“I’m sorry,” she murmured against my skin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
But she had.
That was the thing.
She had meant it.
Maybe not cruelly. Maybe not as a weapon. But the truth had slipped out before either of us could dress it up.
Fake boyfriend.
Fake relationship.
Fake rules.
Fake breakup by New Year’s Eve.
I kissed her back because I didn’t know how not to. Because she was warm and soft and wearing one of my shirts, and the last thing I wanted was to start a fight I didn’t know how to win.
But that night, we didn’t spoon.
We didn’t even really touch after that.
She went back to her dorm a little after midnight with my hoodie folded over her arm, and I lay in my too-clean bed staringat the ceiling, knowing this trip was going to make or break whatever the hell we were pretending not to be.
The flight was quiet.
Isa held my hand through takeoff and most of the landing, but she kept looking out the window like the clouds had better answers than I did. I hated that I’d put distance between us and hated more that I didn’t know how to pull it back without asking a question I wasn’t ready to hear answered.
Are you falling for me?
Or am I still just the guy making your life easier?
When we landed, a black SUV waited outside baggage claim.
Isa looked at me. “You ordered an Uber Black?”
“No.”
The driver stepped out in a dark suit, took our bags, and nodded.
“Mr. Montgomery.”
Isa’s head snapped toward me.
There it was.
The first crack in the version of Drew Travers she thought she knew.
I didn’t explain.
Not yet.
The driver took us out of the airport and onto sun-bright roads lined with palms and money. Everything got greener, cleaner, wider. Houses sat behind walls. Gates opened like mouths. The kind of neighborhoods where people called privacy a lifestyle because calling it wealth sounded tacky.
Isa stayed quiet beside me.
Too quiet.
