possible.

And of course, it had to become their breakout single, popular enough that even fifteen years later, I was still jump scared by it on the radio.

“You clearly haven’t met Sylvie,” I playfully responded, hoping it shut down the questions before they came. Unfortunately, it never stopped them.

What’s Jack Raine like? The worst, and I regretted dating him.

Do you know Kam and Noah? Yes, we were neighbors growing up.

Do you get money from the song? No, and maybe if I did, I'd be more forgiving.

I should've been thankful the students figured it out this early in the school year; chances were it’d be boring by the end of next week, and I wouldn’t have to hear about it until next August. They’d have something new to gossip about other than Ms. Rana’s missed opportunity to be famous.

They didn’t know the flashbacks would be haunting me for the next few weeks, as I did my best to forget it ever happened.

I still remember all the paparazzi outside our houses after the song “Nalini” had exploded.

It'd been one thing for the world to track down the Raine boys, but to find out the girl who inspired the hit song was literally the girl next door? They were constantly bombarding me, trying every single tactic they could to try to turn me into a story. I wasn’t a teenager anymore; I was a source of gossip, entertainment, and hatred all at once.

And what hurt the most was Kameron had done nothing to stop it.

Everyone knew I dated Jack Raine, lead singer of the boy band RaineFall. Everyone knew I broke his heart into a million pieces, and it took “years” for Jack to put himself back together. What most didn’t? His twin brother, Kameron, had been my best friend since I was three years old.

A month after the song came out, the Raines moved to protect the boys’ privacy.

Which was fine, I understood, and frankly, I never wanted to see them again.

However, the paparazzi didn’t even think to give me the same courtesy, staying outside my house the rest of my junior year in hopes Jack might come back.

Laughable, because despite the story Jack told everyone, we only had a three-month relationship that never should've happened in the first place.

I’d been in therapy off and on for years, the deciding factor being whether or not the cheap insurance the school district got us allowed for therapy visits.

Each one had tried to help me let go, but it was hard when it'd completely derailed my life. Any time I thought I was over it, something new would happen — even though it seemed like the rest of the world had moved on from the RaineFall fandom’s favorite pastime of blaming me for the problems of a band that no longer existed.

RaineFall broke up? My fault.

Jack got divorced? My fault.

I hadn’t talked to them since I was seventeen, and at thirty-two, I still didn’t get much of a chance to live my own life.

I wasn’t allowed to be successful; following my dreams would be “disrespectful to Jack.” How was I supposed to move on and let it go when the never-ending parasocial relationships these fans had created decided I would be better off dead?

I sighed and chugged the rest of my coffee. I had a lesson to teach, and I couldn’t be distracted. I just had to focus.

The only good thing that came from the school district deciding to start the school year on a Thursday was that the first Saturday yoga of the school year was two days after I started with students.

It was common knowledge the Saturday morning class was primarily teachers, giving us a chance to let go of the stress from the week, while using the 50% off educator discount my best friend, Misty, had convinced her bosses to enact.

I needed to let go of stress, I needed to let go of anger, and most of all, I needed to let go of the four-hundred-and-eighty-three questions I'd been asked about the Raine brothers yesterday.

“You’re never going to guess who is in my class this year,” I barely overheard a group of elementary teachers whisper behind me, “Cassidy Raine. Like Kam Raine’s daughter, Cassidy Raine!”

It didn’t matter that I had good balance; it didn’t matter that I'd been doing yoga since I was twelve. The shock from hearing his name was enough for me to crumple into a pile on the floor.

“Oh. Nalini. I forgot you were in this class,” Maya Phillips smirked, giving me a look I couldn’t interpret.

Every school had its set of mean girls, and Maya was the type of person who I couldn’t tell if she was one or not.

She always sounded genuine, but her actions always made me question her, which was enough for me not to trust her in the slightest. She taught fifth grade, and it was around the right age for Kameron’s daughter

“It’s fine,” I said, shaking my head goodheartedly, even though I was internally panicking, “I just haven’t heard his name in a while.

” It was a lie, but telling the truth to Maya was out of the question.

Yoga was my safe space, and after a day straight of RaineFall questions, I didn’t want to take the bait.

If it even was bait. I watched Misty, who, despite guiding people through the practice, gave me a “we’ll talk about this later” look.

While I'd been able to stretch out my stress until that point, the ability seemed to disappear as the rest of class dragged on in a frustrating blur. Kameron Raine coming back to Briar Hill was not a thought as easily banished as my yearly student-led RaineFall interrogation. By the time yoga was over, I wanted to bury my head in yoga blocks and scream for an hour, which I was aware wasn’t going to help, but I figured it would make me feel better.

