“I’m happy to see you, too, T,” he says in his silky baritone, pulling back, and his cheeks are ripe to bursting when he smiles. My secret boyfriend. I run my fingers through the sun-lightened curls at the base of his neck and pull his face back toward mine, and he stops me, laughing gently. “Not here. Come on.” He arches his neck to look back into the dark hallway. Voices echo down its length. “You didn’t answer my texts until late. I wanted to talk before you got here. I knew this would be a rough night for you,” he says into my hair, and yeah, I melt.

I hug him close. “Today in general has been hell. Like, if the devil designed a first day of school for a fresh hellie, he would be psyched to see just how much more creatively infuriating today was, compared to his idea.”

He chuckles. “You’re such a weirdo.”

“I am. I’m totally not fit for this place anymore.” The red carpet adoration feels like it happened in a past life. “Can we just leave? Can we go to your place and get away from all of this?”

He sighs. “I know when you start sounding like a romance novel that you’re not serious. And you know my mother would have a fit if we snuck out, anyway.”

“You’re in college,” I whisper back. “You’re an adult now. You make hard decisions for good reasons and shit. She needs to get over it and let you stop sucking at the teat.”

His eyes darken. “Tai, my family’s not like—”

“Not like what? Not like mine?” I feel my eyes glowing with pent-up frustration from the day. “No kidding.”

“You’ve had too much to drink,” he says, reaching for my hand. “Let me ask a waiter to get you a Pellegrino—”

“I don’t want a fucking Pellegrino!” I shout, ripping away from him, and his mouth freezes into a thin line. I feel the melodrama bubbling up in me like hysterical laughter, but I’ve never been one to bite my tongue, even when I sound—

“I want to be normal.”

We both know it’s a lie as soon as I’ve said it. What you want is emotional stability, the kind that comes from feeling loved and not so alone, Noni says in my head, but, you know, spoken eloquence and I just aren’t friends. It feels too good to be a shit mouth sometimes.

He weaves his arm around me and coaxes me back toward him. “Listen,” he says. “Let’s have drinks tomorrow at Maltese. How does that sound? I’ll bring this guy my mother has been hassling me to spend time with, and you can bring Manon.”