: Chapter 26

Vincent doesn’t say anything right away, so my words settle heavily in the silence.

I’ve never told anyone I like them before.

It’s terrifying.

It genuinely feels like I’ve handed him my heart—the literal internal organ imperative to my survival—and given him the choice to either accept it or drop-kick it across the bookstore. I can’t look him in the eyes. If I do, I’m going to burst into tears. And I’m trying to hold it together and give him the time he needs to digest what I’ve just dumped on him, but fuck, I wish I had a free hand so I could fidget with my hair or pick at my nails or do something other than stand in front of him and hold my breath, waiting for him to slam-dunk me and my miserable, sloppy, unrehearsed excuse for a grand gesture in the nearest trash can.

Instead, he says, very gently, “You’re not stupid, Kendall.”

I scoff.

“Okay, you’re a little stupid,” he amends with the faintest twitch of his lips. “But I could’ve handled everything better. You told me you weren’t comfortable having all my friends involved and feeling like you had an audience, and I still asked you out in front of all of them. I crossed one of your boundaries, and I’m sorry for that. For disrespecting you.”

It takes me a solid six seconds to register that he’s apologizing too.

He’s offering an olive branch. He’s leading us to the middle ground. He wants to rebuild what we broke too. It feels like the sun breaking through the clouds after a long week of bleak, ice-cold darkness, and I want nothing more than to tip my head back and bask in the warmth his words bring—the relief—but then I realize that he’s doing it again.

He’s giving me exactly what he thinks I want.

“Oh my God,” I say. “Stop. Please. You have to stop being so—so nice to me.”

Vincent lets out a startled laugh. “What are you talking about?”

“I ruined your birthday! I essentially accused you of hooking up with me as part of some shitty misogynistic pact with your friends. I messed up, so I’m the one who’s supposed to make a grand gesture and grovel and humiliate myself publicly or whatever. So, will you stop being so fucking selfless for, like, five minutes and let yourself be pissed off? Why is that so hard, to think about yourself first? Huh? You tell me I can practice on you, and you memorize poems for me, and you eat me out on your own fucking birthday, and I have no real clue what you want because it’s always about me. What’s up with that?”

I prod his chest with the bouquet of sunflowers for emphasis.

At last, I see the first real spark of anger in Vincent.

“You don’t know what I want?” he demands, low and rough. “Seriously?”

When he looks me up and down in one slow stroke, it’s not just indignation and frustration burning in his eyes. It’s blatant, unapologetic hunger. It’s the mirror image of my own desire, and beneath that, a tiny pinch of something bittersweet—something suspiciously like longing—that tells me this week has been just as painful for him as it’s been for me.

It knocks the breath out of my lungs.

I clutch his note tighter in my hand and remember his haiku.

“Well, I do now,” I say miserably.

Vincent isn’t done. He takes a step toward me, so we’re toe to toe and he’s towering over me with every inch of his (absurd, unnecessary, honestly excessive) height.

“I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you,” he says. “I memorized poems for you because I wanted to be able to talk to you about the shit you like.” He lowers his voice. “And I ate you out because it was my birthday, and all I wanted was to make you come. That was for me, Kendall. All of that was for me. I didn’t do it just to be nice. I did it because I. Like. You.”

I’m light-headed.

My brain is legitimately short-circuiting. All I can do is stand there with my mouth hanging open, swaying and clutching the sunflowers like a life raft, as I stare up into Vincent Knight’s enormous brown eyes and my cerebral cortex tries to fuck me over. But there’s no evidence that this is a joke or a lie, or that I’ve somehow misinterpreted his words. There’s no room for error. There’s no room for me to overthink it.

I. Like. You.

“But aren’t you mad?” I croak.

Vincent holds his arms out wide, palms up. “Of course I’m mad. You’re telling me you ran out on me because you assumed I only hooked up with you to impress my friends. I’m mad you thought I would do that. I’m mad I didn’t take the time to introduce you to everyone on the team so you wouldn’t feel so nervous and weirded out. I rushed this—right from the fucking start—and I don’t know how to take it slow with you, and it makes me feel stupid and selfish and out of my goddamned mind. So yeah. I’m fucking furious, Holiday. But none of that changes how I feel about you.”

