12:57 p.m.

A FEW MOMENTS later, I stop running. Seattle has too many hills.

It’s not that I dislike exercise. It’s just that it’s frowned upon to read books on the soccer field… which is what I did when I was eleven and my parents stuck me on a team called the Geoducks. I tucked a paperback in my waistband and, when the ball was on the other side of the field, pulled it out to read. I always put it away before the other team headed our way, but needless to say, it was my first and last season of soccer.

I check the clues again to assess what’s in my immediate vicinity. If I go to the coffee shop across the street, I could get the cup with someone else’s name on it and devise a strategy for the rest. Most people likely ventured much farther, so I’m probably safe here.

The coffee shop is playing folk music with airy female vocals, and I inhale the scent of chocolate and coffee beans. My vision of a Real Writer is someone who haunts coffee shops and wears chunky sweaters and says things like, “I can’t; I’m on deadline.” Most of my writing happens late at night, sitting in bed with my laptop warming my thighs.

“Riley,” I tell the barista when I order my second latte of the day.

After I pick it up, I grab a table and swipe over to Delilah’s Twitter instead of the list of Howl clues.

Delilah Park @delilahshouldbewriting

I’m coming for you, Seattle! And yet somehow it’s not raining? I feel betrayed.

#ScandalatSunsetTour

I’ve rehearsed a hundred times how to tell her what romance novels mean to me, and yet I’m still worried I’ll get tongue-tied. I found my first one, a Nora Roberts, at a yard sale when I was ten, a bit too young to understand what was really happening in some of the scenes. After speeding through everything the school librarian recommended, I wanted something a little more adult. And this… definitely was.

My parents humored me, letting me get that book. They thought it was funny, and they encouraged me to ask if I had any questions. I had a lot of questions, but I wasn’t sure where to start. Over the years, romance novels became both escapist and empowering. Especially as I got older, my heart would race during the sex scenes, most of which I read in bed with my door locked, after I’d said good night to my parents and was sure I wouldn’t be interrupted. They were thrilling and educational, if occasionally unrealistic. (Can a guy really have five orgasms in a single night? I’m still not sure.) Not all romance novels had sex scenes, but they made me comfortable talking about sex and consent and birth control with my parents and with my friends. I hoped they’d make me confident with my boyfriends, too, but Spencer and I clearly had communication issues, and with Luke, everything was so new that I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted.

But then my parents started asking questions like, “You’re still reading those?” and “Wouldn’t you rather read something with a little more substance?” Most movies and shows I watched with my friends showed me that women were sex objects, accessories, plot points. The books I read proved they were wrong.

It’s a comfort knowing each book will end tied up with a neat bow. More than that, the characters burrowed into my heart. I got invested in their stories, followed them across series as they flirted and fought and fell in love. I swooned when they wound up at a hotel with only one room, which of course contained only one bed. I learned to love love in all its forms, and I wanted it desperately for myself: to write about it, to live it.

I am sick of being alone in my love for romance novels. This is why I want—need—to meet Delilah tonight. Other people read and love these books too, and I have to see them in real life to believe it. Maybe some of their confidence will rub off on me.

“Are you hiding out in here?” someone asks, interrupting my thoughts.

Spencer Sugiyama is standing in front of me, coffee in hand. Spensur, it says on the cup.

“Jesus Christ. You scared me half to death.”

“Sorry.” He eyes the chair at my table. “Can I—” he asks, but doesn’t wait for a response before sliding into it. Even McNair would have waited, I’m pretty sure. “I’m actually glad to see you. I’ve been thinking a lot, and… I don’t want to end on such bad terms.”

“It’s fine.” The slip of paper with his name on it feels red-hot in my dress pocket. His armband is right there. I could reach across the table and pull it off. “Really.”

But a small part of me I’m extremely not proud of wants to hear what he has to say first. I want to know why my longest high school relationship was such a failure, turned me into someone I wasn’t happy with, someone incapable of accomplishing items one through ten on my success guide.

“No,” he says. “It’s not. I need to say something.” He makes a pained face, and there’s something vulnerable there that must have initially drawn me to him.

That’s what always gets me in romance novels: when the love interest reveals a tragic past, or the reason he’s never home on Friday nights isn’t because he’s cheating—it’s because he’s playing bridge with his sick grandmother. When someone displays that kind of softness, I can’t help wanting to know more. I want them to open up, and I want it to be to me.

