Episode 1 · Mature · 18+ private alpha
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Chapter One
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About this story
She’s spent her whole life choosing animals. He’s spent his whole life choosing football. Neither of them ever planned on having to choose between each other.
Maddie Lauder has the acceptance letter she’s wanted since she was eleven years old: veterinary school at UC Davis, her first choice. Jax Reyes, her boyfriend since freshman year, is a do-everything running back with a draft-day projection and a family that’s sacrificed everything to get him there.
They’ve always been sure about each other. What they’re not sure about is the map.
When draft night sends Jax three thousand miles away to the snow and silence of Burlington, Vermont, two people who never once doubted their love have to ask a harder question. Is loving someone enough of a reason to ask them to give up the life they’ve worked for?
They make the reasonable choice. The mature one. The one everybody agrees is right.
But Sunday phone calls have a way of turning into Thursday ones. Old habits don’t care about time zones. And the hardest part of letting someone go might be discovering you never really did.
Running Back to You is a warm, heartfelt contemporary romance about first love, hard choices, and the people who keep showing up for each other, even from opposite ends of the country.
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Maddie had read the email so many times it was hard to focus on it anymore.
We are delighted to inform you of your acceptance into the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program at UC Davis. She'd printed it out to show her family, and the printout had been sitting on her desk for almost a week now.
She still hadn't told anyone outside her immediate family. Which had been causing her anxiety in and of itself, considering she usually told Jax everything.
Jax let himself into her apartment without knocking, the way he'd been doing for three years, ever since she'd given him a key. He dropped his gym bag by the door and found her at her desk, laptop open but ignored, the printout sitting square in the middle like she'd been staring at it instead of working.
"What's this?" He picked it up before she could stop him, and she watched his whole body go still. "Maddie."
"I was going to tell you."
"When? At my funeral?" But he was grinning now. He pulled her out of the chair and picked her up in a hug that lifted her feet clear off the floor, which he knew she hated and did, anyway.
"Put me down, you absolute child," she said through her laughter.
"You got into Davis." He set her down but kept his hands on her shoulders. "First choice program. Mads, that's everything you wanted."
"It's a good day," she admitted.
They had known each other since she was eighteen, a freshman who thought she was going to be a marine biologist, before an internship at a shelter her sophomore year reminded her of what she'd wanted since she was eleven years old and rearranged her whole sense of what she wanted to do with her life.
"It's a great day. Possibly top-three."
"What's number one?"
"The day you agreed to go out with me. Obviously."
"I regretted it immediately."
"You did not." He was still smiling, but something shifted underneath it, and she watched him try to keep it light. "Davis, though. That's still the West Coast. Hour and a half on a plane?"
"Little less, if the flights cooperate." She said it carefully, watching him. Davis was a short flight from almost anywhere on the West Coast, which was the whole point, which was why she'd ranked it first even above two programs that were technically more prestigious.
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