Her eyes blinked open, and her vision filled with Alejandro’s shoulder and bare chest. She was painfully near-sighted without her glasses or contacts, and she could feel her contacts sticking, dry and painful, to her eyelids. She knew she’d pay for having slept in them just as soon as she got home, but Alejandro was close enough to her that she could see the trail of brown freckles across his right shoulder. She watched as his chest rose and fell in deep, slow breaths and unconsciously calibrated her breathing to match his. She had the urge to run her fingers over those freckles and through the soft hair across his chest and then down his stomach, followed by her mouth, but she stopped herself, suddenly unsure.

She’d been single for so long that she’d deluded herself into thinking dating would be easy once she tried again. She’d spent years spinning yarns in her head about what it would feel like when she met the right person, romantic fantasies that grew more elaborate and unrealistic as the rest of her life became more and more stressful. The point wasn’t to prepare herself to date again, her fantasies that were distractions; Deja didn’t believe the right person existed. That’s why it had been so easy to pour her desires into Alejandro; he was a walking fantasy, but apparently, he was even better in person, even better than she, Toni, and Marie thought.

But the insecurity that seized her wasn’t about Alejandro; it was about herself. He might have been a great dresser, smooth talker, down-to-earth, amazing kisser, and damn good in bed, but she was just regular old, overworked, burnt-out Deja, and in the sunshine coming through his bedroom window, she knew that she was punching way above her weight with him.

Instead of touching or kissing Alejandro like she wanted to in the first gasp of consciousness, Deja started inching toward the edge of the bed, ready to run. She didn’t have a concrete plan, but if there was anything she’d become adept at since graduate school, it was winging it. That’s what she did when she had to lecture about a topic she didn’t know much about or had to teach a class she’d never taught before. The trick was that she only had to know more than her students and to speak clearly and authoritatively, and she only needed to be a week ahead of them in the readings on the syllabus. And if she failed...well, she’d failed a lot, and it had become a familiar state of being.