He’s gazing at me, waiting, hoping, imploring, and this should be the perfect chance to execute the final step of my plan. It’s our last full day here, my last opportunity to do so before the trip comes to an end. He’s at my mercy, just like I always wanted. If I reject him right now, tell him that I hate him, that I’ll never forgive him for what he did, the consequences will be devastating. He’ll suffer terribly, and the image of it—the inevitable hurt on his face, like an open wound, his cheeks tinged red with humiliation—should send a thrill of satisfaction racing through me, but when I open my mouth to deliver the fatal blow, nothing comes out.

Nothing comes out, because his lips are on mine, crushing the distance between us, and instead of pushing him away like I should, like I’d planned to, I pull him closer, one hand guiding him forward by the nape of his neck, the other cupping his face, letting my fingertips linger against the hot shell of his ear, teasing, tapping a faint beat in rhythm with his pounding heart. I can always break it later, I reassure myself, a half thought that crumbles when his mouth parts, soft and slow and slightly stunned, and I can sense his disbelief when he inhales. And even though he’s far from the first boy I’ve kissed, it feels as if he is; the others simply don’t count compared to him. He kisses me not like he wants to own me, but like he’s mine, and he’s desperate to prove it.

“You have to know how much I wanted this,” he whispers, his breathing unsteady, his voice thick and hoarse the way it is when you’ve just woken from sleeping too long. “Qin ai de.”

I recognize the words. “Did you just call me your worst enemy?”

He smiles against my lips. “I was lying.”

“What?”

“Qin ai de doesn’t mean my worst enemy,” he says. “It means my love.”

I barely let him finish speaking. I kiss him harder, my thoughts all tangled up like lace ribbons in the collar of his shirt, in the feel of his arms, and the shadowed corner of the alley just a few yards away, where we would be free to do whatever we wanted—

“Oh damn.”

Oliver’s voice cuts through the air, snipping the ribbons of my thoughts in half, and I release Cyrus reluctantly, my eyes opening to the sight of his swollen lips and dark glare.

“I swear that guy is everywhere,” Cyrus mutters to me, adjusting his clothes.

“I know,” I whisper back as I turn around. “He’s basically omnipresent.”