Her lips curved, faint but certain. “Yeah. It did. Even if it’s messy.”
“It is,” I breathed. “We agree on that. The thing that sucks?” I exhaled through my nose, jaw tight because it wanted to clench. “I can’t claim you publicly. Not yet. Not if it puts you in danger.” If Elise caught even a whiff of this, she would twist it until it poisoned everything. And if Dunn wanted leverage? All he would have to do was pull the right string and watch us unravel.
Her head lifted. Eyes on mine. There was a softness there that didn’t take anything away from the steel. “It sucks for me too.”
“I know.” The words burned, but I forced them out anyway. “It’s killing me. Not being able to tell people you’re mine. I want it out there.”
Her breath hitched. The star charm rested against the collar of her sweater, a promise for a future I hoped was still within our grasp.
The world I grew up in measured everything in leverage. I learned that early—money shifted from one account to another, promises that sounded clean but always left a film, adults smiling while they lied. I watched, learned, and adapted. I grew up doing mental math, figuring out who would use what, and when.
It hadn’t hit me when I first met her. But now I knew—people would try to use Mila against me, against herself. Elise already had. And my dad had the kind of power that could be a problem.
“We can wait if you want. If Friday was too much, or if it feels like moving too fast with everything else going on. But I won’t pretend you aren’t—” I stopped. The word wasn’t ready for the air yet. I felt it under my sternum, stubborn and permanent. “Important.”
Her mouth trembled as if she might contradict me, or laugh, or lean in. She did the last one. She rose on her knees and kissed me. Slow. Then not slow.
Her fingers slid along my jaw, found the line of stubble I’d missed with a blade this morning. She traced it as though she was learning a map she hadn’t been allowed to study until now. My hand went to her waist and found the edge of her sweater and the heat of her skin where it had ridden up. I didn’t pull. I set. I anchored. She made a sound in the back of her throat that took the rest of my patience and turned it to glass.
The kiss turned frantic. Then deep. Then something entirely ours. A rhythm we hadn’t invented so much as uncovered, as though it had been under everything since the first time she’d shouldered past me in a hallway a lifetime ago. She tasted of mint and whatever sweet she’d had earlier. Sugar on the seam of her mouth. Confidence in the way she slid closer, one kneebracketing my thigh, the throw blanket tangling between us until I pushed it aside.
The star charm swung and tapped my throat, cold, a tiny meteor hitting the same spot until I sucked in a breath and laughed into her mouth. She smiled against me like she knew exactly what she was doing.
And as much as I wanted to follow through with where this was going, we couldn’t. Not tonight anyway. Her mom already wouldn’t approve of me sitting here, let alone what we were doing. I didn’t need another roadblock between me and Mila—not one I couldn’t fight my way past.
Wanting her lived under my skin—every brush of her mouth flared it, heat racing through me, a fuse I kept trying to pinch out with both hands.
“Your mom,” I managed, because it mattered, because it had to matter, because lines made us safer right now. “What time?”
“Soon.” Her voice was air and heat and hard edges filed down. “Not yet.”
I grinned without meaning to. “Not yet,” I repeated, a promise and a plan wrapped in two words.
We didn’t go all the way. But we went far enough that the room shifted around us, like it had been arranged for two people before and was pleased to get back to it. Her breath hitched when my mouth found the corner of hers. So did mine when her fingers slid under my shirt and pressed between my shoulder blades.
We found the brakes together—her palms flattening at my chest, my forehead resting against hers until breath evened. She was the first to lift her head. I was the first to step back into my body. Our breathing filled the space, the clock over the mantel ticking loud now that I noticed it.
When we pulled apart, the room felt cooler. The window breathed the night in. I searched her eyes for any flicker ofregret, but there wasn’t one—only the same steady pull that had been wrecking me since Friday.
Her gaze dropped to my mouth then to my chest like she could see my heart beating too fast. When she looked away, it landed on the coffee table. On the corner of the sketchbook, a graphite fingerprint was smudged across the cover.
“Were you drawing?” I asked, nodding toward it.
A flicker of something crossed her face—hesitation, possessiveness, shyness. She reached out, slid the sketchbook toward us, and hesitated again.
“You don’t have to,” I offered. “I was just?—”
She flipped it open.
The page wasn’t a full portrait. It was the side of my face—the hard angle of my jaw, the line of my cheekbone, the curve of my ear. She’d caught the way I looked off to the side, away from her, as if I was fixed on something in the distance. The shading made it sharper than I ever thought of myself, but I knew it was me. She’d even sketched the edge of the henley I’d worn, the collar loose at my throat, the kind of detail only someone who’d been paying too much attention would bother with.
Something inside me sat down and refused to move. I didn’t lift my eyes from the page, afraid the moment might break if I did. “When did you do this?”
“Saturday.” She tucked hair behind her ear. “After.”
“After us.”
She didn’t answer out loud.
