My whole life wasn’t spent with Valentino, I didn’t even get a full day. I need more now.

Dalma props my laptop on my bed, setting it to charge so it stays alive. “I love you, O-Bro.”

“You too, sis.”

It’s the first time I’ve called her my sister, and not in a she’s-pretty-much-like-my-sister way.

Dalma squeezes my hand before she leaves the room with Scarlett.

I plug the USB flash drive into the laptop I’ll be using to write stories about Valentino.

To immortalize him.

For now, I click on the file that’s been titled Valentino to Orion.

There he is, frozen, in my bedroom, at my desk, as if he’s three feet away and not out of reach in every way.

I press Play on the video, and Valentino Prince comes back to life.

“Hi, Orion.”

His blue eyes, my name flying out of his heart-shaped lips, his bedhead from after we had sex . . .

If it weren’t for Death-Cast, I’d bet on this video killing me. But knowing I’ll survive gives me the strength to watch this now, to want to watch this forever on a loop.

It won’t kill me. But it could heal me.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Valentino says—said. “Not only because it’s my End Day. That’s obvious. But you’re in the shower after our incredible first time together, and I’m nervous you might pop back in any second now. I just finished filming my video for Scarlett and everything is so uncertain and I wanted to get some things off my chest in case my death catches me off guard.”

Thankfully he had that foresight. But I don’t want to think about Valentino’s bruised and bloody face after that deadly fall down the stairs, I only want to remember him as he was throughout his End Day. Smiling, beautiful, lively.

“I can’t imagine what I would do without you,” Valentino said. “That might seem strange because I lived a whole life before you, but even though I didn’t know you, I know you were the kind of person I was hoping to find. It’s easy to say the timing was bad, but it could have been a lot worse, right? I could have never known you, Orion.”

Valentino’s eyes teared up, like that thought is too brutal.

I’m with him one billion percent.