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if we can spend another night like that together, I’ll buy you all the chocolate in the world

* * *

By the time I go downstairs, it’s nearly eleven. I have learned four flashcards and reread one text sixteen times.

Sydney is at the kitchen island with her phone face-down and both hands flat on the counter on either side of it, like she’s steadying herself against weather.

“Bea,” she says. “I have some terrible news.”

“What?”

“I’m heartbroken.”

I reach past her for a mug. “Okay.”

“You know your tutee,” she says. “Callum Fox.”

Everything in my chest drops about six inches.

She knows. She’s been down here all morning with nothing to do but think about it, and she’s put it together, and now she’s going to make me say it out loud before I’ve decided a single thing about what it is, before I’ve even worked out what I’d call it⁠—

“He’s off the market,” Sydney says.

And turns the phone over.

CALLUM FOX AND VIOLET MARLOWE: NEW COUPLE ALERT?

The photo is bad. Phone-shot, through glass, from across a road at night. A restaurant window with the light coming through it warm and orange, and two people at a table near the back, and even at this size, even blurred, I would know the line of his shoulders anywhere.

A source close to the pair confirms the pop star and the Atlas Falling frontman have been “quietly seeing each other for a few weeks.”

Sydney is still talking. She has a lot to say about Violet Marlowe, about the fact that she personally called this in October.

I put the mug down very carefully on the counter. I feel like I’m going to throw up. I can’t be that mad, I guess. We never defined anything. It was just sex, right?

I still feel sick. This is the thing with musicians. They have wandering eyes.

“Bea.” Sydney is looking at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I think I’m just tired.”

“You look like you’re going to faint.”

“I skipped breakfast. That’s all.”

“Oh my god, eat something.” She’s already moving toward the bread. “You cannot be fainting in here. I don’t know CPR; I only know the song.”

And I laugh, but I’m really not here. My stomach is through the floor.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cal

When I finally get home from Bea’s, I deal with the message that dragged me out of her bed in the first place.

It wasn’t her roommate. I couldn’t give a shit what they think of me. Left to my own devices, I would’ve spent the entire morning between Bea’s thighs, making her forget there was even anyone else in the house.

Then I woke up to a text from Luca.