Before You Hate Me

Some enemies are made in the backyard of childhood - between a blue slide, a rope swing, and a boy who tells you that you smell weird. For Héctor Pierre, that was the beginning of everything: the afternoon he met Dark Darlan, the son of his mother's oldest friend, and decided, with absolute certainty, that he never wanted to play with him again.

Fifteen years later, nothing has changed. Except the battlefield.

When Héctor steps through the doors of his first day at university - soaked from the rain, coffee-stained, and braced for whatever hell the semester might bring - he finds Darlan already there, backpack claiming the only empty chair beside him, dimples intact, slow poison smile unchanged. Same program. Same floor. Same six years stretching ahead like a prison sentence.

They are an Alpha and an Omega who learned to despise each other long before their bodies learned what that division actually meant. Now every glance is a provocation, every exchange a small war, and every stolen seat in a crowded lecture hall a declaration of territory. But hatred this specific, this consistent, this *personal* - has a way of disguising itself. Héctor knows exactly what Darlan's presence does to his body. He just refuses to name it.

Before You Hate Me is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves to survive the people who see us most clearly - and the unbearable intimacy of loathing someone you've never managed to forget.