Page 600 of Bad Prince
I saw it.
Kane’s at the far end of the table with one ankle over the opposite knee, laughing at something Leo said and somehowlooking exactly like the kind of man who could have become a problem in another life and chose not to.
I respect him for that.
Probably always will.
And Stella—sits at the center of all of it in a cream dress that leaves her shoulders bare, the medal glinting against her skin, the bracelet still around her wrist. Her hair is down now, dark and glossy against the candlelight. Her cheeks are flushed from the day, from the heat, from happiness, from finally letting herself exhale after carrying something this big for this long.
She laughs at something Jade says and touches the medal absentmindedly, like some part of her still needs proof it’s real.
Then her eyes lift.
Find mine.
And there it is again.
That look.
There’s still fire in it.
Still enough heat to strip paint if we were alone.
Still that impossible thread between us that has survived humiliation, time, distance, Stanford, two different seasons of heartbreak, public scrutiny, old wounds, new choices, and every version of almost we had to crawl through before we got to this.
And she still hits me like impact.
She lifts one brow slightly across the table.
A question.
You okay?
That’s the thing people miss about us if they only look at the photographs.
They see the surface.
The height.
The symmetry.
The expensive-looking drama of it.
The fact that together we photograph like a threat.
They don’t see this part.
The way she still checks the temperature of my breathing from across a crowded room.
The way I know when she’s reached her social limit by the exact degree of tension in one shoulder.
The way our eyes meet and whole conversations happen under table linen and candle smoke.
I lift my glass toward her once.
A tiny answer.
Always.
