Rule No 1: No Strings Attached

Summer's POV

Brooks Hunters had the messiest apartment known to man.

I'd said that a hundred times and I'd say it a hundred more, because every single time I walked through that door, it proved itself true again. A jersey was thrown over the back of the couch. Shoes were kicked off near the entrance but never inside the shoe rack.

"I don't understand how he functions," Ali muttered from across the room, holding up a damp towel she'd found draped over the kitchen counter. "Like genuinely, Summer. How is he not living in filth?"

"He functions because people like me keep cleaning up after him." I pulled a stack of books off the shelf and started arranging them again. "Hand me that mug, please."

She passed it without looking away from the towel.

Brooks had texted me that morning, saying he just landed, and had stopped by to drop things, and I knew what that meant. The apartment would look exactly like this. So Ali and I had come over, the way we always did, because some habits don't care how many years have passed. I'd been showing up to clean up after Brooks Hunters since I was seventeen years old, and some small, stubborn part of me had never once stopped to ask why.

Then two weeks ago, he'd broken up with Taylor.

He hadn't said much about it. But he'd called me late that night, and I'd known something had changed, the way you know a storm is coming before the sky actually breaks. He just said, "I ended things," and I said, "Okay," and neither of us talked about what it meant. I'd hung up the phone and sat on the edge of my bed for a long time afterward, my heart doing something reckless and hopeful that I didn't let myself name.

"Summer."

Ali's voice pulled me back. She was standing in the centre of the room. She sounded amused.

She held up her hand. In it was a small velvet box. My brain didn't process it immediately.

Then Ali pressed her lips together like she was holding in a scream and crossed the room to me in three fast steps.

"Sit down," she whispered. "Sit down, sit down...."

She pushed the box into my hands and I opened it.

Inside was a simple diamond ring.

For a second I couldn't breathe around it. My whole chest went tight and hot, like something had reached in and squeezed.

"Okay." Ali was using the voice she used when she was trying very hard to be calm and failing completely. "He went on a trip. And he came back with a ring."

"And he broke up with Taylor before the trip," I said slowly, the words tasting strange in my mouth, like I was afraid saying them out loud might undo them.

"And he's been calling you more." She started counting on her fingers. "He told you he had something to tell you tonight and you shouldn't be late."

Well, Brooks had texted me saying he had something to tell me tonight.

"Summer." Her voice dropped. "He bought a ring."

Something moved through my chest, warm and dizzy and terrifying all at once, three years of wanting condensed into one small velvet box.

"We don't know what it's for," I said carefully, even as my hands had already started to shake.

"He broke up with his girlfriend and came back from a trip with a diamond ring and has been attached to you for two weeks." She stared at me. "What else could it be for?"

I closed the box slowly, and set it back exactly where she'd found it, my fingers lingering a beat too long against the velvet.

I'd spent three years keeping these feelings locked somewhere behind my ribs, tucked so far down I'd half convinced myself they didn't exist anymore. I always thought Brooks would never, ever look at me that way. I'd built my whole life around the safe distance of maybe someday. And now there was a ring, and a text that said *don't be late*, and every wall I'd spent three years building was coming down at once, faster than I knew how to feel it.

Wait. Was Brooks going to propose to me?

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, willing them still, willing my heart to slow down enough that I could actually think.

"I'm going to confess," I said, quieter than I meant to. "Tonight. Whatever he wants to tell me, I'm telling him too." I held Ali's hand, jumping up, my pulse roaring so loud I could barely hear myself say it.

Ali's face broke into the widest grin I'd seen in months.

The rest of the afternoon was hers. She picked the dress. She practiced conversations with me, playing Brooks, feeding me lines and waiting while I found the words, my voice cracking every time I got close to the real ones. She did my hair, and told me to breathe at least six times, and every single time, I forgot to.

I wrote down what I wanted to say. Three years of it, folded into three pages, my handwriting getting messier the closer I got to the parts that actually mattered. I was finally going to confess to him. My hand had cramped twice from how tightly I'd been gripping the pen, like the paper itself might get away from me if I loosened my hold.

The neon sign of The Daily Puck buzzed overhead, casting a warm glow over the damp sidewalk. I stood just outside the campus diner, my fingers nervously smoothing down my dark green skirt for the fifteenth time in the last two minutes, my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to get out ahead of me.

"Ali, I look ridiculous," I muttered, staring at my reflection in the glass door. The skirt was a little shorter than what I usually wore. "I should have gone home and changed into my old flannel. This isn't me."

Ali rolled her eyes, grabbing my wrists to make me stop fidgeting. "Summer, shut up. You look stunning. That skirt shows off the legs you usually hide under baggy sweatpants. Trust me, it's perfect. It's exactly what a guy wants to see when he comes back from a long trip."

