Page 19 of You Owe Me

Then—

Slows.

Just a little.

I keep my legs up until I stop seeing stars. Until I can breathe without feeling like my ribs are going to split. Until my heart remembers it’s not a live grenade.

I should tell someone.

Not Ainsley.

Not yet.

She’ll look at me like I’m fragile. Like I’m glass. And I’m already one more skipped beat away from shattering without help.

I pull myself off the floor and wash my face. Cold water. Rinse the sweat off my hairline, pat down my shirt so it doesn’t cling like I just ran a marathon in place.

When I open the door, Sebastian’s leaning in the hallway, arms crossed.

“You good?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

He studies me. “That was a long piss.”

“Enlightening,” I mutter, brushing past him.

“Your heart?”

“Fixed it.”

“Jeez, Mav.”

I don’t reply. I don’t have the bandwidth for a lecture. He knows it and lets it drop.

For now.

I return to the table, grab a pen, and scribble a few numbers in the margin of Melissa Chen’s file. It’s easier than thinking.Easier than dealing with the part of me that knows this is unsustainable.

This is a fire sale, and I’m just rearranging matches.

Because if I stop for even a second—if I really let myself feel how close I am to going down—then I won’t be able to crawl back up.

And I can’t let Ainsley see the wreckage if I fall.

CHAPTER SIX

Rumor has it, she's got a stalker.

Ainsley

There are two things I’ve learned today.

One: Marine biology is actually trying to kill me.

Two: Maverick Lexington has lost his damn mind.

I’m sitting in the corner of the campus café, surrounded by a hurricane of flashcards, three pens that all claim to be “fine point” but are lying, and a very large iced coffee that tastes like grass and soy milk. And yet, none of this chaos compares to the betrayal that occurred in our apartment this morning.