So, here it is, the first of (hopefully) many new chapters on this old story! I'd like to take this time to thank those of you that are reading and reviewing after all this time.

Selena's POV

I couldn't help but notice how cold out it was when I left the house this morning; winter was well and truly on the way, I thought to myself as I slipped my car key into place and started the engine. It always did suddenly seem to get chilly when school re-started.

One more year, I told myself as I trudged through the masses of excited yet terrified freshmen in an attempt to find any of my friends. Not that they would be anywhere in sight yet; they would all be in the bathroom, smoking and discussing the many shenanigans we have dabbled in during our summer vacation. Shane Matthews' party was something that I would rather forget had ever happened, so I slowed my pace a little as I approached our favoured bathroom. It was far too early to be reminded of the absolute mess that was me.

The door creaked loudly on the hinges as I pushed it open; this specific bathroom was perhaps fifty years overdue for a refurbishment project, hence why the majority of students opted to use it for their break-time smoking habits – the creaking door was a total giveaway if someone was coming to catch them.

"… was kissing Shane! I mean, I never expected that from you, Sel, I didn't think you had it in you to cheat on Nick." My best friend since pre-school, Ashley, turned her attention to me as I walked in. She was such a badass, she hadn't even bothered to try and hide her cigarette in case the door opening had been the entrance of a teacher. Daddy would pay to get her out of any trouble and keep the good Rodriguez name anyway. Ha.

"Oh good, eight o'clock and we're onto that already. It's been two weeks now, can we give it a rest?"

The three girls laughed and continued the conversation, laughing and joking about the states that some people, specifically me, had been in on the night of that party. It hadn't been pretty.

"Have you spoken to Nick since?" I rolled my eyes and shook my head; I had no conscience where my boyfriend was concerned. Not after I caught him taking steroids when he swore to me that he wouldn't.

"No, he sent me a couple of texts telling me what a lying, cheating whore I am, but I haven't bothered to reply to him. He can go and fuck himself." He was really getting on my nerves lately; it was his suggestion to play Spin the Bottle but he was up my ass about the outcome of his stupid suggestion. It wasn't even a decent kiss.

As if on cue, my phone buzzed as if it was about to explode. Nick had set himself a personalised text tone that came with a personalised, unnecessarily strong, vibration.

Are you at school? Can we talk?

"Speak of the devil. I had better go and deal with his paranoid ass, maybe give it a quick whooping for the way he's spoken to me over the last two weeks." My friends laughed and I knew in that moment that I had made a bad choice in vocabulary. I turned to leave before Ashley could quip me with a response.

"Kinky." I stuck both of my middle fingers up at her as I walked out of the bathroom and toward the boys' locker room. Nick was always in school early for Football practice and the first day back was no exception. I could hear him shouting amongst the rest of the team as I approached the door. The stench of sweat was pouring out through the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door; I heaved a little as I sent a text to my wonderful boyfriend to let him know that I was there.

"Jones, Mason is outside waiting for you." All the boys inside started to cat call after the coach had announced my presence. He must have been watching the cameras; some of the girls in the school had absolutely no decorum about themselves and would run into the locker room when they knew that the football team were changing to get a sneaky preview, hence why the coach had to watch the exterior cameras.

"What do you want?" I asked him bitterly.

"What do I want? You're the one who kissed another guy, Sel, care to explain yourself for that one? Or at least apologise?" I rolled my eyes at his arrogance. He could be such a dick at times.

"Nick, for fuck sake, we were playing Spin the Bottle, if you can't deal with me kissing somebody else at a party during a stupid, drunken game that you suggested, then that's your problem to deal with, not mine. Get a grip."

I turned swiftly on my heal to walk away but he grabbed my wrist. I pulled but he wouldn't let up, instead he pulled me back in to him and shoved me up against the wall we had been standing next to. His breath hit my face and I was engulfed with the smell of sweat from his training session.

"You won't even kiss me properly, let alone anything else, and then you have your tongue down another guy's throat right in front of me. And I need to get a grip?" I pushed him away but he wouldn't budge. Perks of dating an athlete, I guess.

"Get off me, you're hurting me." Just as I started to speak, the locker room door burst open and the coach lunged at Nick, pulling him away from me roughly.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Jones? You do not use your strength to try to intimidate anybody, especially not a woman. Go and run laps around the pitch." Nate growled and began to walk away backward, still facing me in my exasperated state. I tugged at my wrists to relieve some of the pressure that Nick had left there. "Mason, are you ok?" I nodded quietly, a little shaken. Sure, Nick was an asshole, but I'd always thought he was harmless. "I think that it's best that you stay away from my players during practice. Get to class." He told me firmly, just as the bell rang to reiterate his instruction.

My class was already full when I arrived, so I slipped in silently to see the principal standing at the front of the classroom. "Nice of you to join us," He muttered in my direction as I made my way to the only empty seat left at the front of the room. "As I was saying, Ms. Torres will be joining us tomorrow; she's away on a course today so you're stuck with me. If you could all withhold your excitement to meet your new tutor, that would be exponentially agreeable. For now, let's get started with the beginning of your first assignment for the year. I'll allow Ms. Torres to take care of the wishy-washy, touchy-feely, first day back nonsense tomorrow."

