Page 29 of Bad Men's Good Girl

Max doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away. The silence is heavy with the weight of everything we haven't been saying since we left Florence.

Max lets a slow breath escape his teeth. He doesn't look offended; he looks tired, like a man who has finally set down a heavy trunk after a long march. He turns toward the Pantheon,the massive Corinthian columns standing like sentinels in the dark.

"It’s different," he says. The admission is quiet, lacking his usual lecture-hall authority. "I didn't intend for it to happen, Amos. I’ve lived my life by a very specific set of rules. Responsibility. Distance. Logic."

"I know the feeling," I say, leaning back against the cool stone of the fountain. "Different rules, same result. I kept moving so I wouldn't have to notice how quiet it gets when the program ends. Until she showed up. She doesn't just fill the silence, Max. She makes me want to stop the car and actually unpack for once."

Max finally looks at me, his eyes searchingly sharp behind his glasses. There’s no glare of a rival there. Instead, I see a mirror. He’s spent twenty years being the reliable pillar while I’ve been the restless wind. Baleigh is the first thing that’s made either of us reconsider our nature.

"She asks questions I haven't dared ask myself in a decade," Max says, voice thickening. "She looks at these ruins and sees the life that lived within them, not just the dates and the architecture. She makes the future look... less like a series of sacrifices and more like an invitation."

"She’s grounded," I add, kicking at a stray pebble. "Coming from that small town, she has this gravity. Every time I’m around her, I feel like I’m actually standing on the earth instead of just floating over it. It’s terrifying."

We stand there in the shadow of the temple, two men who have seen the world but are only now seeing themselves. The competition I expected—the sharp elbows and the posturing—doesn't materialize. It’s hard to be a rival when you’re both staring at the same miracle from different angles.

"I’m not looking for a conquest," I say steadily.

"Neither am I," Max replies. "That’s the complication, isn't it? If this were a flirtation, we could walk away. But neither of us wants to walk away. So what do we do?"

The fountain pulses behind us, a steady, rhythmic heart in a city that has seen every kind of love and loss for two millennia. We don't have a solution, but the tension in my shoulders has shifted from a knots of combat into something far more dangerous: a shared understanding of just how much we both have to lose.

The walk back to my room takes me through a labyrinth of narrow alleys where the smell of blooming jasmine fights with the damp scent of ancient stone. My footsteps echo, a hollow rhythm against the shuttered storefronts. Max’s words linger in the air like dust motes in a shaft of light—honest, heavy, and undeniably real.

He wants her. I want her. In any other story, this is where I’m supposed to sharpen my knives and plan my next move. I should be figuring out how to outshine his stability with my spontaneity, how to prove that a life with me would be a vivid dream while a life with him would be a dusty library. But the old competitive fire feels cold.

Watching him admit his vulnerability didn’t make me see a rival; it made me see a middle ground.

I stop at a bridge over the Tiber, leaning my elbows on the weathered travertine. The water below is black and slick, reflecting the golden glow of the streetlamps. My life has been a series of binary choices: go or stay, yes or no, here or there. I’ve always operated on the logic that to have one thing, you have to forfeit another. You choose the career, you lose the home. You choose the adventure, you lose the partner.

But Baleigh isn't a prize to be won or a destination to be reached. She’s the catalyst.

She hasn't just awakened feelings for me; she’s cracked open a door to a version of life I never dared to draft. Max provides the anchor she’s lacked, the intellectual challenge that keeps her sharp. I provide the wind in her sails, the reminder that the world is wide and meant to be tasted. Why does it feel like she needs both to truly fly? Why does it feel like I need him to keep me honest, and he needs me to keep him alive?

The air in Rome is thick with the impossible. This city was built on layers—pagan temples beneath Christian churches, ruins repurposed into palaces. It’s a place where contradictions coexist because they have to.

I push off the bridge, a strange, electric hum vibrating under my skin. The future doesn't have to look like a picket fence in North Carolina or a lonely hotel room in Paris. Maybe the stability I crave isn't a house, but a set of people who truly see me. I want her, and I respect him, and I wonder if the "correct" choice is actually the smallest one available.

I’m tired of choosing. Maybe it’s time to start building something entirely new.

19

BALEIGH

The morning light filters through the shutters of my Roman hotel room, casting golden stripes across the ceramic floor. I press my face against the cool glass, watching the city wake up below. Street vendors arrange their displays of postcards and miniature Colosseum replicas. A woman in a crisp white apron sweeps the steps of a bakery, the sound of her broom scraping against stone mixing with the distant hum of Vespas navigating the narrow streets.

Just over two weeks left.

The thought hits me like a physical weight settling in my chest. Just a few weeks until I'm home, sitting in my childhood bedroom, explaining to my mother why I'm different now. Weeks until this version of myself—the one who says yes to adventures and doesn't overthink every conversation—becomes a memory I'll polish like a souvenir.

I pull on a sundress the color of burnt orange, the fabric light against my skin. The mirror reflects someone I barely recognize. My hair has grown lighter from the sun, and there's a confidence in my posture that wasn't there two months ago. I look likesomeone who belongs in postcards, not someone who sends them.

"You're stalling, Baleigh."

I grab my camera and head downstairs to meet the group for breakfast.

The hotel's courtyard buzzes with the familiar chaos of program life. Students cluster around small tables, their voices mixing with the clink of espresso cups and the rustle of guidebook pages. I spot Max near the fountain, his dark head bent over a stack of papers. Even from across the courtyard, I can see the careful precision in the way he organizes his materials, every movement deliberate.

My pulse quickens, the way it has every morning since Florence shifted into something deeper. But today, there's a thread of panic woven through the attraction. How do I go back to casual conversation when every word between us feels weighted with possibility?