"What do you want?" I ask.
He's silent for a long time. I watch him think—watch him actually consider the question, maybe for the first time.
"Everything," he finally says.
"Everything?"
"I want the career. I want the internship. I want to build something that matters." His grey eyes lock onto mine. "And I want you. I want mornings like this morning. I want to fight with you about methodology and fall asleep with you and wake up arguing about whose turn it is to make coffee."
His jaw tightens.
"I'm done pretending those things are in conflict," he says. "I'm done accepting that I have to choose."
Something shifts in my chest. A crack in the wall I didn't know I'd built.
"But Sterling said—"
"Fuck what Sterling said." The venom in Devan's voice surprises us both. "He doesn't get to decide what's possible for us. He doesn't get to put us in a box and tell us to fight over who gets to suffocate."
I stare at him. In two years of knowing Devan Morse—two years of debates and arguments and watching him dissect people with cold logic—I have never heard him sound like this.
Angry. Defiant.
Alive.
"Who are you right now?" I ask, a little dazed.
"I don't know," he admits. "Someone who's tired of being careful. Someone who's tired of playing by other people's rules."
He drops his hands from my face, starts pacing now. I watch him wear a track into his own carpet.
Then he stops. Goes quiet. The defiant energy drains out of him, and what's left is just... tired.
"But it doesn't matter, does it?" he says, his voice hollow. "Being angry doesn't change the math. We still have to choose."
The fight goes out of me too. He's right. Righteous fury doesn't rewrite the terms of Sterling's ultimatum.
I sink onto the edge of the bed. After a moment, Devan sits beside me. We don't speak. There's nothing left to say.
His hand finds mine. I lean into his shoulder. He's warm and solid and here, and in twenty-three hours one of us is going to have to sign away our future so the other can have one.
"I don't know what to do," I whisper.
"Me neither."
We sit in the silence. The clock on his desk ticks. Somewhere outside, someone laughs—bright and careless, the sound of a person whose world isn't ending.
I close my eyes and try to imagine signing that non-compete. Watching Devan walk into the Johnston offices without me. Building a life in some other field, some other path, while he becomes everything he's capable of being.
I can't. The image won't form. It's like trying to picture a color that doesn't exist.
"Sterling said something," Devan murmurs. "In the interview. Remember?"
"He said a lot of things."
"He said we'd make quite the team." Devan's voice is strange—slow, like he's working something out. "He said it like it was a weakness. Like our connection was the thing holding us back."
"It was an insult," I say. "He was mocking us."
