The floorboards creaked under Flynn’s bare feet as he crossed to the dresser. The single bulb above the bed still burned, and Ivy sat on the edge of the mattress, her back to him, pulling the Henley over her head. The opal on her finger snagged the light—hieroglyphs he’d spent nine months choosing glinting against the stone. She’d been staring at it for a full minute before he spoke.

“You’re going to wear a hole in that ring.” He pulled a clean shirt from the drawer, didn’t turn around. His voice was still rough from sex and sleep, but the professor’s cadence was creeping back in.

“Can’t help it. It’s the first thing in my life that actually looks like it belongs on me.” She said it without self-pity—just a fact. She twisted the band once, let her hand drop. “Emma’s going to lose her mind. You know that, right?”

Flynn turned, shirt half-buttoned, the dark hair on his chest still visible. “I’m counting on it. I want someone else to be as absurdly happy as I am, so I can feel less like a madman.” He crossed to her, thumb brushing her shoulder as he passed. “We should figure out the how and when before we go. She’ll ask.”

“Vegas.” Ivy pushed off the bed and reached for her jeans. “You’ve been talking about Elvis since Chapter Eleven.”

“I’m serious. There’s a chapel. We fly out Friday, come back Monday—married by a man in a sequined jumpsuit. I’ll buy you a plastic bouquet. It’s perfect.” He watched her struggle with the button, didn’t offer to help—just let her fight the denim, her soft stomach pressing against the zipper. He loved watching her do ordinary things.

Ivy snorted. “You’re a Fulbright scholar. You’ve excavated tombs in Thebes. And you want a man who does a terrible Presley impression to pronounce us man and wife?” She tugged the jeans over her hips, finally, and looked up. “Also, Vegas has a courthouse. You know that, right? Just a desk, some fluorescent lighting, and a clerk named Doris who’s seen everything. No sequins.”

“Courthouse.” Flynn said it like she’d suggested getting married in a morgue. “Ivy. I’ve waited three years to call you my wife. I’m not doing it under fluorescents.” He stepped closer, his thumb finding the opal again, turning it on her finger. “Friday. Vegas. Elvis. And if you hate the jumpsuit, we’ll go to the desert at dawn and I’ll say the vows in front of a sphinx. I don’t care. Just—soon.”

Her breath caught. The word *soon* hung between them. She’d spent years not letting herself want soon. “Friday,” she said, tasting it. “That’s five days. Emma will need time to process. And I’ll need a dress.”

“Then we tell her tonight, and you two can raid every bridal shop within a hundred miles. I’ll fund the campaign.” He kissed her forehead, his hand still wrapped around hers. “Now finish getting dressed. I made coffee, and it’s terrible, but it’s hot, and we’re about to change Emma’s whole evening.”

They drove in his old Volvo, the heater fighting the damp February air. Emma’s house was a boxy bungalow with a porch light that flickered and a front door that stuck. Ivy knocked three times before Emma swung it open, a glass of wine already in hand. “You’re late. I assumed you were off eloping.” Then she saw Ivy’s hand, the opal, the way Flynn’s palm was pressed to the small of Ivy’s back. Emma’s mouth opened. Shut. The wine glass sank to her chest.

“We’re engaged,” Ivy said, the words barely out before Emma shrieked and pulled her into a hug, wine sloshing onto the welcome mat. Flynn stepped inside, closed the door against the cold, and watched Ivy’s face—the startled laugh, the tears welling, the way she clutched her friend like she’d finally reached shore.

Emma pulled back, gripping Ivy’s shoulders. “You’re getting a dress. A real one. Not something off a rack. I’m coming with you, and we’re going to find something that makes him cry.” She glanced at Flynn, who was already blinking too fast. “Friday. We have five days. It’s enough. It’s more than enough.”

Emma pulled back, still gripping Ivy's shoulders, her eyes wet. "Okay. Okay. I need—" She spun toward the kitchen, bare feet slapping the linoleum. "Champagne. I have a bottle of something cheap from New Year's that I never opened because I fell asleep at ten-thirty like a ninety-year-old. Sit. Both of you. Sit right there."

Flynn guided Ivy toward the lumpy floral couch, his hand still pressed to her back. The cushions sagged under her weight, and he settled beside her with the kind of proprietary closeness that made Emma stop in the kitchen doorway, bottle in hand, and just stare.

"I've never seen you like this," Emma said, not to Ivy—to Flynn. "You're actually—Professor Ashworth, you're grinning. I've had three classes with you and I've never seen your teeth."

"I've been hiding them," Flynn said. "Tactical decision. Didn't want anyone to know I had them." He glanced at Ivy, and the grin softened into something private, something Emma was witnessing but not part of. "She found them anyway."

Ivy elbowed him. Hard. "Stop being charming. Emma's already going to be insufferable about this."

