Page 18 of Bad Men's Good Girl

He looks at me, his eyes dark and unblinking.

"Failure is a bruise," he says. "It fades. But the things you never do? Those are the ghosts that haunt you. Risking disappointment is the only way to prove you’re actually alive."

The heat from the stone bench seeps through my dress, but it’s his gaze that makes my skin prickle. Max doesn’t look away. He doesn't offer the easy, polite smiles I’m used to from the men back home—the kind that meandon't worry your pretty head about it.

"I’ve watched you these last few weeks," he says, voice losing its academic polish and smoothing into something intimate. "You think you’re just an observer, Baleigh. But I see the way you handle the students when they're spiraling. You don't just solve their problems; you anticipate them. You’ve mastered a city that usually swallows people whole within forty-eight hours."

"I'm just trying to keep my head above water," I mutter, though my heart begins a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

"No. You're swimming," he counters. "You’re intelligent in a way that isn't found in textbooks. You have this instinctive, fierce ability to connect. It’s a rare type of leadership—the kind that doesn't need to shout to be followed."

He stops, his eyes searching mine as if he’s reading a script written in my iris. "I see a woman who is far more capable than she gives herself permission to be. It’s been the highlight of my time with the program, watching you realize that."

A lump forms in my throat, thick and stubborn. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen a leader. They see the dependabledaughter, the "slightly chaotic" friend, the safe bet. To have Max—a man who has spent his life studying the greats—look at me and see something worth documenting makes me feel stripped bare. It’s terrifying. It’s the most hopeful I’ve felt in a decade.

We stand to leave, the silence between us no longer just comfortable. It’s heavy. Charged.

Intimate.

As we navigate a particularly steep, narrow alleyway, a Vespa engine roars behind us. Max’s hand instinctively finds the small of my back to pull me toward the wall. Even after the scooter rattles past, his hand stays for a second too long. The heat of his palm through the fabric of my dress feels like a brand.

"Sorry," he says, but he doesn't sound sorry.

We reach a shop window filled with intricate carnival masks. I make a joke about one with an absurdly long nose, and we both laugh. The sound echoes off the high stone walls, but when the laughter dies, our eyes lock. We’re standing too close. I can see the salt-and-pepper grain of his stubble and the way his pupils dilate behind his glasses.

The air in the alleyway vanishes. My hand brushes his as we turn to keep walking, and instead of pulling away, our fingers linger, grazing skin to skin. It’s a tiny, electric friction that renders the rest of Siena invisible. The attraction is no longer a quiet hum in the background; it’s a roar I can’t shut out.

The late afternoon hour catches Siena in a stranglehold, turning the terracotta into molten copper. We reach the city walls where the valley opens up like a vast, darkening sea.

"Look at that horizon," Max says, his deep voice a low vibration near my ear. "Most people see a boundary. I see the fact that the world keeps going whether you’re ready for it or not."

I lean against the weathered stone, the heat of the day still pulsing from the masonry. "It’s easy to be brave when you’restanding in a postcard. Back in North Carolina, the horizon feels... smaller. It’s like a list of chores and people I just can’t disappoint."

Max shifts, his shoulder brushing mine. He doesn't pull away. "You keep talking about disappointment like it’s a terminal illness. What happens if you disappoint them and the world doesn't end? What if you choose wrong, and the only consequence is that you have to choose again?"

"I've spent twenty-eight years trying to be the girl who doesn't make mistakes," I admit, watching a hawk circle a distant farmhouse. "If I fail, I lose the only thing I've built. My reputation for being the 'good one'."

"Then trash the reputation," Max says. His intensity is startling. He turns fully toward me, blocking out the view of the valley. "Stop defining your future by the catastrophe that hasn't happened yet. Start considering what might go right. Imagine a life where you aren't waiting for permission, but taking it. What does that Baleigh look like?"

I swallow hard. I see her. She’s louder. She’s messy. She lives in a city where she doesn't know everyone's name, and she isn't afraid of the silence in her own apartment.

She isn't afraid of anything anymore.

On the bus ride back, the students descend into a chaotic, snoring heap of exhausted tourists, but I am wide awake. The hills are silhouettes now, black teeth biting into a navy sky. Max rests his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, his breathing slow and rhythmic.

I watch the reflection of my own face in the darkened window, overlaid against the passing Italian countryside. The thought of my bedroom back home—the familiar floral quilt, the predictable Sunday dinners—suddenly makes my chest tighten with a new kind of panic.

Failure isn't the monster under the bed anymore. The monster is the version of me that gets back on that plane in three weeks and picks up exactly where she left off, unchanged, as if this light had never touched her.

I can't let that happen.

12

AMOS

Logistics are the enemy of joy. That’s my unofficial motto, anyway. I’ve spent much of my adult life dragging college kids through customs and coordinating bus schedules that run on "Italian time," which usually means whenever the driver finishes his espresso. On a rare afternoon where no one is bleeding, lost, or arrested, I refuse to spend it staring at a spreadsheet in a windowless office.

"Absolutely not," Baleigh says, eyeing the vintage Vespa like it’s a sentient explosive. "Amos, look at the size of that thing. It’s a motorized bicycle with an ego."