Cassidy Renée Valentine walked out of the Hartwell library like she owned the building, which technically her family did, at least the east wing and the new arts annex that bore the Valentine name on a brass plaque nobody ever read. Her combat boot oxfords struck the marble floor in a rhythm that matched the catastrophic drumming behind her ribs, and she kept her chin up and her shoulders back because if she let anything slip for even half a second the entire school would see her melt into a puddle of feelings right there between the trophy case and the water fountain where somebody had stuck a piece of gum shaped like a star.

She made it around the corner before her knees went stupid.

"Oh my god."

Her back hit the wall. The stone was cold through her untucked shirt and she slid down until she was sitting on the floor of the east hallway with her knees pulled to her chest and her bag dumped beside her like a casualty. Her hands were shaking. She could still feel the silk of his tie between her fingers, still feel the way he’d lurched forward when she’d yanked him, the heat of his face two inches from hers and the look in his dark eyes that said he wanted to close the distance and also that he was going to let her be the one to decide.

He always let her decide.

That was the thing about Isaiah Angelo that made Cassidy want to tear her own hair out and also possibly kiss him until neither of them could remember their own names. He never pushed. He never grabbed. He sat across from her and checked her math and told her she wasn’t stupid and when she shoved him against walls or dragged him by his tie or literally sat in his lap and rolled her hips against him until they were both breathing like they’d run a marathon, he held still. He held still and he looked at her with those brown eyes that had green in them when the light hit right and he waited for her to decide what happened next.

Nobody in Cassidy’s entire life had ever waited for her.

Her phone buzzed against her thigh.

She pulled it out and found a text from Harlow, because of course she did, because Harlow had some kind of sixth sense for emotional vulnerability and also because Harlow never stopped texting, not ever, not even during sleep, which Cassidy suspected because she’d received messages timestamped at 3:47 AM that contained nothing but a photo of a sleeping cat plushie and the words "he looks like u when ur grumpy."

The message read: "did u see him today??? he looks SO GOOD in that tie iris picked out. also i finished the cape clasp and it has a tiny heart on it but dont tell him ok its a surprise!!!"

Cassidy stared at the screen.

Three enemies.

Harlow Valentine, who smiled like sunlight had a physical form and gave hugs that made you forget your own name and had somehow convinced Isaiah to play a car color game like a child and then fed him waffles with strawberries arranged into hearts. Harlow who had bitten his neck and left a mark that Cassidy had seen and wanted to trace with her own tongue before the rational part of her brain caught up with the feral part.

Vivienne Valentine, who kissed Isaiah in a bathroom at a museum gala and wore his dead father’s cufflinks and fell asleep on his lap in a car and cried against his chest in a room full of designer clothes that cost more than most people’s houses. Vivienne who got there first. Vivienne who always got there first, at everything, forever, since they were five years old and Vivienne learned to read before Cassidy learned to tie her shoes.

Sabrina Valentine, who watched everything and said nothing and somehow knew the exact right moment to appear and the exact right words to say and had kissed Isaiah on the steps of their house before any of them even understood what was happening. Sabrina who played the long game. Sabrina who was already scheduled for the first rotation starting in November.

Three sisters. Three girls who shared Cassidy’s face and her eyes and her hair and her blood and her grief over a father who died while Cassidy sat in detention for calling a teacher a pretentious windbag. Three girls who had decided, collectively and without consulting the Geneva Convention, that they were all going to date the same boy.

And Cassidy had agreed to it.

She’d agreed because the alternative was losing Isaiah entirely, and losing Isaiah would be like losing the graph paper, the colored pens, the poker chips, the ninety percent, the way he said "that’s very good" in his quiet voice that made her chest cavity fill with something warm and terrifying.

She’d agreed because she wanted him. Not a quarter of him. Not her scheduled rotation. Not the scraps left over after Sabrina’s quiet conversations and Vivienne’s corporate romance and Harlow’s sunshine campaign. She wanted all of him, every single exhausted sleep-deprived instant-ramen-eating bartending scholarship-surviving inch.

But she’d take what she could get.

Cassidy stood up, brushed the hall dust off her skirt, and walked toward the exit. Her left thigh-high was still doing its slow migration south, a problem she’d never fixed because honestly it drove Vivienne insane and that alone was worth the mild inconvenience. She pushed through the double doors into the September sunlight and crossed the courtyard, dodging two freshman girls who were practicing some kind of TikTok dance near the fountain and a boy she vaguely recognized from her chemistry class who was doing something suspicious with a Bunsen burner near the science wing entrance.

Tennis was at four.

She had approximately six hours to kill before she needed to be at the courts, which meant she had six hours to think about tomorrow, which meant she had six hours to think about the festival, which meant she had six hours to think about Isaiah in that vampire butler costume Harlow had spent thirty hours creating, the black tailcoat with the red piping and the cape and the stupid custom fangs that he’d agreed to wear because Harlow did the lip tremble thing that nobody on earth could resist.