She paced to the window and back, her chest heaving. "What is wrong with everyone? Why do people keep insisting there is something more?"
Leo goes rigid. “People?”
She let out a weak, breathless scoff. "Sophie and Claire sat in my office and told me you've had a thing for me since college. Isn't that ridiculous?"
Leo did not laugh.
He just stared at her. Intensely.
The silence abruptly shifted the gravity in the room. Olivia felt the change in the air before she fully understood what it meant.
Leo took one slow step toward her. "No."
Olivia’s weak, defensive smile faded.
"It's not ridiculous," Leo said, his voice dropping into a quiet, unwavering register. "And Sophie and Claire aren't wrong."
Shock moved through her veins like ice water. For a second, her brain simply refused to make his words fit inside the foundation of everything she knew about him.
"But, Leo," Olivia stammered, shaking her head. "We’ve always been friends and—"
"Because you wanted it that way," Leo interrupted. He said it with the quiet devastation of years of truth finally breaking through a dam.
He moved closer. "I have wanted you since the first day I saw you, Liv. The way you looked at me, the way you smiled, the way you seemed so completely unimpressed by me, yet so alive right in front of me... it hit me like a punch to the chest."
Olivia shook her head, backing up until her hips hit the edge of the counter. She did not want this to be true. Not because the idea disgusted her, but because the truth rewrote the history of her entire adult life.
Every dinner. Every herb delivery to the bakery. Every ride home. Every late night. Every time he showed up just when she needed someone. Every time he let her talk about James. Every single time he swallowed his own feelings and handed her friendship, simply because that was all she had ever offered him.
"I didn't date anyone else for the rest of that year," Leo told her, his blue eyes locked onto hers. "Not until I graduated. Not even after I left college. Not until you met James and looked at me and told me you were in love."
Olivia remembered pieces of that time rushing back with startling clarity. Like every girl on campus, she had noticed Leo. He was impossible to ignore. She had even harbored a brief crush on him at the very beginning, but she knew his reputation. He seemed like the kind of man who made girls hope and then moved on.
But then he had become her friend. Her best friend. He had clung to her. He sat with her in the library, brought her coffee, walked her to her dorm. He became so constant, so deeply woven into her daily routine, that she had stoppedthinking of him as a romantic possibility and started thinking of him as something much safer. She had never looked back at those early months and wondered if he was trying to be more.
Now, staring at him, she wondered how she had ever been so blind to miss it.
"No," Olivia said weakly, her voice trembling. "It can't be."
Leo closed the remaining distance between them. He reached up, his large hands cradling her face with exquisite gentleness. He did not hold her tight; he gave her all the time in the world to pull away if she wanted to.
"This is the worst possible time to say it," Leo whispered, his thumbs tracing her cheekbones. "I know that. But I can't stand here and lie to you anymore. There are more than enough lies in your life."
He looked deeply into her eyes. "I love you."
Olivia’s breath hitched in her throat. "I love you too."
Leo interrupted her softly, a flash of pained, self-deprecating humor crossing his features. "Yes, I know. As a friend. At least you never said 'as a brother,' or I would feel really awful about everything I feel for you."
Leo looked down at her lips. Olivia stared back at him, stunned, profoundly confused, and unable to force herself to move away.
Then Leo bent down and kissed her.
It was not a casual brush of lips. It felt like half a decade of desperate restraint breaking at the absolute worst possible moment.
At first, Olivia was too shocked to respond. She stood frozen.
Then she felt it. The searing warmth of his mouth. The tender, reverent care in the way his hands held her face.The deep, suppressed hunger he was trying so hard not to unleash. He smelled like cedar and clean soap, a scent that was overwhelmingly familiar, yet suddenly completely new.
