"I'm extremely sorry for all of them," Luke said as soon as Emmy left. "I'd say this is a trial by fire and they're usuallyless determined to tell stories about each other, but I'd be lying. They're always like this."
"I know! I've known Emmy and your parents for over a year, and met most of the others at least once!"
"I wish we hadn't missed each other all those times you were visiting," Luke said. "It would have been great to meet you earlier."
"All things in their time," Sabrina intoned. "Although it would have been nice to notneedto do fake boyfriend shenanigans at the wedding. Derek called me out on it!"
Luke's eyebrows shot up as he struggled between two answers and landed on the second. "He did?"
"He said you were in Norway live-streaming some kind of event on July fourth!"
"Oh. Oh, shoot, I was. Whoops? Did he rat you out?"
Sabrina shook her head, her blonde ponytail bouncing. "No, he was so impressed I'd managed to pull a rabbit from the hat?—"
I'M THE RABBIT! I'M THE RABBIT IN THE HAT!Luke's rabbit hesitated.Was I in a hat?
Luke said,No, it's just an expression,but even he stumbled over the particular phrase. "Rabbit from the hat? Why did he say that?"
"—by turning up with a fake boyfriend that he didn't want to blow my cover," Sabrina finished.
"Oh. Oh! Right, of course. That rabbit. That hat."
She lifted her eyebrows at him. "You okay there?"
"Yes. But…look," Luke said abruptly. "Could we get out of here? I'd like to talk to you about that thing I wanted to…talk to you…about…" He trailed off, increasingly aware he sounded like an idiot, although Sabrina's eyes sparkled with humor as he faltered.
"Your not-anatomically-big secret? Yeah, of course, except will they think I'm a cold fish if we leave early?"
Technically, Luke thought, his big secretwasanatomical in its way. Just very much not in the way Sabrina was imagining. "They might not even notice if we sneak out. There are dozens of them."
"Yes, but you're very tall," Sabrina said like that made sense, and he decided it didn'tnotmake sense.
"Let's risk it anyway." Instead of risking it, Luke actually went to say goodbye to his parents, who put up the absolute minimum of protest before letting them go. They cut through the B&B to make good on their escape, with Sabrina shaking her head as they reached Virtue's big town square, golden with evening sunlight.
"My parents would never," she told him. "Either they'd have kept us there lecturing me for an hour, or I'd have heard about it for months if we'd snuck out. 'Propriety, Sabrina,'" she said in a voice that was obviously channeling one or both of her parents. "'You have to think about how thingslook.' Well, I do," she added a bit dryly. "I think about how buildings look, all the time. Only that's apparently not what they meant."
"It's a difficult relationship?" Luke asked cautiously.
"I mean, not anymore, in the sense of I just don't talk to them very much. It's too easy to get dragged back into the dynamic if I visit, so I just…don't."
"I would hate that," Luke admitted. "I don't know how I'd live without being close to my family. Is that—would you be okay with that? If this dating thing went somewhere?"
"If? You bring me home to meet the family on the first date and you say 'if?'" Sabrina teased. "No, I'm okay with it. I really like your family, and you all seem to like each other, which is crazy from my perspective. Good crazy, but crazy. I wouldn't want tolivewith them," she added hastily, and amused relief swept Luke.
"I promise I used to have a place of my own, but this past year I've been doing so much sponsored travel that it seemed dumb to keep an apartment. I'm not planning to live at home again forever."
"Wait,sponsoredtravel? Oh, I keep learning new things about you. You really are a successful influencer! Waaaaait. Sponsored travel puts you in economy class?"
For a moment Luke wished he was a turtle shifter so he could pull his head all the way into his shell and hide. He mumbled, "No," and Sabrina hooted.
"You were making all that fuss about flying business class! Why? What'd you think I was going to think?"
"I don't know! I was trying to seem really normal!"
"I'm pretty sure at least some normal people fly business class," Sabrina said. "Me, for example."
"You're the farthest thing from normal that I've ever met. You're incredible." They'd crossed the square and were heading in the direction of Sabrina's apartment, with the sunset becoming increasingly gold. "I feel unbelievably lucky to have met you."
