Heavy silence.
“Right?”
Sten’s jaw tightened.
“You’re still going to come with me to the festival when it’s time to turn this in, aren’t you?” I added weakly when he remained silent.
A beat passed.
My stomach tightened.
“I said I’d attend the Equinox Festival with you,” he said finally.
Not exactly the answer I was looking for.
And somehow, it was worse.
Because I realized suddenly that I needed him to say he was going with me. That he wanted to attend with me.
I needed his reassurance.
Needed to know he wasn’t pulling away.
Okay.
This was getting out of hand.
And fast.
“Okay,” I said quickly, standing before he noticed how flustered I was becoming. “Great. Wonderful. Um, I think I’ll finish entering the rest back in my room.”
Good idea, Amrin. Put some distance between us.
Yeah, I desperately needed distance.
Because spending hours alone with Sten every night was destroying my ability to think rationally.
This truce? This fake relationship we’d agreed upon for the assignment no longer felt so fake to me.
And that was a huge fucking problem.
At first, I’d told myself it was harmless.
Practical.
Temporary.
A mutually beneficial arrangement between a struggling Witch and a grumpy celestial Monster with terrifyingly good Astronomy grades.
That should have been all it was.
Instead, somewhere between late-night tutoring sessions and him silently carrying my bag like it weighed nothing as he walked me home at night, something inside me had shifted.
And now?
Now I was starting to forget this arrangement had an expiration date.
Starting to forget that people like Sten did not fall for women like me.
