I tilted my head back to look at him. “I didn’t blame them. I still don’t. But I internalized something from that dynamic—that love was something you took in measured doses. That wanting too much risked collapse. That desire should be quiet. Manageable.”
His eyes were intent now, fully on me.
“And then,” I continued, “there was the professor.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“I was in college,” I said. “He was older. Charismatic. Brilliant. Married. He saw me. Or at least, it felt like he did. And the attention came in fragments—stolen moments, careful boundaries, secrecy dressed up as intensity.”
“Almost,” Connor said.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Always almost.”
I closed my eyes briefly. “I told myself I was choosing it. That I liked the complexity. But the truth was … it fit what I already knew. Loving someone who couldn’t fully show up felt familiar.Safe, in a twisted way. I never had to risk being too much, because there was a built-in ceiling.”
Connor exhaled slowly, controlled.
“He didn’t leave his wife,” I said. “I didn’t ask him to. It ended the way those things always do—with distance, with excuses, with me convincing myself it hadn’t mattered as much as it had.”
I opened my eyes again, meeting Connor’s gaze.
“I think that’s why Paris changed me,” I said. “It gave me permission to exist without containment. To want without apologizing. And then you came along, and you didn’t offer almosts. You offered presence.”
Something raw flickered across his face.
“That scares me,” I admitted. “Because I don’t know how to do this halfway. Not with you.”
He cupped my cheek, his thumb brushing just beneath my eye, tender and reverent.
“You don’t have to do it halfway,” he said. “Not with me.”
I leaned into his touch, my eyes stinging.
“I don’t want to disappear into you,” I said. “But I don’t want to stay on the edges anymore, either.”
“You won’t,” he said firmly. “I wouldn’t let you. And you wouldn’t let yourself.”
I laughed softly through the emotion. “You sound very sure.”
“I am,” he replied. “About this, at least.”
I shifted closer, straddling his thigh, my hands resting on his shoulders. The contact was intimate without urgency—skin against skin, warmth shared freely.
“I’m drunk in love with you,” I said quietly.
The words didn’t feel reckless when I said them. They felt inevitable. Like naming something that had already taken root.
A smile broke through his restraint then—slow, disbelieving, undone. It wasn’t the kind of smile he wore easily. It looked like something forced into the light after a long time in the dark.
“That’sdangerous,” he murmured.
“Everything worth having is,” I said.
He exhaled, something deep and unsteady leaving him, and his thumb brushed my jaw like he was grounding himself.
“I’m in love with you, too,” he said. Not rushed. Not dramatic. Just absolute. “Completely. There’s no edge to it for me, Mila. No almost.”
My chest tightened, emotion blooming sharp and bright.
