And all the other guys who have kissed me with a purpose, touched me with a destination, and taken me to bed with a plan have never done so with as much passion as Aiden Griffith is right now. Aiden melted my heart, throughout the whole book, even as a child he's always just wanted to be there for Ivy and to be what she needs. Ivy and Aiden truly got their chance at a life together and I’m always a sucker for good epilogue which this book delivered on. and honestly i was just bored 😐 having said that i think the topic being discussed here is very important and I did feel for ivy but unfortunately i just didn’t like her enough.

childhood friends (to enemies ish) to lovers is one of my all time favorite tropes and this was done absolutely perfectly. I may not agree with some of their justifications, especially with the heroine, but I grasped the true reasons behind their actions. ivy, by this point has been through a shit ton and aiden is the star sport player who doesnt wanna let their friendship go. but also with the separation, the heroine and hero would have to learn to be friends again, so I was really interested in this. I suffered through this whole book even though it was boring as hell, thinking there an interesting plot twist somewhere in the middle or end but no.I’m not even sure where to start as this story was complex and emotional in so many ways that I needed to take some time to reflect on what I had read.

I liked reading some cute thoughts from Aiden’s pov, but we didn’t get any cutesy moments of them together. There's something sadder about the way Ivy ridicule herself being a whore, brushing everything she went through like nothing, and still, be as strong, selfless, and a dreamer as she was.

It attempts to deal with some pretty hard hitting topics but it's totally unrealistic the way they play out in the book as if she is just fine after everything that happens, more needed to be done to explain how she went from hitting rock bottom to making it to college and then to suddenly being fine with sleeping around for survival and trying to harm herself.

Admittedly this won't be for everyone, our heroine does suffer from self harm and it didn't fully go into the details as some might want it to, it was glossed over not making that the full focus of this book and I was ok with that. Ivy’s built such a high wall around herself that it requires Aiden to literally bulldoze himself back into her life. Now Ivy was also an interesting character but I think that I got a bit bored after a while and that there wasn’t enough tension? i really struggled with this book, i couldn’t connect with ivy or aiden which made it harder to feel the love chemistry between them. years and a lot of bad decisions and mistakes later, including an attempted suicide, Ivy meets Ayden again at Linden University.i started getting annoyed at how repetitive it got between ivy and aiden with her pushing him away and him pushing her into confiding in him. They both had their own struggles in life, but those struggles ultimately bring them together again and it was done so beautifully.