“No?” she repeats, and my hips buck weakly of their own accord as I seek out her hand. She holds it steady. I hate her. “Is there something else you’d like to do?”

I open my mouth to answer, but even though my lips start to form a word, the only sound I manage to make is a clipped noise in the back of my throat. “Rose,” I force out.

“Danni.” She presses down firmly.

My breathing is past the point of control now. To my dismay, it comes out in a rasp, quick and shaky and frantic. I lift my hips one more time. “Please,” I say. “Please.”

And that, thank god, is finally enough for Rose. Silently, she moves her hand from my hip, rising off the ground as she does, and I take back everything I thought about hating her, before I stop thinking anything rational altogether.

We’re almost at the right street when Rose pauses, looking up at the moon. Her face goes weirdly dark, just for a second. We stand there for so long, Theodore almost catches up to us.

What’s upset her? It’s just the moon, as far as I can tell. It’s super pretty tonight, actually. It’s full, but that attention-seeking kind of full, where it sits really close to the horizon, and it’s more of a golden egg-yolk sort of color than its usual soft white.

“It’s a path light moon,” she says, and there’s something about the way she says it that makes it sound like the moon’s committed some sort of personal crime against her.

“A path light moon?” I repeat.

“Yes. That’s what Hennish people call it.” She tears her eyes away. “We won’t be able to spend much time together tonight, you know.”

I do know, obviously, but it’s still a stab in the gut. It’s not a rejection sort of feeling. Just, I guess, a sort of bitterness. Maybe a bit of anger. At the world, not Rose. Anger that it’s somehow more moral for me to be seen all day in public on a “date” with a guy I couldn’t care less about than to be caught spending thirty seconds with the girl I’m … I mean, the girl I really … like a lot.

“Got it,” I say.

“And make sure not to give me pining looks across the room,” Rose says. “As far as you’re concerned, I’m not even a little bit breathtakingly gorgeous. Now, I know that will be quite hard to pull off, but—”

“I don’t give you pining looks,” I interrupt her.

She stops mid-step to look at me. “Why not?” she asks, sounding wounded. “Don’t you adore me?”

Adore. That might be the word I was looking for a few seconds ago.

“You’re fine, I guess.”