I set my glass down. “Love is…Romeo and Juliet. Orpheus and Eurydice. Anna Karenina. It’s beautiful and it’s devastating and it usually ends with someone dead or destroyed.”
“That’s literature, Leo. Not real life.”
“Literature reflects real life. We tell those stories because they’re true. Love makes people irrational. It makes them sacrifice things they shouldn’t sacrifice. It blinds them to reality.”
“Or,” Annie says, her voice soft but firm, “it gives them hope. It makes them better. Elizabeth Bennet becomes less prejudiced because of Darcy. Jane Eyre finds herself because of Rochester—not in spite of him, but through him. Jo March learns that lovedoesn’t mean losing yourself, it means finding someone who sees all of you and loves you anyway.”
I start to argue but she keeps going.
“Love makes people braver,” she says, and her voice has this delicious, honeyed weight to it that makes me want to record it and play it back on a loop. “It makes them kinder. It gives them something to fight for when everything else is falling apart. Yeah, sometimes it ends badly. Sometimes people get hurt. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.”
“Doesn’t it?” I ask, and my own voice sounds shaky, like a paper doll in the path of a hurricane.
“No.” She’s looking at me with this fierce certainty. “The fact that something can hurt you doesn’t make it worthless. It’s exactly what makes it precious. If it couldn’t hurt you, it wouldn’t matter, would it?”
She leans in just a fraction. “You’re so afraid of how something ends that you’re missing the middle, Leo. The good stuff. Falling asleep next to someone, waking up to them. Dancing in kitchens. Inside jokes. Kissing them just because you can, just because they’re there. How they leave their socks everywhere and it drives you crazy but you know you’d miss it if they stopped. It’s the messy, stupid, perfect stuff that makes the ending worth surviving. It’s the part where you actually get to be happy, even if it’s temporary.”
Her fingers tracing the rim of her wine glass. “Love can end badly. But the possibility of pain is the price we pay for the magic. And I think you know that it’s worth it. You’re just too scared to say it out loud.”
I don’t have a comeback for that. The room is silent, save for the distant, muffled sound of a taxi hitting a pothole outside.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say quietly.
“Maybe?”
“You’re probably right.”
She smiles. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Excruciating, actually.”
She laughs, then nudges me with her elbow. “Maybe you need to be the one to take Eileen’s advice, Leo.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Which part? Because if it’s table-dancing in a mini-skirt, I have a reputation at Columbia to uphold. The Board of Trustees is remarkably old-fashioned about leg hair.”
She’s grinning now. It’s a grin that could make you forget your own name. “God, I would pay so much money to see that. Like, a gross, obscene amount of money.”
I laugh. “How much are we talking?”
“At least a hundred bucks. Two hundred if you commit to the bit.”
He whistles. “Who knew Annie was a big baller over here? I’ll keep it in my back pocket for the next faculty mixer.”
“I mean the other part,” she says, her voice dropping, going softer. “The part about not being afraid of everything. About being bolder. Taking the risk of being ridiculous.” She pauses, swirling the final half-inch of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in her glass. “Embracing the idea thatmaybescience doesn’t have to explain the magic for the magic to be real. That you can just feel something and know it’s good without needing a lab report to prove it.”
I look at her again. Her hair is a beautiful disaster, strands falling out of the knot and framing her face in dark, messy loops. Her sweater has fallen off her shoulder, revealing the elegant curve of her collarbone. She’s watching me with those eyes—mossy green and honeyed gold—and every logical, prefrontal-cortex-driven part of my brain is screaming that this is a catastrophe in the making.
But fuck it. She’s right. I want to be bold and I want to be brave.
I want to be hers.
I reach out, my hand cupping the side of her face. Her skin is warm, soft. And then I kiss her.
She makes this tiny, sharp sound of surprise—a soft gasp that I catch and pull into my own mouth. I swallow it whole, drawing her closer until the space between us disappears. Her hair is like silk between my fingers. Her lips are soft, and they taste like the wine we’ve spent the night disappearing into, mixed with something sweet—vanilla, maybe, from the chapstick she’s always digging for in her pockets.
For half a second I think she might pull back. That I’ve miscalculated, misread everything, that this is where it all falls apart. But she doesn’t.
She leans into me, her hand fisting in my shirt, and she kisses me back. Her mouth opens under mine and suddenly it’s more—her tongue against mine, a question that turns into a demand. I angle her head, deepening the kiss, and she lets out this small, broken sound in the back of her throat that vibrates right through my chest. My other hand finds her waist, pulling her flush against me, and she comes willingly, shifting until she’s practically in my lap.
