If You Stay by Courtney Cole

24-year old Pax Tate is an asshole.

Seriously.

He’s a tattooed, rock-hard bad-boy with a bad attitude to match.
But he’s got his reasons. His mother died when Pax was seven, leaving a hole in his heart filled with guilt although he doesn’t understand why. What he does know is that he and his dad are left alone and with more issues than they can count.

As Pax grew up, he tried to be the kid his father always wanted; the perfect golden boy, but it didn’t work. His dad couldn’t overcome his grief long enough to notice and Pax couldn’t keep up the impossible perfect façade.
So he slipped far, far from it.

Now, he uses drugs and women to cope with the ugliness, the black void that he doesn’t want to deal with. If he pretends that the emptiness isn’t there, then it isn’t, right? Wrong. And it’s never more apparent than when he meets Mila.

Sweet, beautiful Mila Hill is the fresh air to his hardened frown, the beauty to his ugly heart. He doesn’t know how to not hurt her, but he quickly realizes that he'd better figure it out because he needs her to breathe.

When memories of his mother’s death resurface from where he’s repressed them for so long, Mila is there to catch him when the guilt starts making sense. Mila is the one…the one who can save him from his broken troubled heart; from his issues, from the emptiness.

But only if he can stop being an asshole long enough to allow it.
He knows that. And he’s working on it.
But is that enough to make her stay?

He's the local trust fund bad boy. Pax has a drug problem, he's not an addict, but uses drugs and alcohol as a method to forget. Forget about his mother's death, his emotionally absent father and the sad reality that he doesn't have anyone in his life who cares. That is all about to change.

 

Mila will never forget the night she first stumbled upon Pax, unconscious and overdosed in his car by the lake. But when Pax stopped breathing, she gave him a second chance and hope that he can find redemption.

Pax is keeping a secret that even he can't remember, protecting himself from a traumatic event. Remembering could destroy his world and those around him... Including Mila.

If You Stay was well written, but it really wasn't for me. This isn't a young adult novel. It has very provocative sex scenes and begins with Pax exchanging drugs for oral sex, with a woman he refers to as a 'bar whore'. It is very descriptive and the drug use is rife throughout. Pax isn't just traumatised, he's broken beyond belief and Mila is the girl who is supposedly changing his life for the better. I didn't see her role as being supportive, I seen Mila as more of a mousey doormat who enabled Pax.

The premise has been seen time and time again in New Adult books, Easy, The Secret of Ella & Micha, Fallen Too Far, Beautiful Disaster, and I could go on all day. New Adult books all seem to be the same, You're broken, I'll fix you, you'll pull away and then fix yourself and return to me and I'll take you back, because your a former bad boy now turned marriage material and I'm a doormat who picked up with the first tattooed male with a penis.

Enough said.

If You Stay

(Beautifully Broken: Book One)

Written By Courtney Cole

Published 07 / 01 / 2013

228 Pages