Page 125 of The Love Operation

“It’s the night. Everything tastes better when it’s the right time.”

Before I can process how good that sounded, he holds out his spoon. “Try mine. I know you’re a purist, but this is amazing.”

He slips the spoon between my lips.

“Holy crap. Butter pecan?”

His eyes brighten. “I don’t think I can ever get anything else.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

He shrugs, tossing me a knowing smile.

The air shifts—still warm, but tinged with the first breath of fall. A breeze lifts the edges of the blanket, brushes my skin.

“You’re cold,” he says.

“I’m okay.”

I expect him to pull me into his arms. Instead, he stands and offers his hand. “Dance with me,” he whispers, his breath warm between my cheek and ear.

“There’s no music,” I say.

“So, we’ll hum.”

He spins me before I can protest, catching me by the waist and pulling me close. The streetlight pools around us, a makeshift stage on parking lot asphalt.

He starts to hum, soft and low, and I rest my cheek against his as he sways us in a lazy circle. The entire campus holds its breath.

“This,” he murmurs, brushing his lips against my temple, “this is what I want to remember when everything else is hard.”

I close my eyes and feel every point of contact: his hand on my waist, my fingers in his, our cheeks pressed close. This parking lot, this lamplight, this boy—it’s all I need.

Then the wind shifts, rustling the branches overhead and sweeping the leaves into a swirl. They cascade around us like someone fired a confetti cannon from the sky. It feels enchanted. Choreographed by the universe.

Our eyes meet. And in that look, I know—we’re forever. The leaves say so. Benedict’s eyes agree.

We make a circle with our arms, collecting the falling tree confetti, this moment, each other. Then, we kiss—sweet and slow and grounding. It’s the kind of kiss that promises the next ten thousand.

When we finally pull apart, it doesn’t feel like separation. It feels like a breath before the next heartbeat.

We’re elastic. We bend. But we don’t break.

I roll out of the memory and bury my face into the comforter, trying to suffocate the memory because I can barely handle it.

There is nothing false about what I just saw. Those two people? They were in love.

If there are cracks here, I’m still immune to them. I should rewatch it, but I can’t.

I have to move on.

The middle:

Benedict grins as he holds open the library door, somehow managing to shift it with two metal cups in his hands. Officially? They’re water. Unofficially? They’re hot chocolate, freshly purchased from the Starbucks at the student center. We’re smuggling them in like contraband.

“They’re going to smell the chocolaty aroma and kick us out,” I whisper as we slip through the vestibule.

“If you’ll be quiet,” he says, “no one will think anything of it. And if they smell chocolate, they’ll assume they have vivid imaginations, and it’s from the books they’re reading.”