Dad glances up from the game, brow raised. “You going out, honey?”
“We are,” I say. “To celebrate.”
“Be safe.” Which is Dad-speak for be wild, but within reason.
My brothers are already jostling for the leftover pizza, but Tony claps Logan on the back one more time. “Way to go, man. Fucking incredible.” He turns to me, lowering his voice. “He’s all right, Aud. Don’t screw it up.”
I stick my tongue out at him, and he grins that big, goofy Greene smile. “Love you, too, you troglodyte.”
We slip out into the spring night. Logan holds the screen door open, and it’s such a small gesture, but that’s always the way with him, deliberate, tuned to the frequency of my existence.
I breathe in the cool air. Somewhere a neighbor’s wind chimes are going to war with a distant siren, but for once my brain isn’t running simulations.
I’m just happy. Not the anxious, borrowed kind that always comes with an asterisk. The real version.
Logan stands on the sidewalk, pale as the moon and shaking his head, like he still can’t believe what happened tonight. He glances sidelong at me, then blinks a few times, fighting for control over his face, and I see it the instant he decides to let go of it all. He turns to me, hands in his pockets. “You do realize what we just did, right?”
I raise my eyebrows, grinning at him. “Impress your way into my family with baseball stats?”
He laughs, shaking his head with enough force that a strand of hair falls over his eyes. “No. I mean, yes, but… Audrey. We just changed the world.”
The words pluck a string in my chest. I want to deflect, to make a self-deprecating joke, but he’s deadly serious—and so am I.
Epilepsy. Parkinson’s. All the syndromes that end dinner conversations and leave empty chairs at tables. And somewhere, in some version of the universe I’ll never get to see, maybe my mother’s neurons could have held on a little longer. Maybe she could have met the man I chose.
“We changed the world,” he says again, softer.
The words fall into me like stones into water.
I don’t have answers for the enormity of what we’ve done—there are no words—so I kiss him.
It’s not a gentle, movie-ending kiss. It’s raw and hungry, his hands tightening at my waist like he’s making sure I’m real, that this moment is real.
He laughs into me, unguarded and dizzy, and I love him most in these moments—stripped of pretense, the old panic giving way to something wilder. I pull him closer until the world narrows to just this. His mouth, the warmth between us, and the shocked certainty that we did it.
We did it.
I’m still laughing when we get to the car, a noise that won’t leave my body. We drive with the windows open, the night air cold enough to bite, but Logan’s hand finds my knee and stays there, thumb drawing invisible equations on my skin. I know, by the tilt of his mouth, that his brain is running every probability tree about tonight, but I also know he’s intentionally glitched the simulation, letting it loop on the branch where we just… win.
“Pit stop?” I say as Logan pulls past the Dunkin’ at the corner of 18th and Western, almost at my apartment.
His brow creases, suspicious. “What for? We just ate.”
I grin. “We need to stop off at my apartment so I can change. I look like a high school mathlete’s chaperone, and if we’re going to the Alibi, Serena will literally set me on fire if I show up looking like this.”
Logan glances at me. “An oversized T-shirt and pizza stains? I think you’ve never looked hotter.”
“You lie. But regardless, they won’t even let me into the club in this outfit.”
He narrows an eye. “I mean, I couldpaythem to overlook it.”
I shake my head, laughing as we pull up outside my apartment, and he cuts the engine. “You don’t have to come upstairs, you know. I’ll be ten minutes, fifteen max.”
He gives me a look. “You’ve barely been home for weeks. I am not letting you get murdered by your own closet. Is that not the kind of support a boyfriend provides?”
“You just want to see me try on all my outfits.”
“Not all,” he says deadpan. “Just the short ones.”
