Unbound

Paloma Blake is, at best, antagonistic. Beneath the hairspray, the attitude and the promiscuity is a scared girl whose trauma runs deep, and the walls she has built are strong enough that everyone only ever sees the façade. Everyone except Bennett.

Bennett Reiner — the carefully controlled, neurodivergent goalie — has his routines and he sticks to them, because they are what keep a hold on his OCD compulsions and the crippling anxiety that comes with them. Quiet and meticulous, he sees everything, and he has always seen the girl underneath Paloma's masks.

Unbeknownst to their friends, Bennett and Paloma were each other's first real love, and it ended in crippling heartbreak. Bennett still doesn't know what happened. Paloma is determined to stay away from the comfort she once found only in his arms. For years he has remained her protective shadow, coming when she asks, keeping her as close and as safe as she will let him — and then, like a tumultuous sea to a constant shore, they find each other again.

Alternating between past and present, Unbound sets the tentative tension of first love against the loneliness of having it taken away without ever being told why. As Bennett learns the truth about Paloma's past, the threads of his careful control begin to come unbound, and both start to wonder whether letting go of everything else is worth it if it means getting back what they had.

The third book in Peyton Corinne's The Undone series. Explicit, and heavier than its premise suggests — Paloma's backstory is handled at length.