“We're kind of a disaster on paper,” she admits.
“Incredibly romantic.”
“You know what I mean.” She gestures vaguely with her good arm. “You have labs and classrooms. I have a truck and a radar subscription.”
“I know.”
“And we're just supposed to make that work somehow?”
The uncertainty in her voice is real now.
I look at her against my chest and feel something click quietly into place.
“Yes.”
Lila blinks. “That's it? Just yes?”
“Yes.”
“Jonah.”
My fingers trace lightly along her waist. “ I don' t know what it looks like yet. But I know I don' t want it to end when the season does.”
Something shifts in her face—goes quiet and unguarded in a way I haven't seen before.
“Well, that’s probably the hottest thing you’ve said to me so far.”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“Oh, Professor.” A slow grin. “You really don't know what that voice does to me.”
I exhale as she shifts closer, her knee sliding between mine. My entire nervous system registers the movement before my brain does. She watches my face with that particular attention she reserves for incoming weather.
“There,” she says, and the tone is new, not a challenge or a tease but a kind of quiet triumph, like she’s discovered something secret and holy in the way I’m looking at her now.
“There what?”
“That.” Her eyes flicker, not away but deeper in. “That look you get when you’re trying to be composed and losing badly.”
I pull her closer, not with urgency, just with a need to close this last fraction of space. She’s right. I’m defenseless. Maybe I always have been with her. “You do that to me constantly.” It’sas much a confession as an accusation. We’re past that now. The room feels vacuum-sealed around our bodies.
For once, Lila doesn’t quip or roll her eyes; she just breathes, holding me in that rare, unguarded way that makes me forget she ever wore the armor of sarcasm or bravado.
She looks at my face for a long, unhurried moment. “You meant it, didn’t you?” she asks, but it’s rhetorical, or nearly. “Earlier.”
I know what she’s asking, but I want her to say it. I want to hear her name the thing that’s been pinging between us like atmospheric pressure for days now. “Which part?”
“All of it.” Her thumb moves along my jaw. “Me. This.”
I lean forward until my forehead meets hers
“Yes,” I say. “I meant it.”
Her eyes close, and something in her relaxes, like the tug-of-war she’s been playing with herself just snapped clean. Then, quietly, against my mouth, she says, “Okay. So we figure it out.”
“Wasn’t that the entire point of us talking?” I point out.
She shrugs with a smile before reaching into her mini donut bag, and retrieving another one. “Yes, and we did. Now…the second most important question of the day.”