I really need to sit down, I think numbly. But we’re in the middle of the aisle, and the nearest chairs are all the way at the front of the bookstore by the magazines, and oh my God, I think I’m in shock or something?

“I’m supposed to be the one grand gesturing you,” I argue weakly.

Vincent folds his arms across his chest. “You’re not grand gesturing me, Holiday. Not on my watch.”

I hold his note up. “I’m literally grand gesturing you right now.”

“Well, knock it off. Maybe I want to be the hero for once, even though my dad’s not a billionaire and I’m not in the fucking Mafia—”

“Okay, first off,” I interrupt, “sports romance is a thing. You’re a Division I basketball player with pretty eyes and floppy hair. You’re not exactly an underrepresented population in the genre.” I would stop to appreciate how utterly endearing it is when Vincent blushes, but I’m on a roll. “And secondly, I’ve had enough of you talking about me and my standards. What I want to read about in books isn’t necessarily what I want in a boyfriend. And you’ve never been anyone’s boyfriend anyway, so I don’t know why you think you wouldn’t be—”

It’s Vincent’s turn to interrupt me. “How did you know I’ve never dated anyone?”

“Jabari. He found me on campus today. We talked.”

“I told him to leave you alone.”

“Well, he put in a really good word for you.”

“I’m still going to kill him.”

I roll my eyes.

“Look,” I say, “all I’m trying to say is that I’m not expecting you to be a character straight out of a romance novel. You’re not fictional. You’re not perfect. But I don’t want you to be, because I’m not perfect either, and it would really suck if I’m the only one who ever puts my foot in my mouth and—”

“We have to learn each other’s language,” Vincent blurts.

I frown.

“It’s like you said about poetry,” he presses on. “We have to learn to speak each other’s language. Get to know each other, so we can pick up all the subtext and shit.”

“I’m pretty sure I never used the phrase subtext and shit.”

“I’m paraphrasing. Sue me.”

But he still makes a compelling point.

We haven’t known each other very long, even though it sometimes feels like it’s been decades since we first kissed in the library during my night shift. Maybe if Vincent and I can start handing each other the puzzle pieces, I’ll stop trying to fill in the gaps myself. And maybe I need to get comfortable with the idea that it’ll take time for us to get there—to a place where we have a full picture of each other.

I should probably start enjoying the process instead of letting the unknown torture me.

“I want to meet all your friends,” I tell him.

Vincent nods immediately. “Good. I want you to.”

“And I’d really like to hear about your family, and what you were like in middle school, and what you want to do after graduation, and—and I want you to teach me everything you know about basketball. Because you don’t get to quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning to me if I can’t talk to you about why the fuck the Clippers traded their first-round draft pick to the Cavs and let them scoop up Kyrie Irving.”

“That was a shit trade in retrospect, but they couldn’t have known—” Vincent begins, then narrows his eyes. “I thought you didn’t know anything about basketball.”

I shuffle the flowers and book and note around in my arms, suddenly shy.

“Well, I didn’t. But then I met you, and I stopped scrolling past the articles and the videos on social media and started paying attention. Also, I read the Coach K autobiography you checked out from the library. It’s actually kind of a fun sport to watch. I’m sorry I talked shit, okay? I care about it now. Because I care about you. I want to know your opinions and the teams you like and which players you’d want to be stranded on an island with.”

Vincent arches an eyebrow. “You’re genuinely interested?”

“Of course I am. It’s part of you. And I’m interested in all of you, not just how good you are at reading me poetry and”—I stop short and blush—“other stuff.”

Vincent blinks at me with those absurdly thick eyelashes of his, and then a slow smile breaks across his face.

“I’m good at other stuff, am I?”

There he is.

My Vincent.

I feel my whole body unwind and sag with relief. I want to reach out and touch him, somehow, but my arms are still full between the sunflowers and the romance novel and the note. All I can do is smile at him, even as my eyes start to sting and the built-up anxiety of the last week drains out of my body and leaves me feeling utterly exhausted.

“I’m sorry I ruined your birthday,” I whisper.

Vincent runs his tongue over his teeth and shakes his head.

“You ruined my whole fucking week, Holiday.”

Again, he tries to make it a joke.

Again, he’s an open book.

“Vincent,” I say miserably.

