When my lease with Ava, Mandy, and Katherine was up, we decided to go our separate ways. Or rather, I did. I had earned out my advance from JMP about a month after my debut released, and it didn’t look like anything was going to slow down anytime soon. Besides, I had been splitting most of my time between writing and a lengthy press tour with interviews and signings and the whole shebang. When I’d get home, I’d go straight to Ryan’s condo anyway, because he lives alone, and having an adult relationship with three roommates is awkward to say the least. It only made sense for me to buy a place of my own.

I bite my lip as what he said really sinks in. “You watched every interview?”

“Of course I did,” he answers easily. He catches my eye in the mirror and smiles, then goes right back to fixing his hair.

I allow myself a minute to drink him in. His dark hair is longer now than it was when we met. He got new glasses, too, though they are a barely different version of the old ones. But that ass is the same, and it’s exactly as delicious as it was a year ago.

I don’t have much room to talk about Ava and how fast she fell for the love of her life. It didn’t take me long at all to know Ryan was special, and it wasn’t long after that when I realized spending the rest of my life with him seemed like a fun prospect rather than a daunting one. We slipped into each other’s lives so easily, as if we were occupying spaces that had been left for us. Soon, I was staying over at his place for several nights, then weeks at a time. We’d work well into the night—or at least as long as we could last as we tried to resist each other’s small touches and suggestive glances—then wake in the mornings and share coffee and breakfast before he’d leave for work. It felt domestic, but not in an oppressive way. In an exciting way. A picture of the life we could lead together had emerged on the horizon, and I liked it. Loved it, if I’m being honest. And once I admitted that to myself, I started daydreaming about all of our options. A house in the suburbs. A little son or daughter running around in the backyard or shoving wrinkled pages of a story they wrote into our hands. A dog? No, probably a cat. Neither of us have the patience for a dog.

I mean, I certainly can’t have any of that now, while my book is still climbing the charts and I’m being asked to do more and more signings and interviews. But someday.