I swallowed the lump in my throat, glancing down at my black ankle boots. "I just feel exposed."

That wasn't entirely a lie. It wasn't the skirt. It was the letter folded up small in my bag, three years of wanting somebody flattened down into a handful of paragraphs, and the terrifying, thrilling possibility that in the next hour I might not need it at all.

"The only person who's going to look at you is Brooks, and he's going to realize what a total idiot he's been for the last three years," Ali said firmly, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. She adjusted her own purse strap.

I took a deep breath, my eyes scanning the room, searching for the one face I actually wanted to see. I spotted him across the room before Ali could point him out. Brooks Hunters was easy to find. Tall, looking relaxed, wearing a grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. Then he laughed at something the person beside him said, and the sound of it, even muffled through glass, did something helpless and familiar to my chest.

"There he is," Ali whispered, pointing toward a booth in the far corner.

My heart did a violent dance against my ribs. He looked happy, exactly like the boy next door I had spent a lifetime yearning for, and for one dizzy second I let myself believe this could actually be the night everything I'd been carrying finally set itself down.

"Go get him," Ali whispered, giving me a gentle push forward. "I'm going to go sit at the counter. Good luck, Sum."

Something in me pulled toward him the way it always did, an old, worn groove I'd walked a thousand times before.

"Go," Ali said quietly. "I'll be right here."

He saw me coming and his face shifted into that easy smile, and I felt it land somewhere under my sternum the way it always had, warm and stupid and entirely out of my control.

"Summer!" Brooks slid out of the booth, stepped forward and wrapped his massive arms around me, pulling me into a heavy hug. "Wow!! You look....good."

A shy smile spread across my face. I had to hold my skirt tight. "Thanks. I just wanted to look different tonight."

"Well, it suits you," he gestured for me to sit across from him. "Sit. Man, I've missed you."

I slid into the vinyl booth, my pulse still not settling. As much as I was nervous, seeing Brooks' face made me feel relieved, the way it always did, like something in me finally exhaled after holding its breath for weeks.

"So, I heard what happened between you and....Taylor," I said, as soon as I sat down. I slid back a strand of hair that fell off behind my ears, buying myself half a second I desperately needed.

"Oh, yes. It was really a hard decision though. We were just going around in circles, toxic as hell....."

This was it. The door was wide open.

I swallowed hard, my heart hammering against my ribs so loudly I was almost certain he could hear it from across the table. I squeezed his hand back before he pulled it away, three years of practiced silence cracking right down the middle.

"Actually." He started again. "Taylor and I...."

"Brooks....I...I have something to tell you. Something I've been...." I said, cutting him off, my voice shaking on every word, three years finally spilling out of me all at once. Just before I could proceed, someone behind me lurched, and I felt the cold hit before I understood what was happening.

Someone had poured a champagne down the back of my dress.

"Oh, my God, I'm so so sorry." The waitress apologised, bending down to clean it off, but I stopped her halfway.

"It's.. it's fine. I'll just go clean it off in the bathroom," I stood up, my whole body still buzzing with everything I hadn't finished saying.

I excused myself and found the bathroom, working at the fabric with paper towels under the harsh lights, telling myself it was fine. The fabric would dry. My hands were shaking again, and this time it had nothing to do with the cold champagne soaking through my dress. I stared at myself in the mirror, at the girl who had almost said it, who had gotten close enough to taste the words, and I told her to breathe.

Few minutes later, I went back out.

Something about the room had shifted - the light, the mood of the crowd. People were looking toward the centre of the diner and I followed their gazes.

There were neon lights, and candles on tables that hadn't been there before. Flowers along the bar in small white vases. The whole atmosphere was rearranged.

Brooks was standing in the centre of the room.

He was facing my direction, and for one suspended second, everything in me went perfectly, achingly still. I thought.... I believed he was going to propose to me. My whole body braced for it, that strange, weightless mix of terror and hope, three years of waiting collapsing down into a single held breath.

Then, a woman walked past me. Her perfume trailing behind her as she walked, toward the centre of the room, and toward Brooks.

Confusion moved through me, slow and cold, like water finding a crack.

Taylor.

That was Taylor, walking through the candlelight toward Brooks, who stood in a room full of flowers with his hands at his sides and his eyes on her.

Brooks reached into his jacket pocket, and he dropped to one knee.

Brooks was on one knee with a ring box open in his hand, and Taylor was walking toward him, and I was standing at the edge of the room holding a folded piece of paper in my bag with all the things I'd wanted to say to him, my whole body suddenly, terribly numb.

My brain refused to pick up what was happening.

What was Brooks doing on his knee with a ring box in his hand while his ex-girlfriend approached him?