I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I woke up before noon, but I didn’t actually sleep very well. My stupid brain kept replaying last night over and over—like the theater previews before a film. I saw her every time I closed my eyes, illuminated by the soft light of the dashboard, fiddling with the radio even though she never picked a channel, just so I wouldn’t notice the blush across her cheeks.

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.