Page 117 of The Rom-Commers

We ignored it until we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and then we broke apart—him looking exactly as disheveled as I felt.

I walked over to the stove, but then it took me a second to find the oven mitts that were on the counter right in front of me. I pulled dinner out, and set it on the stovetop for a second while I tried to pull myself together.

I guessed Charlie was doing the same.

Because just as I turned to him, unsure of how to shift gears fromwhatever that just wasto doing an ordinary thing like eating dinner… Charlie said, with a slow nod, “I get it now.”

“Get what?” I asked.

Charlie met my eyes. “Why we’re rewriting this story.”

Twenty-Three

THE NEXT MORNING,on FaceTime, Sylvie and Salvador were a little dismayed.

“You had a totally epic kiss,” Sylvie asked, more than once, “and then you just ate roasted chicken?”

“With herbes de Provence,” I said, in our defense.

“You didn’t… I don’t know—confess a bunch of feelings?” Sylvie asked.

“Or have a night of passion?” Salvador suggested.

“No!” I said. “No. It was a first kiss!”

But Sylvie was calling bullshit on that. “You’ve been living together for weeks.”

“But as professional colleagues.”

“So…” Sylvie said. “Was the kiss real? Or was it research?”

“It was real,” I said.

Sylvie and Salvador looked at each other like I was some kind of love weakling. “Are you sure?”

“It was real for me,” I said. “And for him, too—I think. Just based on nonverbal cues.”

Sylvie frowned.

“He said he didn’t want to kiss me for research—and then he kissed me. So that implies it wasn’t research.”

But Sylvie kept frowning.

“What?”

“Could that have been part of the research, though?” she asked. “To pretend it wasn’t research?”

“No!” I said. “That’s crazy!” But was it also a good point?

Now we were overthinking it.

“This is ridiculous,” Sylvie said at last. “Just go ask him.”

“Ask him?!” I gasped in horror. “I will never ask him!”

“You don’t want to know?”

“I desperately want to know,” I said. “But I will just privately obsess over it, like a normal person.”

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