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He was so, so wrong.

When it ended, the crowd went insane. I’d never heard them like that. Not even after his most popular songs.

His sad eyes scanned his screaming fans like none of it mattered to him. Like he didn’t care one way or another whether they liked it because he was too broken to feel anything but the emptiness that I’d been feeling for the last three months.

And then he stopped cold.

He put a hand up to block the lights and squinted out over the crowd.

“Oh. My. God,” Kristen breathed next to me.

He just stood there, staring.

At me.

It wasn’t possible.

I was one face in the thousands on the floor. I was buried in the crowd. I had a hat on and glasses and the lights were in his eyes. But he was looking right at me. He was looking at me so intensely people started turning around to look at me too.

I couldn’t move. I was frozen to my seat.

And then Jason dropped his guitar and jumped off the stage.

A laughing sob burst from my lips. Kristen grabbed at my sweater, yanked my beanie and glasses off. “Go! Go!” She spun me and shoved me toward the aisle.

“Let me through!” I started to push my way out of the row. “Please!”

I managed to get to the aisle, but once I did, my progress stopped. I wasn’t the only one trying to get out.

Bodies surged toward the front. Fans folded in around Jason on all sides, and I lost sight of him. I only knew where he was because they kept the Jumbotrons trained on him as he tried to make his way through the throng.

It was complete mayhem.

He didn’t have any security with him like he usually did. He’d stage dived before they knew what was happening. There was nobody to keep the swarming fans back.

“Jason!” The chaos drowned out my voice. Everyone was pushing in the same direction I was, trying to get closer to the same man. I wasn’t moving.

I looked around frantically. I had to get higher. I climbed a seat and stood on top of it, people bumping into my back and legs. He was still fifteen feet away, but he saw me. “Sloan!”

As soon as he pointed me out, the camera for the Jumbotron panned back and then zoomed in on me. I could see myself, twenty feet tall in my red dress and tattoos, tears running down my face.

That’s when people seemed to understand what was happening. The crowd began to make a path to let him through and gentle hands guided me down to the floor and toward him. It felt like the ebb of the ocean. A riptide sucking me out to sea. They parted for me and then folded in after me, pushing me forward. And then suddenly the only person in front of me was him.

We both paused for a breathless second before we dove for each other. I jumped, wrapping my legs around his waist, and he caught me.

The floor shook with the cheers. Camera flashes came off of a thousand cell phones and someone backstage released the confetti meant for the finale of the show and it burst over the crowd and fluttered around us.

He buried his face in my neck and I could feel the racking of his gasps as he held me to his chest. Hands touched us, people swayed against our bodies with the surge of the crowd and it didn’t even matter because we were alone. It was just us.

Nothing was left but us.

His lips went to my ear. “I think we just figured out how to make them want pictures of us together.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t care.

“How did you see me?” I whispered.

He came up to look at me. He had tears in his beautiful, blue eyes. “I told you, Sloan. I’d notice you in a crowd of a million.”

And then, in front of fifteen thousand cheering Jaxon Waters fans, Jason kissed me.