He takes the sunflowers and the novel from my arms and turns to set them, very gently, on a display shelf of erotic romance proudly labeled spicy booktok reads. And then he turns back to me, loops an arm over my shoulders, and pulls me into his chest. The warmth of his body seeps right through my rain-damp clothes. I press my nose into the collar of his sweater and will myself not to make any audible crying noises as I clutch fistfuls of his jacket. But his stupidly large hand is flat against my back, bridging my shoulder blades, so I know he feels it when my breath catches as I inhale.

“I think that’s enough groveling,” he says above me.

“Are you sure? I can go bigger, I think.”

The words are muffled by his chest, but he must hear me, because he sighs and squeezes me just a little bit tighter. I try to breathe steadily and focus on the steady thump of his heartbeat against my cheek so I won’t lose it.

“Maybe another day,” he says. And then he mumbles into my hair, so quietly I almost miss it, “Nobody’s ever given me flowers before.”

I push back so I can look him in the eyes.

“I can get you more,” I tell him, forgetting to be embarrassed when a tear spills out and dribbles down my cheek. “Seriously, I’ll give you fucking fields of them. Whatever it takes to let you know how into you I actually am. I just—I think, for now, I need you to give me aggressively straightforward statements of intent. Constantly. Otherwise, I’ll run circles in my head trying to interpret things.”

I step back fully, so I can discreetly run a fingertip under my eyes.

Vincent watches me with an odd expression on his face.

“Shit,” he finally says, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Guess I’m a coward too. All right. Um.” He rolls his shoulders back in a move I recognize: he’s hyping himself up the way he does before a basketball game. “I’ve never dated anyone before. I mean, I’ve gone on dates, but I’ve never actually been in a situation where I wanted to keep seeing a girl after we hooked up once or twice. And that’s not me being a dick—it’s always been mutual. I genuinely thought I just preferred keeping everything casual. And then I met you, and you—” He breaks off.

“I what?” I press.

“You . . . intimidate me.”

A burst of shocked laughter breaks through my tears. “Oh, fuck off.”

Vincent lifts an arm to rake his fingers through his hair. There’s a little tremble in his hand that tells me he’s serious.

“You’re scary smart,” he says, “and you’re so fucking pretty it hurts to look at you sometimes. I’m just—I’m fucked. I want to text you every time I see something funny, and I want to get coffee with you between classes so we can complain to each other. And I want you to know all my friends, and I want to know yours, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I feel like you want—like you deserve more than, I don’t know, getting coffee on campus and hanging out at house parties and driving around in my car. That’s so boring compared to the shit you read.”

“You don’t even know what I read,” I protest half-heartedly.

Vincent shakes his head.

“I’ve gone through, like, ten of these this week,” he admits, gesturing to the shelf of romance novels next to us. “I know I gave you a lot of shit, but I’m trying to work on unpacking that, so . . . Look, I still have my complaints. But I get it. I get why you like them. And I was wrong to say that your expectations are too high. They’re not. You deserve to have this.”

My eyes sting all over again.

I don’t know if he’ll ever understand how much those words mean to me.

“Well, you haven’t dated anyone before, and I am”—I snort—“obviously not good at this either. So maybe we should just figure it out together.”

Vincent nods.

And then he takes my hands in his and brings them up to his lips, one at a time, to press two soft kisses to my knuckles. It feels so utterly Jane Austen that I think I might cry.

“Your fingers,” he says very seriously, “are fucking freezing.”

“It’s raining. I walked here. Sue me.”

Vincent laughs a little too loudly. I can tell he’s nervous—that he’s trying to push through it, for my sake—so I squeeze his hands in encouragement.

“I want you so bad it hurts sometimes,” he admits quietly, a little wrinkle between his brows as he stares down at my hands around his, one of his thumbs tracing laps back and forth across my knuckles. “I don’t know if I like feeling this way. I don’t want to be one of those guys who goes all caveman on the girl he likes, but I feel . . . greedy with you.”

And there it is. My own feelings in his words.

“Be greedy, then.”

Vincent blinks at me like he doesn’t understand.

I shrug. “If you feel the same way I do, then I don’t get what the problem is. I’ve been greedy. You can be greedy too. Ask for what you want.”

He clears his throat and says, “I want to kiss you.”

My heart hiccups.

I whisper, “Prove it.”