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“Try,” I urge. She’s never going to be able to get what she wants from men if she doesn’t know what that is herself.

The whiskey burns going down my throat.

I deserve it. For this night. For this conversation.

“I guess I’d want it to be slow. Like we’re both savoring the moment, not rushing to claim a prize.” Her gaze drops to the cat in her lap. “I’d want it to be… a bit teasing. Like it might end at any moment, instead of a race toward…”

“A finish line.”

“Yes.” She smiles a little. “Like you kissed me earlier tonight.”

There’s an old grandfather clock in this library. In the sudden quiet, I can hear it ticking loudly. Once. Twice. Three times.

I can’t look away from her.

Nora breaks our staring contest first, a blush rising up her cheeks. “Please forget that?—”

“Like I kissed you,” I say roughly. “What about it?”

She lifts a shoulder in a shrug and looks down at the cat now purring in her lap. He’s going to ruin her pretty silk dress, and she doesn’t seem to care at all. “You started slow, and then it grew deeper. Better.” She shakes her head and presses a hand to her forehead. “I need to shut up.”

“You’re drunk,” I say. “I won’t hold you to this.”

“But you will remember it. That’s the part you’re not saying.”

I can’t forget it even if I tried. And there’s not a single part of me that wants to try. Triumph flows through me, dark and heady.

Like you kissed me.

“If you want to feel what it’s like to date, to be courted, to be in a relationship? To kiss? I’ll give you all of it. On your terms.”

Another smile ghosts across her lips. “Exposure therapy.”

“You ask for what you want with me,” I say. She’s had so little of that in her life. If I can be the one to give that to her, it’ll all have been worth it. “So that when you go out into the real world later, you know what you want, and you stop wearing a mask. A man who wants you to pretend for him doesn’t deserve you.”

“Okay.” She tilts her head and looks at me like I’m a surprise. “How come you’ve always been able to see through it?”

“You’re not the only one who’s perceptive,” I say. And because I’ve looked far, far too much at her over the years.

And once I saw the real her, it was the only version I wanted.

CHAPTER24

NORA

It takes me longer than I want to admit to get over my hangover from the Paradise Lost party, and there are stains and claw marks on my dress I’ll never get out. I don’t resent a single one of them.

There was a magic to last night. I felt alive around the idea ofrealmen and sex, when it’s not just in my head, but right there in front of me. West kissed me again, and I liked it.

It wasn’t just pleasant or nice. It was amazing.

I talk to Zeina about it over video call, and despite her professional tone, she’s amused by the whole thing. Especially by West’s insistence that I practice dropping the mask.How did that make you feel?she asked me.Do you think he’s right?

It was a leading question, because of course he is. It’s something Zeina herself has told me over and over again. I people-please too close to the sun, making people like an image of me. Not actuallyme, with my truth and my flaws.

I never thought West Calloway would be the person to see it so clearly. He was raised in a world that prides itself on surface, on legacy, on appearances. And yet he seems to be obsessed with getting to the truth of things.

My truth, at any length.