"Emma is already insufferable." Emma popped the cork—it hit the ceiling, bounced off a lampshade—and poured three mismatched glasses full to the brim. "So. Friday. Vegas. You're actually doing this." She handed a glass to Ivy, then Flynn, then raised her own. "Tell me you're doing the Elvis thing. Please tell me there's a jumpsuit."

"There's a jumpsuit." Ivy's voice was steadier than she expected. The champagne was too sweet and too warm, and it burned going down. "And a chapel. And apparently a plastic bouquet. He's put thought into this. Unsettling amounts of thought."

"Nine months," Flynn said. "The ring, the plan. I had contingencies. Spreadsheets."

"You did not have spreadsheets." Ivy turned to face him, one knee pulling up onto the couch. "Tell me you did not make a spreadsheet."

"I made a spreadsheet." He didn't look sorry. "Color-coded. It had a column for 'Ivy's probable objections' and another column for 'counterarguments.' You've already hit four of them. I'm winning."

Emma lowered herself into the armchair across from them, wine forgotten on the side table. "You've been in love with her for three years and you made a spreadsheet about marrying her. That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard or grounds for a restraining order."

"It's both," Ivy said. "I'm choosing to focus on the first one." She reached for his hand, their fingers threading together on her thigh. The opal caught the lamp light and threw it across Emma's ceiling in a scatter of blue-green sparks. Ivy watched it dance and felt something in her chest unlock—something she hadn't known was still locked. "Friday," she said again, the word settling into her. "We're getting married on Friday."

"And I'm coming with you." Emma leaned forward, her voice dropping the joking register entirely. "Not to the ceremony—that's yours. But tomorrow. I'm taking tomorrow off. We're finding a dress, and it's going to be perfect, and he's going to sob when he sees you walk toward him. Publicly. In a sequined chapel. I want photographic evidence."

The first two shops were disasters. The first had pushed ivory satin and cathedral trains until Ivy's jaw ached from smiling. The second had looked at her body and suggested "something with sleeves" three times before Emma physically dragged her out. Now they stood on a cracked sidewalk in the kind of neighborhood where boutiques sold vintage lamps and ceramic owls, and the bridal shop wedged between a bakery and a used bookstore was barely wider than its own window display. No mannequins in white. No tulle.

"This one," Emma said, her hand on the brass door handle. "I have a good feeling."

"You said that about the last one. And the one before that." Ivy's glasses had fogged from the cold and she didn't bother wiping them. "If one more consultant tells me what I should be 'camouflaging,' I'm getting married in what I'm wearing."

"You're wearing jeans and his Henley."

"He likes the Henley."

Inside, the shop smelled of old roses and steam heat. Gowns hung from copper pipes along exposed brick walls, and the woman behind the counter—seventy if she was a day, with silver braids coiled on her head—didn't look up from her embroidery hoop. "Dresses are sorted by color, not by size. Try whatever you want. I'll be here if you need zippers."

Ivy exhaled for what felt like the first time since breakfast. Emma was already moving, her fingers trailing through jewel tones—sapphire, garnet, something deep and burnt orange. And then she stopped. Her hand closed around a hanger and she pulled it free, the fabric sliding past the others with a whisper Ivy felt in her chest.

"Oh," Emma said. Just that.

The dress was emerald green. Not the muted green of academic robes or the pale green of hospital scrubs—this was deep and alive, a color that held light and threw it back. The neckline plunged in a V, held by thin straps, and the skirt fell in unbroken silk to the floor. No beading. No lace. Just the color, saturated and certain, like someone had spun the dress from a single, perfect hour of dusk. Emma held it up to Ivy's shoulders, and the green hit her chestnut hair and turned it into something darker, richer, the red undertones surfacing like flame. Her dark eyes caught the reflection and shifted, the hazel notes pulling forward.

"Try it," Emma whispered. "Ivy. Try it."

The fitting room was a curtained alcove with a three-way mirror and a stool Ivy didn't trust with her weight. She stripped to her underwear—plain black, practical, nothing bridal about them—and stepped into the dress. The silk slid over her hips like it had been waiting. She couldn't reach the zipper. "Emma."

Emma's hands were steady on the tab, pulling upward in one slow motion. The dress closed around Ivy's back like a second skin, and Emma stepped away, and Ivy faced the mirror.

The woman in the glass didn't look hidden. She didn't look like someone compensating, or dressing for a body she wished she had. The green plunged between her breasts and draped over her stomach and her thighs in a fall of silk that moved when she breathed. Her shoulders were bare and strong. The opal ring glinted against the dark fabric like a promise set in a forest. Her hair—still in its messy bun, though pieces had escaped—looked intentional now, like a Romantic poet mid-sonnet. And her eyes, caught in the green, had stopped being brown. They were hazel shot through with amber, and they were wet.

