The Deal by Elle Kennedy

 

I know without a doubt a single doubt that Elle Kennedy’s The Deal is gonna be a lifelong favorite of mine. I can say it with full confidence.

The POV? Brutally honest. The plot? Simple yet engaging. The characters? Extremely deep and detailed. The romance? 10/10 babes. The friendship? The sisterhood? The brotherhood, bromance? Perfect! (The smut was pretty good too in case you were wondering)

The tropes in this book would be Enemies to Lovers, Fake dating, Opposites attract, and Sports romance. Both the main characters have traumas that they have gotten over but I believe traumas like bad memories are quick to rise to the surface of the mind at the slightest provocation. The female main character is a victim of SA and the male main character has a nutcase, I mean, a father with mental issues. But the good thing is that their trauma isn’t exactly what the story revolves around, at least not for Hannah.

The first in the Off-Campus Series, The Deal, is the story of music major Hannah Wells and star hockey player Garrett Graham. They are not from the same social circles and while Hannah knows him, as does every other student at Briar University, Garrett is not even aware of her existence. We could perhaps, chalk this up to the reason why Garrett wasn’t even aware of her name the first time he noticed her. Literally he thought her name started with an M.

The story begins with a mention of Hannah’s crush, Justin Kohl and a member of the football team who Hannah is very sure doesn’t even know she exists. She is thinking this while sitting in her Ethics class listening to her teacher drone on about how more than half the class has failed their paper. Hannah who was also pretty sure she was going to bomb the test, has to her surprise passed it with an A+ somehow. As the class ends Justin smiles at her and she is beyond happy, but being a shy girl, she simply nods back. It is mentioned right in the first chapter how she was an SA victim. Also added is the fact that she has had a thing only for two guys after the ordeal – her ex-boyfriend and Justin. Her first POV ends with her therapist’s advice to her – Baby steps.

Now over to Garrett. He is among the kids who bombed the test and isn’t feeling happy about it all. As he is seated in his seat and sulking he notices Hannah. To be honest, Hannah isn’t exactly what he notices at first, but y’all gotta read the book to know about that, heh. Anyway, the next thing he notices is that she is extremely short, especially when compared with his tall self. Just as Hannah is getting out the door, she stumbles and her books and papers fall out of her hands. Garret bends down to help her and that is when he glimpses her answer booklet and the A+ on it. He is immediately hooked and wants her to teach him. He flirts with her and even puts on his “aw-shucks-little-boy grin” as Hannah refers to it. Unfortunately, neither works on Hannah Wells. Hannah knows as does their entire college that Garret Graham is a playboy. And Hannah is the kind of girl that Garrett and his friends stay away from because hockey is their main focus and girlfriends are too distracting. In fact, there's a term that one of Garrett’s friends calls his own future girlfriend in the third book in the series that I feel, would apply to Hannah too. “Nester” is the term they use. On top of that, while crushing on another boy, I don’t think Garrett’s charms would have worked on her very well in the first place. To sum it up, Hannah refuses to teach Garrett, vehemently. And she uses the excuse of her Winter music showcase as the reason for not being able to do so. 

And because Garrett Graham never gives up, the chase begins. He is hell-bent on making Hannah tutor him and Hannah is just as resistant to the idea. He goes to the diner where Hannah works part-time and requests her to teach him. He gets her number from the Ethics class study group and bombs her DMs with texts begging her to help him with the paper. In short, he annoys her. A lot. He even manages to disgust her by offering himself (basically, s3x). Nothing works…..until! Until he discovers her crush on Justin, that is. Garrett then proposes the idea of fake dating. His logic being that, if Hannah were to show up “latched to his arm” Kohl would definitely notice her. Although Hannah is very skeptical about the whole thing, she gives in and goes along with Garrett’s schemes. In exchange for helping her woo her crush, Hannah agrees to tutor him on his Ethics paper retake. And thus begins their deal, their tutor-student relationship.

Along the way, we as readers get to see how widely different these two are. Garret is a PDA guy who is proud of it. Hannah is anti-PDA to the core. Garrett is an open playboy who’s all about “puck bunnies” and Hannah is looking for true love. Hannah hates athletes (funny considering she had a crush on a football player) and Garrett is the star athlete in his college. Hannah is shy and Garrett is bold. 

In fact, if I were to assign a filter to them, I’d say Hannah would be some kind of light academia filter, and Garrett, an indie filter.

Hey! On the bright side, Hannah got christened Wellsy by Garrett. His friends stick with it and I don’t think I remember a single scene where they refer to her as Hannah. It’s always Wellsy!

Their relationship reaches a platonic level at some point, a totally new thing for Garrett since he’s never had a girl best friend. They’re comfortable enough to watch web series together and have takeout. Basically, stuff that besties do together. What started as a deal soon becomes a relationship both are comfortable with. It gets to a point where Hannah is okay with him, enough to attempt to make a move on him to try to "cure" herself. Garrett who was slowly falling for her by this time, stops her from doing so, to which Hannah reacts by breaking down crying. A bewildered Garrett asks for an explanation or rather begs her to tell him what’s wrong. Hannah comes clean, telling him about the traumatic experience from her past. She goes on to reveal how she has had an issue while having sex with a guy and how she wants to "reprogram" her body and cure herself. Garrett is heartbroken for her and is ready to do anything to help her. This part of the novel was quite sad to read, because not only were there Hannah’s repeated cries of “I’m broken”, but also Garrett’s anger and helplessness and pure love for Hannah.

