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I had to get out of there.

I had to find the rubble of the walls we’d just torn down and start stacking it back up—taller, thicker, impenetrable.

Ugh.

That was not the best word to be thinking right then.

“I, um, should go make sure Tess isn’t dancing on a table somewhere,” I said, sliding off the desk.

Silas was quicker than I was, scooping up my heels and holding them up. There was something like a challenge in his gaze as he looked at me.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

I snatched my shoes and ran out of there barefoot.

Only when I was safely standing inside Tess and Margo’s sound booth did I let out the whimper that had built up inside me.

Because, on the one hand, what the hell was I thinking? On the other, why did Jack have to interrupt what had to be the hottest make-out session of my whole entire life?

I couldn’t say how long I sat there waiting for a calm to come over my chaotic body. It never came, though.

Eventually, as the whole building seemed to erupt into karaoke, I buckled my shoes back on (cursing them the second I got back on my feet), peeked out the door, then made a mad dash for the exit.

For once, Silas wasn’t there.

He likely either got held up by someone inside or thought I’d already gone home.

Good.

That was good.

Totally no reason to feel a crushing sort of disappointment that he wasn’t going to follow me home. And maybe inside. To my bed. Where we might spend an hour or two working through whatever the connection was between us.

By the time I got back to my apartment, alone, I was both still intolerably turned on and so melancholic that I knew I was going to have a pretty unexplainable (to my nosy roommate) crying spell if I didn’t work through my complicated emotions.

So I did the only thing I could.

I sat down and wrote it out.

Until my shoulders were aching and a nerve pinched in my wrist, making my fingers go numb.

I stared at the page I’d just finished.

The one where the characters finally started to get physical.

And all I could think about was the sensations Silas’s hands and lips had evoked in me.

Followed by the words I’d been too overwhelmed to process before.

This is not a story that gets a happily ever—I’d cut him off before he could finish. But I knew that last word: after.

This is not a story that gets a happily ever after.

That was what he was trying to say.

What’s more, he meant that.

And, well, I was and would forever be, a happily ever after kind of girl.