"Ivy." Emma's voice was thick. She was standing behind her in the mirror, hands clasped over her mouth. "That's it. That's the one."

Ivy couldn't speak. She turned, watching the silk swing, watching herself from the side, from the other side, from behind. Her back. Her hips. The curve of her ass in unbroken green. She looked like a woman someone had made a spreadsheet for. She looked like a woman Flynn Ashworth would sob over. She looked like herself—the version she'd been too afraid to imagine into existence.

"Yeah," she said finally, her voice cracking. "Yeah. This is it."

The woman with the silver braids looked up from her embroidery hoop as Ivy pushed through the curtain. Her needle stopped mid-stitch, and for a long moment she said nothing—just studied Ivy in the emerald silk with the kind of stillness that belonged to someone who had spent decades watching women find themselves in her mirrors.

"That color," she said finally, setting the hoop aside. "I bought that silk from a dyer in Lyon who works only with natural pigments. He said it was the exact shade of the Rhône at sunset in August. I thought he was being French." She rose, her knees clicking, and crossed to Ivy with a measuring tape already unspooling from her palm. "He was not being French."

Emma hadn't moved from her spot by the mirror. Her hands were still pressed over her mouth, but her eyes were doing something complicated—wet and fierce and fiercely proud, the way someone looks when they're watching a thing they'd stopped believing would ever happen.

"How much?" Ivy's voice came out steadier than she felt. She was still watching herself in the three-way glass, turning slightly to catch the way the silk moved when she breathed. "I need to know before I fall any further in love with it."

The woman named a figure. It was not a small figure. It was a figure that would have made Ivy laugh and walk out of the first two shops, but she was standing in a green silk dress that made her look like a woman who had been waiting for someone to see her, and she'd already said yes, and the word had cracked in her throat and come out true.

"Okay," Ivy said. She was still facing the mirror. She watched herself say it. "I'll take it."

Emma made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, and the silver-haired woman nodded once—a crisp, professional nod that didn't match the softness in her eyes—and began unpinning the hem she hadn't been asked to adjust. "It doesn't need alterations. That's rare. That's the dress choosing you, not the other way around."

Ivy stood in her underwear behind the curtain while the woman slid the dress onto a padded hanger and disappeared through a beaded doorway with Ivy's credit card. The boutique was quiet except for the clack of beads and the distant hum of the radiator. Emma passed her the Henley and the jeans through the gap in the curtain, and Ivy dressed herself back into her ordinary life with hands that felt different—surer, slower, like she was handling something precious.

When the woman returned, she carried the dress in a garment bag the color of dark chocolate, and she pressed it into Ivy's arms with the gravity of someone handing over an artifact. "He'll cry," she said, and it wasn't a question. "They always cry when the dress is green. I don't know why. Something about the unexpectedness." She touched the opal ring on Ivy's finger—just a brush of her thumb—and her smile deepened. "Egyptian. I recognize the hieroglyphs. Someone paid attention."

On the sidewalk outside, the cold hit Ivy's cheeks and she realized they were wet. Emma was already on her phone, texting someone—Flynn, probably, though Ivy didn't ask—and the garment bag hung heavy on its ribbon strap, bumping against Ivy's hip with every step. The weight of it was real. The silk inside was real. She had bought a wedding dress in a shop wedged between a bakery and a used bookstore, and somewhere across town Flynn Ashworth was probably making another spreadsheet, and in four days she would walk toward him wearing the exact shade of the Rhône at sunset.

Emma shoved her phone into her coat pocket and turned to Ivy with the kind of intensity usually reserved for dissertation defenses and hostage negotiations. "You need the right undergarments." She held up a hand before Ivy could object. "Not the practical black things you've got on. The dress is bias-cut silk. It shows everything. And I mean everything. You need something seamless, something that disappears under the fabric, and—" a grin split her face, "—you need wedding night lingerie."

"I have underwear," Ivy said. "Several pairs. Some of them match."

"That's not wedding night lingerie and you know it." Emma was already moving, her hand closing around Ivy's wrist with the grip of a woman who had never been told no by a clearance rack. "My wedding gift. You get no say in this. You get no say in the price, you get no say in the color, you get no say in how much lace is involved. You just stand there and let me dress you like the goddess you are."

Three blocks later, Ivy stood in front of a shop with windows tinted the color of champagne and a sign so understated it was nearly an apology for existing. The door opened onto carpet thick enough to swallow her sneakers, and the air smelled of tuberose and something that probably cost more per ounce than her monthly grocery budget. Mannequins wore wisps of silk and French lace, their nipples visible through fabric so fine it might as well not exist, and Ivy felt her face go hot before she'd taken three steps.

"Emma," she hissed, "this is the kind of place where a thong costs more than my car insurance."

