“No,” Mathias said, stumbling backward and collapsing onto the sofa.

“Yup,” I confirmed, popping the “p” for good measure. “You’ve gotten everything you ever wanted by walking over people and making a fucking mess, Mathias, while I managed to save my company by forming a genuine relationship with an elderly, somewhat lonely woman who just needed someone to be there for her. Karma is a bitch, and I do believe she just justified her reputation by shoving a ten-foot pole up your ass.”

My mother galloped in my direction, throwing her arms around my neck. I let her. Not because I wasn’t mad at her. Not because I wasn’t livid, and not because I thought her behavior was remotely acceptable.

No. I let her because if my little Chucks could forgive me for being an inglorious bastard, maybe I could forgive Maman for lying to me in order to protect me, even though it was the truth that ended up setting me free.

Maybe I could break the cycle of hate.

Maybe I wouldn’t have any more misunderstandings that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of people I loved and cared about.

Maybe I could live. With Judith by my side.

With good music and bad exes.

And with so much sex, she couldn’t fucking see straight.

Making headlines dirty between the sheets.

“I need you to turn my maybe into a definitely.” Célian crawled into my bed at the end of that grueling Monday in the office.

I didn’t kick him out, even though a small, vindictive part of me wanted to. Life was too short to deprive yourself of spending time with those you love, something I’d learned the hard way.

His body seemed to mold into my small mattress. Somehow, he fit. If there was one thing I’d realized this year, it’s that sometimes we belong in the last place we thought we’d ever be.

“How can I do that?” I put my thriller in my lap and let his arm loop around my waist, dragging me into the crook of his shoulder. His lips fluttered along my neck.

“Stay at LBC, no matter how this shit turns out. I can’t make it without you.”

“Make what?” I laughed. “News?”

He sounded drunk, but he looked sober, almost grim. My arms wrapped around him involuntarily. We sank into the hug and didn’t come up for air for long minutes.

“Sense,” he said after a while—a minute or three, or maybe more. “Very little makes sense when Chucks is not around. This is the part where I should say something romantic and profound—that you’re my beginning, middle, and end. But I don’t even know what that shit means. All I know is the very idea of moving to the other side of the country was enough to make me want to kidnap your ass, and not in the sweet, joking way. You’re brave, sexy, and beautiful, and there’s not one woman on this earth who can push my buttons like you.”

“Please say you’re offering me the remote to make this super corny.” I bit down on my smile.

He rolled his eyes, thrusting his groin into my stomach. “Only if you agree on flipping channels. So, what do you say we make it official?”

“This sounds a lot like a proposal,” I snort-laughed.

“It is.”

“Then no,” I answered seriously.

“No?” He blinked, as if I clearly didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

“Jesus, of course not. I want you on one knee, humbled and ringed.”

Jesus: “First time you’re calling me for the good stuff, and you’re going to refuse his proposal?”

He rolled out of the bed, walked over to his duffel bag, and threw something into my hands. A new iPod box. I laughed, opening it. But instead of finding an iPod, I found a ring—a multicolored gemstone ring with yellow and blue, pink and silver, red and purple. It looked like a crown, and nothing like an engagement ring.

Célian went down on one knee beside the bed, bowing his head. “Make me a happy bastard, Judith. You’re the only one who can.”

Not a question, but an order.

And just like that, for the first time since we’d met, it wasn’t difficult to be obedient.

Six months later…

“You look delicious.”

Jude and I just got married in the art room of the Laurent Towers Hotel, in a ceremony that took us approximately four days to arrange.

After the private proposal in Jude’s bedroom, I went down on one knee in front of everyone in the newsroom—on the day Mathias stepped down from his position as the president of LBC—and gave her the real ring, the one that cost enough to buy two apartments like the one she’d lived in.

That was twenty-four hours after the showdown with my parents in my office. The reason we didn’t bother planning a wedding until this week was because we didn’t care.

We are together.

Out in the open.

The world can fuck itself and jizz all over my new suit. I don’t give a damn.

“You don’t look too bad yourself,” Judith counters.

My bride has on my favorite white Chucks under her affordable, fuck-knows-where-she-got-it gown.

For the past two hours, the DJ has played The Smiths and The Strokes and The Shins, and almost nobody has danced, other than Grayson, Ava, Phoenix, Kate and Delilah, Elijah, Jessica, Brianna, and us.