Bookish and the Beast - Ashley Poston Page 0,65

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