I zoned out from there. The previous scenes with Nick were replaying in my head. I was pretty ballsy and could generally take care of myself, but he actually scared me back then. Was that really the kind of guy that I wanted to be with? Maybe he had a point when he mentioned about me not wanting to go any further than kissing him, everybody else in school seemed to be desperate to jump on their boyfriends, yet there I was, pushing him away if he kissed me for longer than ten seconds.

I knew that it wasn't right, I had never felt the way that I should have about him and it wasn't fair for me to string him along like I had been.

God, I needed a drink.

Screw it, if our new tutor hadn't been bothered to make an appearance, I certainly wasn't going to bother sticking around.

It was quiet in the bar I had found myself in. It was run down, dingy, and smelled a little of damp. But it was open. And it was quiet. There was only the bartender and two other women in there with me, but they were seated at the bar.

I found myself staring at the two over the top of my book more than I was actually reading it. They looked cosy; the taller of the two had her hand on the small of the shorter woman's back. They were clearly a couple. Their faces were an inch apart at best as they shared a cocktail pitcher between them. I tilted my head in awe of them; they both looked so happy, in the perhaps ten minutes that I had been staring at them, neither of them had stopped smiling.

I couldn't remember ever being like that with Nick.

"Is this seat taken?" I snapped out of my daze when a brunette woman spoke to me. I hadn't noticed anybody else come in; she must have been in the bathroom or slipped in through the back. The bell that rang on the door to alert the bartender to another customer definitely hadn't rang. Or maybe it had.

"No, you can take it." I told her, expecting her to drag the chair away, but instead she sat down opposite me. There was an entire empty bar but she wanted to sit with me when I was hoping for some time to myself. But I didn't mind, I just went back to my book.

"I'm Demi," she introduced herself after a few moments of silence. I peered over the rim of my novel and saw her smiling. It was dark in the corner of the bar that we were sat in but I could tell that she had a pretty face; good, strong features and perfect teeth that peeked through when she spoke or smiled, both of which she was doing.

"Selena,"

"Can I buy you a drink?" She offered politely. She was probably lonely. I nodded and she disappeared, before returning with two beers and four shots of something that was clear and very much vodka-looking.

"It is not even ten o'clock in the morning yet." I wasn't even sure that it was legal to serve alcohol at that time, but I supposed that nobody bothered to run checks on a bar that had its windows boarded up.

"It's five o'clock somewhere. Did you think that I was offering to buy you a Coke?" I shrugged and took a sip of the beer that she had placed in front of me. It was my usual drink of choice when I was alone. "Besides, I'm celebrating."

"Celebrating what?" I wasn't in the mood for a conversation but clearly she was. She smirked and picked up one of her shots, holding it in the middle of the table and prompting me to do the same.

"To life. And to my divorce finally becoming final today." She clinked her glass against mine and we both drank our shots. They were definitely vodka. It burned my throat; I hadn't touched it since the first high school party I ever went to. I woke up afterward halfway up the stairs of my house in a puddle of my own vomit; I hadn't been able to get near it since then.

"Oh, I'm sorry." I told her after the feeling of fire in my throat had passed.

"Don't be, I should never have married the idiot in the first place. Never mind, lessons learned." She smiled and reached over to my closed book on the table. "I love this book, don't you think Chaucer was an absolute psychopath?" She smirked as she fingered the lettering on the cover.

"You don't look old enough to be divorced." I stated openly. Fuck Chaucer, I wanted to know more about her.

"I'm twenty five, we married last year. We never should have, she was just all I had and the person I clung to. She gave me a sense of home but home was never supposed to feel as miserable as she made me. I was her puppet."

"Did you just say 'she'?" I asked without really thinking.

"Yes, my ex-wife and I are now divorced. How about you, what's your story?" I shook it off quickly and shrugged my shoulders. I didn't really have much of a story.

"I have just had a fight with my boyfriend; I'm going to leave him when I next see him but for now I'm letting him sweat." I told her honestly. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, before picking up her second shot.

We both drank them quickly and chased them with beer. I was approximately halfway through my drink and I hadn't even noticed.

"So you're straight?" She asked bluntly. I shrugged at her again; what a strange question to ask, I thought to myself, drinking yet more beer.

"I guess so, I've never really thought about it too much." Bare-faced lie. I had thought about it, of course I had, what teenager hadn't? But I could never really come to a solid conclusion so I left it as it was; a question that I didn't want nor need to ask myself.

"I think that's a lie." Well, she was straight-talking… no pun intended.

"No, I'm straight." I protested half-heartedly. Maybe it was the drinks, although I hadn't had many, or maybe it was because I had never conclusively figured out where I was in my sexuality. Or maybe it was because this woman was, to no one's denial, absolutely beautiful. I couldn't help but stare at her lips and realised, as I did, that that was actually the first time I had looked away from her eyes. They were glistening.

"So you're sitting here, alone, in the middle of the day… in the only lesbian bar in town…" She began as I all but gasped. I looked around more closely at the décor of the room we were in and realised that it was, in fact, a lesbian bar. "But you're straight?" She finished with a smirk.

I shrugged again and downed the rest of my beer.

"Ten bucks says you come home with me tonight."