[Floris’ POV]
I need someone outside this mess—someone who'll tell me the truth even if it hurts.
Which is how I end up at The Crooked Bean, our usual café, watching Gemma's face cycle through expressions like a slot machine of increasingly alarming emotions.
The coffee between us has gone cold. My pastry sits untouched, which is basically a federal crime given their croissant quality, but my stomach is too busy tying itself into sailor knots to process carbohydrates.
"Let me make sure I understand this correctly," Gemma says slowly, holding up one finger. "You agreed to a fake engagement with your billionaire boss." Another finger. "Then you actually fell for him." A third. "Then you slept with him." Fourth finger, and her eye is definitely twitching now.
"And now he's asking you to be his secret side piece while he publicly dates his high school sweetheart to appease his vampire grandfather?"
"When you say it like that, it sounds bad."
"Because it is bad, Floris! This is objectively, catastrophically, monumentally bad!" Gemma's voice rises enough that the couple at the next table glances over with concerned expressions.
She lowers it to a hiss. "I thought the fake engagement was risky enough, but this? This is like watching someone juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle over a pit of crocodiles. Entertaining for spectators, fatal for participants."
"There were extenuating circumstances," I attempt weakly.
"There are always extenuating circumstances! That's how people justify terrible decisions throughout human history. 'Sure, the Trojan Horse looks suspicious, but there are extenuating circumstances!'" She takes a breath, visibly collecting herself. "Okay. Walk me through it again. From the beginning. The Charlotte thing."
So I do. I tell her about catching Charlotte kissing him, about the explanation that followed, about believing him because I wanted to believe him. I tell her about the lodge—the games, the bar, the night he showed up at my door and asked me to lock it. The night I didn't.
Gemma's expression shifts from disbelief to something softer when I describe sharing our scars, our histories, the pieces of ourselves we'd never shown anyone else. But then I get to the gala, to Priscilla, to Harrison's ultimatum, and the softness hardens into something that looks a lot like barely contained fury.
"So let me understand the current arrangement," she says, setting down her coffee cup with deliberate care that suggests she's resisting the urge to throw it.
"You're supposed to wait in the shadows—indefinitely—while he parades around with his first love, hoping he'll eventually choose you. Like some kind of romantic consolation prize stored in a closet until he decides you're worth the inconvenience."
"It's not indefinite. He said six months originally, and once the inheritance is secured—"
"But that's not what's happening anymore, is it? Six months was for the fake engagement where you were the public girlfriend. Now you're the hidden one.”
Gemma leans forward, her dark eyes sharp. “Has he given you any concrete plan for this new situation? Any actual guarantee beyond 'trust me and hide while I publicly romance another woman'?"
I open my mouth to answer and find nothing there. The six months feels distant now, a relic from an arrangement that's transformed into something unrecognizable.
No specific moment when hiding becomes unnecessary and I get to exist in daylight instead of shadows. Just vague assurances wrapped in expensive words that sound meaningful until you examine them closely and realize they're built on nothing but hope and good intentions.
"He hasn't," I admit, and the words taste like defeat.
Gemma reaches across the table and takes my hand, her grip warm and fierce. "I love you. You know that. I love your stubbornly optimistic heart and your refusal to let the world make you bitter and your genuinely insane ability to find silver linings in absolute dumpster fires.”
I sense a ‘but’ before it comes. “But this has disaster written all over it, Floris. I've seen this story before. I've watched it play out with friends, with colleagues, with every woman who convinced herself she was the exception to a very old, very predictable rule."
"It's different with us," I insist, but even I can hear how thin the words sound. "Maverick cares about me. He—" I stop, because the word I want to use feels too heavy for a sentence I can't finish. "He cares."
"Does he love you?" Gemma asks quietly. "Has he actually said that? Because caring is not the same thing, and you know it. Caring is what you feel for houseplants you forget to water. Love is what makes you rearrange your entire life to make sure they get sunlight."
The silence between us stretches like taffy, pulling thin and uncomfortable. Maverick has never said he loves me. He's shown it—in touches, in protection, in the way he looks at me when he thinks I'm not watching—but he's never spoken the words.
And I couldn't say them either because I don't actually know if they're true for him, only that they're devastatingly true for me.
"The woman who waits never wins," Gemma says softly. "The other woman, the secret, the one who's supposed to be patient while he figures out his priorities—she never wins, Flo.”
I see her trying to soften the blow. “Maybe in movies, maybe in romance novels where the author can guarantee a happy ending, but not in real life. In real life, she just waits until waiting becomes her whole identity, and then she wakes up one day and realizes she's been standing still while everyone else kept moving."
"Maverick isn't like that," I say, but my voice cracks on his name.
Gemma doesn't argue. She doesn't push back or list counterarguments or try to convince me I'm wrong. She just looks at me with eyes that hold years of friendship and shared history, and her silence is louder than any words could be.
It says everything she's choosing not to say: that she thinks I'm making a terrible mistake, that she's watched me survive worse and knows I'll survive this too, that she loves me enough to let me make my own choices even when they terrify her.
"Just promise me you'll protect yourself," she says finally. "Whatever happens. Whatever he decides. Promise me you won't lose yourself waiting for someone who might never choose you the way you deserve to be chosen."
"I promise," I tell her, and I mean it, even if I'm not sure I know how to keep it.
We hug goodbye outside the café, her arms tight around me, her whispered "call me if you need anything" warm against my ear. Then she's walking toward the subway, and I'm walking home alone, and the distance between us feels like more than just city blocks.
Gemma's skepticism echoes in my head with every step. The woman who waits never wins. Has he promised anything concrete? Does he love you?
I try to convince myself she's wrong. That she doesn't understand what Maverick and I have, the connection that defies easy categorization. That this situation is different because we're different, because what we've built is real even if it has to stay hidden for now.
But the walk home is long, and doubt is a patient companion. By the time I reach my building, climbing the familiar stairs with their familiar creaks, I'm not sure who I'm trying to convince anymore—myself or the ghost of Gemma's words that refuses to stop haunting me.