I ended class sprawled out on my yoga mat, looking like a girl who had dramatically died in a Victorian novel.

Maybe I could say I died of thinking too much; it was a common enough way to go in those books.

And while I'd always thought it was ridiculous, I was starting to see how it was possible. I glanced at myself in the mirrors of the studio, and I looked exhausted. My golden brown skin was covered in sweat, my thick dark hair looked like it was fighting for its life to get out of the ponytail I’d forced it into, and my deep brown eyes looked like they belonged to someone years older than I was.

Clearly, I was on my way to a Victorian death, and I’d probably be better for it.

Anything was better than dealing with Kameron again.

“I’m turning on the heater, because hot yoga is next, but you have fifteen minutes before anyone starts wandering in here,” Misty said, sitting down next to me. “So… tell me what the protocol is if I see him. Do I glare? Do I chew him out? Do I make him regret ever coming back to town?”

“If his daughter is with him, ignore him,” I groaned.

Cassidy, if that was actually her name, was innocent.

There was already a lot of simmering resentment in the town toward the band, and I was sure people would be more than happy to take it out on Kameron.

But if the kid was there? She'd done nothing wrong, which was more than could be said about her father or uncles. “But if he’s by himself? Glare. The super scary one that makes everyone think they were teleported into a horror movie.”

“Deal, I’ll make sure to practice in the mirror,” Misty snickered, taking my hand and squeezing it. “Are you okay? When Maya mentioned it, you looked like you saw a ghost.”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “I never thought any of them would come back. It’s the only reason I still live here; it was supposed to be Raine-repellant.

” I'd grown up dreaming about leaving Briar Hill.

Mom had moved us here after my deadbeat and married to someone else, sperm donor, broke up with her.

The hospital, a town over, was the only one who'd hire her after he had her blacklisted from surgery everywhere else. Her Grey’s Anatomy relationship turned into a nightmare.

She'd told me so many times growing up she didn’t want me in the first place.

It was her parents and sisters who'd convinced her she had to raise the consequences of being the other woman. Not to mention my Aunties had been so excited for there to be a baby, they actively peer-pressured her into keeping me. They didn’t do anything to help my Mom raise me, other than show up out of the blue, take pictures declaring themselves Aunties of the Year, and leave before I really got to know any of them.

Between my Mom’s animosity, my extended family’s flakiness, and the general nothing to do in town, Briar Hill hadn’t been my favorite place to grow up.

But after RaineFall went viral? It became the safest place I knew.

I went to college online just to make sure I didn’t end up with an obsessed roommate who would hate me because of the situation.

I became a teacher because I knew Briar Hill always had teaching positions open, and it gave me some stability.

I'd torched friendships with people who'd liked their music, locked down my social media and blocked any mention of them, and even convinced the coffee shop in town to remove their music from their rotation so I could relax there in peace.

And the town itself? Between the paparazzi and gaggles of fangirls who descended on Briar Hill, it was almost ruined.

Developers tried to come in and gentrify everything in an attempt to turn the town into a Raine Family tourist trap.

Fangirls wanted to see if the brothers would show up, only to be disappointed they'd moved away and never came back. The truth was, with a town as small as Briar Hill, there wasn’t room for thousands of people to visit — even during the heavy tourist season of the spring and summer.

Every single small business lost money because the hikers and nature enthusiasts were suddenly blocked out by people who only cared about RaineFall.

We’d survived, though for some it was by the skin of their teeth, but nobody ever really forgot what that year was like for Briar Hill.

For them or for me. New people came in all the time, either from working for the National Forest or because they were hired at the hospital, but the main businesses were family-owned and operated, and none of them ever forgot the strain the boys’ fame put on the town.

Nobody would be rude enough to try to get Kameron to move away, but the reception was definitely going to be colder than he probably expected.

“If you see him, just ignore him,” Misty said, “What’s the chance of him recognizing you after this long? He would've expected you to have moved away after graduation.”

“You sound like you were here for all the trouble they caused ," I laughed.

“What can I say? I was lucky enough to move here once the craziness died down,” she smiled, “It’s obvious anyone our age moved here as an adult, almost everyone raised here left.

Why would he expect to see you?” I shrugged, even though I knew she had a point.

The hospital and the forest were the only things keeping the town from dying out completely, but it made for a strange demographic of people.

“Do you think his coming back is temporary?” I asked, sweat rolling down my face as the heat for the next class started getting to me.

“No clue,” she admitted, “I can ask him when I inevitably run into him. I’ve always wanted to be a spy, and you know I’ve got your best intentions in mind.”

“Fine, but after that, go back to glaring,” I insisted, “he deserves it. And if he’s not here temporarily, maybe he’ll rethink his decision after you give him enough jump scares.”