If this were a romance novel, he’d confess he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about me since our breakup. That it was the worst decision of his life, and he’s been thrown overboard in a sea of regret without a life jacket. Somehow, I get the feeling that’s not what’s about to happen. Spencer is not that eloquent.

“Then say it.”

He sips his coffee, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do you remember our first date?”

The question throws me.

“Yes,” I say quietly, my heart betraying me in my chest, because of course I remember.

We’d been flirting in AP Government for months, to the point where romance-novel heroes had started to take his face. Like most modern relationships, it started over social media. Your color-coded study guides are so cute, he typed, and I responded, So are you. It was easier to be brave when you couldn’t see someone’s face.

Then he asked if I was free on Saturday. It was October, so we went to a pumpkin patch, got lost in a corn maze, and sipped hot chocolate from the same cup. After dinner at a restaurant so nice it had a dress code, we made out in his car. I felt drunk on him, drunk on the way he ran his hands down my body and kissed the tip of my nose. It was more than the omg a boy likes me relationships from earlier in high school. This felt serious. Adult. Like something out of one of my books.

It felt like he could love me.

My face must be turning red because I’m suddenly warm all over.

Evidently, the memory doesn’t trigger the same response in him. He’s still calm, collected. “Okay. Do you remember our second date? Third? Seventh?”

“I mean, no, but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“Exactly. I think you want the entire relationship to be like that first date.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say, but he holds up a finger to indicate he’s not finished. I slump back in my seat, fully aware I could do it now. Grab the bandanna and shut him up.

“I could tell you were disappointed when we just hung out and did homework or watched a movie. I felt this weird expectation with you. Like I was never going to measure up to the guys in your books.”

Of all the regrets I have about Spencer, at the top of the list is that I told him about my reading preferences. He took it better than most, but in retrospect, maybe it was because he just wanted to sleep with me.

“I wasn’t disappointed,” I say, but I’m not sure I trust my memory. “It felt like you just… stopped caring.”

It was more than that, though. It was how I wanted to hold hands in public and he’d keep his in his pockets. It was how I wanted to lean my head on his shoulder in a movie theater and he’d wiggle his shoulder until I moved. I tried to get close, but he kept pushing.

I planned romantic dates too: ice-skating, a picnic, a boat ride. Most of the time, he stared at his phone so much that I wondered if I really was that uninteresting.

“Maybe I did,” he admits. “It started to feel like an obligation, I guess. Okay, that sounds bad, but… high school relationships aren’t really meant to last.”

It’s clear now that Spencer and I were never going to have a happily-ever-after. The best parts of our relationship happened in a bed when our parents weren’t home, and maybe that’s okay. It’s okay that he wasn’t the perfect boyfriend.

What’s not okay is that he’s still sitting here, making me doubt something that’s never let me down.

“I’m sorry our relationship was such a terrible seven months for you.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He grimaces, staring down at his coffee cup. “Rowan…” Then he does something perplexing: he stretches his hand across the table as though he wants me to hold it. When it becomes clear that I won’t, he draws it back.

I think about Kirby and Mara. Their hand squeezes never seem compulsory. My parents, too—they still have major heart eyes for each other after twenty-five years.

“Look, I’m not sure what you wanted from this, but if your goal was to make me feel like shit, congratulations?”

It felt like an obligation. You felt like an obligation is how my mind warps it. I want so badly to be stronger than this. Luke and I even signed each other’s yearbooks. But Spencer has never not been complicated, and maybe it’s because I’m the complicated one.

Maybe I’m too difficult to love.

With a sigh, he scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’m just trying to explain what happened, at least on my side. You want this idealized romance, and I don’t think that’s real life. I’m pretty sure all relationships get boring after a while.”

It’s in that moment that pity is the overwhelming thing I feel. I feel sorry for this troglodyte because he has no idea that love doesn’t have to sour over time. I don’t need to be whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage, and I fully believe both partners are responsible for making a relationship romantic, if that’s what they want. Not whatever heteronormative bullshit that tells us guys are supposed to make the first move and pay for dinner and get down on one knee.

But I do want something big and wild, something that fills my heart completely. I want a fraction of what Emma and Charlie or Lindley and Josef or Trisha and Rose have, even though they’re fictional. I’m convinced that when you’re with the right person, every date, every day feels that way.

“I’m gonna go,” he says, getting up and turning away from the table.

“Spencer?”

He glances back at me, and with a sweet smile, I dive forward to yank off his armband.