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Once everything is good to go on the table, I start setting candles up all around the room. I brought enough tea lights and pillar candles to cast the whole studio in a soft glow once I shut the overhead lights off. I let my eyes adjust to the dim ambience and then immediately consider turning the lights back on again.

“This is way too much,” I mutter as I take in the scene.

The studio now looks like something out of a ‘time to lose our virginities’ scene in an early 2000s teen movie. I still have no idea what exactly Kenzie and I are to each other or where we’re headed, but that is definitely not the vibe.

Before I can make any adjustments, the ding-dong of the doorbell rings out downstairs, and I jump. My heart climbs into my throat. I don’t have time to pack up all the candles again, so I bite the bullet and stash my grocery bag over by the music station before galloping down the stairs.

When I reach the entryway and spot Kenzie on the other side of the glass door, I nearly trip over my own feet and have to grab the edge of the front desk to steady myself.

She’s not nearly as dressed up as on our first date, but somehow, she’s even more stunning. Her hair is completely down tonight, the long, needle-straight layers hanging over the shoulders of her grey pea coat. She has a little makeup on, just enough to make her dark eyes look extra bright and her cheeks extra flushed from the cold.

My blood runs hot at the memory of what it felt like to have her stare up at me with glittering eyes and pink-stained cheeks while we lay chest to chest on the floor upstairs.

I haven’t seen her since we went skating two weeks ago, and the need to kiss her senseless takes over like some kind of dormant spirit waking up to possess my body. Now that I’ve had her once, I just cannot get enough. She makes the whole world bolder and brighter.

She makes me feel bolder too. Somehow, she makes me feel like my old self and a new self I’m just getting to know.

“You gonna let me in?” she shouts, smirking at me.

The rap of her knuckles on the glass pulls me out of my daze.

“Don’t look so satisfied with yourself,” I say after I’ve got the door unlocked and she’s stepped inside, her smirk still locked in place. “That was just a power move to establish my superiority in this competition.”

She snorts. “Right. Okay. Whatever you need to tell yourself, Moira.”

I take the Tupperware container and paper bag printed with the liquor store’s logo out of her hands so she can get her coat off.

She’s wearing black leggings made out of some kind of slippery, shimmery fabric that stretches over her toned legs like liquid obsidian. Her perfectly oversized cardigan is a deep navy blue, and the wide neckline falls over one of her shoulders to expose her smooth white skin.

“You always look like a fashion model,” I blurt as she’s hanging her coat up.

She pauses for a second, her back to me, and then shrugs.

“They’re just clothes.” She turns around and avoids my eye as she takes her Tupperware back. “Clothes are just a way to blend in where you want to blend in, to direct people’s attention, to make them think...”

I wait for her to go on, but she just presses her lips together and shakes her chin from side to side.

“Think what?” I prompt.

She looks up from the floor, her eyes going wide like she forgot she was talking to me. Then she brushes past me to head for the stairs.

“I don’t even know. I’m rambling.” Her laugh sounds forced. “We’re in your favourite studio again, I presume?”

I confirm we are and follow her up to the room. I tug on the hem of my flowy, striped button-up as I trot up the stairs behind her, tucking the front into the waistband of my skinny jeans.

She may have said clothes don’t matter, but I still feel underdressed.

All the worries leave my head when we get into the studio and I watch her set the brownies down on the table next to mine. I stand just inside the doorway, tracing the lines of her body with my eyes. I’m staring like an idiot again, but I can’t stop. I can’t even move my feet any farther on the floor.

The glow of the candles makes everything about her look soft and blurred, like a prized oil painting on the wall of an ancient old house. If I could draw, I’d sit down with a sketchbook right here and spend hours capturing the way the light catches on her hair.

She’s here, in this room, with me, and as I watch her fuss with the brownies, I realize this doesn’t feel strange anymore. The sense of walking around in an alternate reality every time we’re close to each other is gone.

This is reality. This is happening. Kenzie is more than my rival. She’s more than the girl I grew up wanting to beat at all costs. She’s become even more than the girl I threw a plate of brownies at, or danced around my house with, or kissed in a hallway until my knees went weak.

She matters to me. She makes my whole body light up in ways it’s never done for anyone else. She makes me feel like the sun and the sky and the stars all at once. She makes me feel limitless, even when so much of the world has tried to tell me just how limited I am.

“Hey, Kenzie.”