But I definitely did.
It could have nothing to do with you, I think as I fish for a shirt in my dresser drawer, my hair damp against my neck from a shower.
But still.
I wish I’d said something—something remotely flirty, I guess—but instead I made up cat puns. And the way she laughed, and smiled, and leaned over the console in the middle—
There you are, she had said, as if she’d been looking for me underneath Vance Reigns this whole time.
I scrub my head, abandoning any hope of finding a clean shirt, and pace my bedroom. Oh, I’m in so much trouble. I have half a mind to ask Imogen what to do, until I remember that we haven’t talked since our fight, and I haven’t seen her online since.
I really did bungle that up, didn’t I?
Elias knocks on the door before he pokes his head in. “Hey, sleepyhead—oh, you’re awake.”
Sansa squeezes through the crack in the door and jumps at me, tail wagging. “Oof! Easy, girl.”
I scrub Sansa behind the ears, and she thwaps down on the carpet and rolls over for me to pet her belly.
“So, did anything…happen last night?”
“What? No, we didn’t fight or anything, if that’s what you mean.” I grab a button-down shirt from the clean-laundry basket and put it on. It’s wrinkled, but it isn’t like I am going to impress anyone today.
Rosie doesn’t care about wrinkled shirts.
…Does she?
“That is not what I mean,” Elias replies as he comes into my room and sits down on the edge of the bed. “Now, tell me all about it. I can see it on your face. You’ve got something on your mind.”
I give a one-shouldered shrug. Sansa nudges my hand when I stop petting her, and I resume with the scratches. “I just…I don’t know, honestly. I like her, but do I deserve to?”
Words aren’t usually this hard, are they? I like you. I want to date you. Okay, let’s bone. That’s the extent of my relationship vocabulary, which now, come to think of it, is wholly lacking in…literally everything.
“I want so badly to be part of something again,” I say slowly, trying to figure out exactly how I feel. “To care about something. And we both know that I don’t. Back in LA, I rarely cared about anything. I didn’t need to, or maybe I was just afraid to, I don’t know. And once I return to the real world, to being me, there’s no way that someone like her and someone like me…”
I frown.
Because that’s the root of it, isn’t it? She deserves so much better than anyone I could ever be.
“¡Ay mijo!” he says, shaking his head. “You’re falling hard.”
I put my face in my hands. “Oh God, I am, aren’t I? What do I do?”
He puts a hand on my shoulder.
“I just want her to be happy,” I mutter, realizing it’s true the moment I say it. Because every time I close my eyes, I see the way she looks at that library full of stories, and I’ve never seen anyone look so hopeful and alive and…home, somewhere before.
There’s a warmth in my chest—it’s been there for a while now—that is soft and sure, and I realized last night, as I watched her walk into her apartment, what the feeling was.
Happiness.
The kind I’ve never felt before.
And that’s when I get the idea.
“Elias, do you have Natalia’s number? Can I have it?”
He gives me a peculiar look, but he doesn’t ask why.
I WILL NEVER TELL VANCE REIGNS THIS, but I wake up to him every morning.
Literally.
Because on my wall is a fanart poster of Ambrose Sond, shirtless and more than a little disheveled, one hand behind his head, the other snaking underneath the sheets that artfully cover up the bits of him that probably are also unclothed. It’s such a trash poster. I got it from ExcelsiCon last year on the down-low and smuggled it out of the convention so strangers wouldn’t know my shame.
And now I see the real-life version of him almost every. Single. Day.
Every morning, his sharp cerulean eyes remind me how much smut I’ve read online and how much smut I probably should not have read online. I have so much PWP bookmarked on my secret fanfic account that if anyone ever found it they would try to exorcise the demons that are most definitely in me.
And now I can’t even read any of them because instead of Sond? I see Vance. Instead of my sweet, wonderful Ambrose, all I hear is Vance’s soft, subtle English accent as he reads to me my mother’s favorite novel.
My phone goes off a moment later—a text. I reach over to my nightstand. It’s the group chat with Quinn and Annie.
QUINN (6:45 AM)
—RISE AND SHIIINNNNEEE~
—IT’S COFFEE TIME!
ANNIE (6:45 AM)
—ugh
ROSIE (6:46 AM)
—morning lovers!
—* LOSERS
—** I MEANT LOSERS
ANNIE (6:46 AM)
—also lovers.
—I will take no alternative.
QUINN (6:47 AM)
—That’s McLovin to you.
Sunlight creeps in through the lace curtains, and I groan and roll onto my back. And Sond stares at me from my wall, smirking at me like he knows my secret.
“Starflame.” I groan, shoving my pillow into my face so I don’t have to look at that smug, beautiful face. “I am so, so boned.”
* * *
—
QUINN AND ANNIE ARE WAITING at the edge of the cul-de-sac when I swerve around to pick them up. They hop in, greeting me with, “Hey, lover.”
“Hi, McLovin,” I sigh in reply. We have ten minutes to get to school and said school is, oh, fifteen minutes away, so we say our morning pleasantries on the road.
Annie begins to rage about the Homecoming game coming up as I pick up her coffee from the middle console and hand it to her. “Thank you—I mean can you believe my brother? He’s so stupid. Like, he knows he’s no match for the quarterback of this Friday’s Homecoming game, and yet he just bet fifty bucks on himself! That he’ll win!”
Quinn nods regally. “I hear the quarterback for this week’s team is massive,” they say.
“He’s only a junior! He’s the youngest first-string quarterback in that school’s history. His name is Milo something-or-another. Ugh, if only Redfair High didn’t have that doping scandal last year, we could actually play a local rival team. Instead, we’re paired with some team from Asheville and we’re gonna get pulverized.” Annie sighs and sips her iced latte. “No, correction: my brother is going to get pulverized.”
I frown. “Aren’t we supposed to play easy teams so we can win Homecoming games?”
“You’d think,” Quinn replies with a shrug. “I can’t spare the brainpower to worry about that. Garrett is still in the lead for Homecoming Overlord, and I’ve run out of ideas…”
And if Garrett wins Homecoming, then it’ll just make my life even worse, because I am not going to the dance with him with or without the title. But if I don’t, everyone will think I’m some kind of stuck-up snob. Is it too much to ask to go back to the days of when I was absolutely invisible?
In all honesty, I wouldn’t mind going to the Homecoming dance if I had someone—besides Garrett—to go with. Vance flashes in my head, and I wonder for a moment what he would look like in the Federation’s perfect shade of blue—
“Red light!” Quinn cries, and I slam on the brakes as the light changes.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
Annie, in the passenger seat, slowly releases her death hold on the oh-shit handle. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Oh?” my friends ask.
The light turns green and I turn left onto the main drag that leads to the high school. “Well, Dad caught the apartment on fire and…I spent the weekend with Vance.” I try to make it sound nonchalant, because it’s not like anything happened. I just stayed in a house with a lot of rooms with my father and one of the most-hated guys on the internet. No biggie.
Just a normal weekend, right?
“WHAT?” they both cry.
“Dish,” Annie orders.
“You can’t hold out on us,” Quinn adds.
So as I turn in to the school, I tell them what happened. All of it. All of the boring bits—staying at his house, him asking me to read to him, the Saturday morning my dad and I taught Mr. Rodriguez how to make chocolate murder pancakes, the quiet afternoons when Vance would find me in the library while Dad was at the apartment overseeing the maintenance work and ask if he could join, the silence that settled between us that was warm and comforting, the night he took me home and I saw him—the real him, the him I remembered since the night of the ExcelsiCon Ball.
There you are, I had said.