Beautiful.
Fuck. Me. He is so beautiful.
I wanted him so badly that it physically hurt.
“I-I’m sorry. Do you—do you want to call this off?” I asked quietly, my heart beating me to death.
“Call what off?”
“The tutoring. The festival. Us. All this pretending.”
His expression hardened instantly.
“No.”
The force behind the word made my pulse jump.
“I don’t want that. It’s just, you can’t touch me, Luna,” he said roughly. “Not when I feel so?—”
“So what?”
He looked away.
Tormented.
And suddenly—terrifyingly—I understood.
Something about him, or maybe it was me, but something made physical contact between us impossible.
The realization hit like lightning.
Real.
Raw.
Violent.
And it hurt—more than I cared to admit.
“Tomorrow,” he said finally, handing me my bag carefully without touching my skin. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Like he needed to hear I’d come back.
“Okay,” I whispered.
He exhaled slowly. As if he were somehow relieved by my acquiescence. I exhaled softly, and he disappeared into shadow.
I stood there for a moment beneath the night skies of Asgarheim Runevald Institute, and I realized I was already doomed.
Because somewhere between failing Astronomy and fake dating a celestial Monster, I had done something rash and idiotic—even for me.
I’d fallen for him completely.
And now I had to figure out how to pass my class and survive the fallout of my impossible feelings for Sten.
Piece of cake.
Shivering with the sudden chill—whether from the night breeze or his departure, I didn’t know—I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders and turned toward the winding path that would lead back to the graduate dormitories.
