"Then I'll have tried. I'll have shown you I'm serious and I'll respect your answer." I start the car. "But I really hope you say yes."
She's quiet for the drive back to campus. I don't push. Just let her think.
When I park outside her dorm, she doesn't immediately get out.
"Sebastian?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm saying yes. After the gala, when you ask me out for real... I'm saying yes."
Relief floods through me so intensely I have to grip the steering wheel to steady myself.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She leans across the console and kisses me. Soft and sweet and full of promise. "One more date to get through. Then we figure out what we are without the contract."
"I know what I want us to be."
"What's that?"
"Real. Honest. Together." I kiss her again. "Everything we should have been two years ago if I hadn't been such an idiot."
"You're still an idiot. But you're my idiot now."
"Yours," I agree. "If you'll have me."
"We'll see. One more date, remember?"
She gets out of the car, and I watch her walk into her building. Watch until she's safely inside. Watch until I'm sure she's okay.
Then I sit in my car in the parking lot and let myself feel something I haven't felt in years, hope.
Real, terrifying, all-consuming hope that this might actually work.
That I might actually deserve her. That tomorrow night at the gala, everything will fall into place exactly the way it's supposed to.
I'm wrong, of course.
But I don't know that yet.
For tonight, I let myself believe in happy endings.
Chapter 11
Isla
Valentine's Daydawns bright and cold, and I wake up with butterflies that have nothing to do with the weather.
Tonight is the gala. The final date. The end of the contract and the beginning of whatever comes next.
I spent last night texting with Sebastian until two in the morning, nothing important, just random thoughts and inside jokes and the kind of conversation that makes you smile at your phone like an idiot.
This is what falling in love feels like, I think as I get ready for my morning shift. Terrifying and exhilarating and so far outside my comfort zone that I can barely recognize myself.
The café is busy with Valentine's Day traffic. Students buying coffee for their partners, last-minute gift bags, heart-shaped cookies we're selling for some campus charity.
Lennox works beside me, and she keeps shooting me knowing looks.