And that is how their relationship escalates to that of Friends with Benefits.

Garrett is honestly the greenest flag I have read in a long time. He asks his senior who is in the kind of love relationship everyone envies and wants, about how to have sex with a virgin and prepares and does everything he can to make Hannah’s technically first time, good and pleasurable for her.

For the record, yes guys he is able to help her with her issue.

At the same time, he is reluctant to actually have sex with her since his feelings are all tangled up and he cannot make the head or tail of it. He is so comfortable and at peace around Hannah that he talks to her about his traumatic childhood, basically his abusive father. On the other hand, Hannah is eager to do it with him, because she truly believes he is the one who she can trust and who will help her with her problem. And last but not least, Justin Kohl has, just as Garret predicted become interested in Hannah Wells.

Woohoo!

That’s what a huge, hot, gigantic mess looks like honeypie, keep in mind!

But not everything is a mess, however. We get some of the cutest interactions along the way. Garrett’s bromance with his housemates and best friends is legit adorable. His friends and teammates are also the ones with whom he shares his house. John Tucker, John Logan, and Dean Di Laurentis are Garrett’s best friends and hilarious side characters who provide the daily laugh but also support him when he seems to need it. They’re also pretty fond of their “Wellsy” and the one time she cooks for them they're infinitely thankful and pretty much love her even more than they did before.

Hannah’s friendship with her own roommate is quite hilarious, to be honest. Allie is your typical Live Life, Love Life cuz it's Hella Short anyway kinda person. She is impulsive, loud as hell, unique, bold, and a theater major. In short, the total opposite of Garrett’s Wellsy. She is the one who drags Hannah to parties and dine-outs and anything fun. So it's no wonder at all that she and Garrett become BFFs way too quickly.

The tipping point in their confusing relationship comes when Justin asks Hannah out for dinner. Garrett gets furious when he hears this because by this point in the book it had been kinda established that Garret and Hannah loved each other. So he goes to confront her and she gets defensive because like I said, she was confused and Garrett’s rapid firing only succeeded in confusing her further.

But in the end, they do manage to sort it out.

I guess that’s mostly like the first part of their love trials. The second is Phil Graham. Yup! Abusive father with serious mental issues- enter! (personally, I believe he'd gone crackers)

He orders Hannah to break up with his son since according to him she’s distracting him from hockey. Behind Garrett’s back, mind you! The audacity! Dude literally corners and forces her to do it and the poor thing is forced to do it, thinking that it is ultimately for his good. She also proposes that maybe she should try it out with other guys, breaking Garrett's heart a little bit more. 

Result? A miserable Hannah Wells + An even more miserable Garrett Graham.

But Garrett Graham doesn’t give up, does he? He figures out soon enough that Hannah didn’t break up with him on her own accord. He repeatedly annoys her by asking how hanging out with “others” is. Just to shut him up and make him believe it, Hannah goes out on an emergency hooking-up Operation Believe-It-When-You-See-It but she is unsuccessful.

What Hannah doesn’t realize in this scene is that Garrett had enforced a campus-wide “Hands-Off Hannah" law due to which no one dared to approach Hannah much less go out with her. She only gets to know of this when Allie’s boyfriend, Sean admits this to her.

Hannah reacts by barging into the boys' locker room and demanding an explanation from Garrett.

This is one of my top funniest scenes ever in a book just for the way Garrett’s teammates obey Hannah without a single question or argument when she orders them to “skedaddle” out of the showers so she could yell at their captain. Birdie’s surprise seeing her, their team Coach’s reaction on seeing the half-naked Garrett and fully dressed Hannah in his locker room, Logan’s amusement at Hannah's reaction upon entering a boys' locker room, Dean’s apparent unconcern seeing her there, all are absolute peaches of reactions.

The locker room is where the Great Truth is revealed and let's just say the shock almost knocked out Garrett. Garrett takes Hannah to her dorms where he demands that she tell him everything in detail. Garrett explains back to her how he escaped his father’s clutches by paying him back for everything that his father always told him he should be “thankful” for with the money that he inherited from his grandparents on his latest birthday when he turned 21.

Aaaaaaaand happy ending!

The cherry on the cake is definitely the much-deserved ending of Phil Graham who was not only ignored by Hannah and Garrett but also by his entire team. Garrett opens up to his team and talks of the abuse he went through and they collectively boycott Phil. Plus, his girlfriend whom he also abused, dumps him. So yeah the happiest ending.

We get a sweet chapter before this one where Garrett and his Wellsy are sickeningly sweet, nah kidding, they were cutely sweet and lovestruck and totally whipped for each other. I love yous and kisses are thrown about like confetti. Seriously they were so lovey-dovey!

I truly enjoyed this work of art by Elle Kennedy. It’s not often I get hooked and the characters don’t annoy me and are straightforward along with the book being a simply fab story. Trust me, this is one of those books.

10/10 totally!!

Happy Reading peeps!