After We Collided

Hardin, a college student who grew up in England but attends university in Washington State to repair his relationship with his estranged father, is one of the novel’s two protagonists. Hardin had a difficult childhood. His father was an abusive man with alcoholism. When Hardin was young, he witnessed his mother being raped by men his father had provoked. Hardin became a rebellious teenager, often indulging in behavior he knew was harmful and having little to no feeling for the people he hurt. However, this attitude changes when Hardin becomes involved with Tessa Young, growing as a person when he falls in love.

Nevertheless, Hardin remains volatile, quick to anger, jealous, and physically violent, often changing his moods quickly and with little explanation. Alone with Tessa, he would be gentle and kind, but around his friends he would be rude and offensive. Even his ostensibly romantic actions display the need to control and manipulate Tessa: He tows Tessa’s car to have it repaired without telling her, demands she stay by his side exclusively at parties, barges into her work functions to drag her away in fits of jealousy, and unilaterally decides that she needs to find someone else to be with. Even his gift of a charm bracelet with custom-made charms evokes shackles.

The novel excuses much of Hardin’s darker side, including his history of sexual assault, as the product of insecurity. Whenever Hardin feels that his relationship with Tessa is threatened by an outside force, he turns to violence to protect it. On multiple occasions, Hardin gets into a physical altercation with former friends who suggest they might like to date a newly single Tessa. Hardin also turns to violence when he feels his father is disrespecting his mother by talking lightly about the night she was raped. This habit of turning to violence leaves Hardin on the brink of expulsion from the university at the end of the novel. Instead of treating this as an enormous red flag and letting readers understand that Tessa is in grave danger in this kind of relationship, the novel cosigns Tessa’s view that Hardin flying off the handle means he loves her.

Although Hardin shows character growth in this novel by seeking forgiveness from some of the young women he harmed in his past, he still has a long way to go. Hardin is suffocatingly controlling of Tessa, he is violent, and he struggles to control his own emotions, especially his tendency toward rage. Hardin’s mother warns him that if he doesn’t deal with his anger, his anger may be all he has left one day.

Zed is a former friend of Hardin and the antagonist of the novel. In the first novel in the series, Zed took the bet Hardin made to see who could take Tessa’s virginity first. In this novel, as Hardin and Tessa struggle with their relationship, Zed tries to convince Tessa that he would have been a better choice for her, describing how he would have treated her differently during the bet, that he would have told her the truth before having sex with her. In reality, Zed had multiple opportunities to warn Tessa about the bet, and did not.

Zed serves not only as a villain, but also as Hardin’s foil. Guilty of many of the same behaviors as Hardin, Zed puts on a perfect boyfriend act for Tessa, coming across as emotionally available and dependable. However, behind her back, he is possibly manipulating her and Hardin into breaking up—though the reader does not know for sure, he is most likely the person who sent text messages from Hardin’s phone to make it appear that Hardin bailed on Tessa to look at strippers. Unlike Hardin, whose uncontrollable rage leads to irrevocable mistakes, Zed is very good at reading the room to his advantage: During his fight with Hardin, Zed feigns complete innocence when a professor enters the room, putting the blame entirely on his former friend. Despite Zed’s actions around Hardin, Tessa still looks to him as a friend and potential lover, which illustrates Tessa’s character as much as it does Zed’s.