"You don't have a car." Emma was already fingering a robe the color of champagne, the silk sliding through her fingers like water. "And it's my gift. I've been saving for this since you told me you loved him. Which, by the way, was three years ago. I've got a lot of savings."

A saleswoman materialized from somewhere behind a display of lace bodysuits—tall, immaculate, wearing a sheath dress that probably cost more than Ivy's entire wardrobe. Her smile was professional and warm and utterly devoid of judgment. "Are we shopping for a special occasion?"

"Wedding night," Emma said, before Ivy could open her mouth. "And the night before the wedding night, because she should have something to wear the morning of. And maybe the week after. She's been in love with him for three years and he made a spreadsheet about marrying her, so we need something that makes him forget how to speak."

The saleswoman's eyes flicked to Ivy—took in the jeans, the glasses, the messy bun, the Henley that was definitely Flynn's—and her smile deepened into something genuine. "Then we'll need the fitting room with the good lighting. Follow me."

Ivy followed, because Emma's hand was still on her wrist and the saleswoman was already pulling things from racks: emerald silk to match the dress, a deep wine red that looked like spilled merlot, something black and barely there, a bodysuit with a thousand tiny hooks that Ivy couldn't imagine anyone getting out of without scissors. She stood in the fitting room—larger than her first apartment's bathroom, with a velvet chaise and a three-way mirror and lighting that made her skin look like it had been lit from within—and stared at the pile of lace and silk and things she didn't have names for.

"Start with the green," Emma called through the curtain. "The one with the—you'll know it. It's the one that looks like a dream a French courtesan would have."

Ivy found it: a chemise in emerald silk charmeuse, cut on the bias, with a plunging neckline held by straps so thin they might as well have been spider silk. The lace at the hem was black Chantilly, and it would hit her mid-thigh—exactly where Flynn's hand would land if he slid it up her leg. She stripped off the Henley, her jeans, the practical black bra, the practical black underwear, and stepped into the chemise like she was stepping into a version of herself she hadn't met yet.

The silk was cold at first—that brief shock of fabric against warm skin that made her nipples tighten and her breath catch somewhere high in her chest. Then it warmed, the charmeuse sliding over her stomach and her hips and her thighs like it was learning her shape, memorizing the curve of her waist and the heavy swell of her breasts. The straps settled into the hollows of her shoulders. The hem kissed her mid-thigh, exactly where she'd known it would, and the black Chantilly lace at the edge was a whisper of texture against skin that suddenly felt more alive than it had a minute ago.

She lifted the chemise by the hem and let it fall. Watched it settle. Lifted it again—higher this time, the silk pooling in her hands, exposing the tops of her thighs and the dark triangle of hair she hadn't thought about until right now, and she'd need to do something about that before the wedding night, or maybe she wouldn't, maybe Flynn wouldn't care, maybe he'd press his mouth there just the same—and let it drop. The weight of the silk against her skin was a promise. It was the lightest thing she'd ever worn and it felt like armor.

"Well?" Emma's voice through the curtain was strained with the effort of patience. "Are you going to make me stand out here imagining, or are you going to let me see?"

Ivy turned in the mirror. The chemise moved with her, the bias cut clinging and releasing, and from the side her stomach was a soft curve under emerald silk, her ass round and full and unapologetic, and she didn't look like a woman who needed to apologize for taking up space. She looked like a woman who had been invited to occupy exactly as much space as she wanted. She pulled the messy bun free and let her hair fall around her shoulders—chestnut waves that hadn't seen a brush since this morning, and she didn't care—and the woman in the mirror was someone Flynn Ashworth would go quiet for.

"Okay," she said, and her voice was steadier than she'd expected. "Come in."

Emma pushed through the curtain and stopped. Just stopped, one hand still holding the velvet aside, her mouth opening and closing like she'd forgotten how words worked. The silence stretched—three seconds, five—and then Emma made a sound that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a sob and was somehow both.

"Ivy." She stepped closer, her eyes moving from the plunging neckline to the lace hem to Ivy's bare feet on the thick carpet. "Ivy, you look like—you look like a painting. One of those Pre-Raphaelite ones where the woman is too beautiful to be real and you spend twenty minutes staring at her in the museum and then you go home and you can't stop thinking about her hair."

"My hair is a mess." But Ivy was smiling, and her eyes were doing something complicated in the mirror—wet again, because apparently everything today was going to make her cry, the dress and the chemise and Emma looking at her like she'd sculpted her out of marble.

"Your hair is a goddamn Renaissance masterpiece and I will fight anyone who says otherwise." Emma circled her, fingers brushing the hem of the chemise without quite touching it, the way someone might hover near a painting in a museum. "The green is perfect. It's the exact color of the dress. It's like you planned it, except you didn't, because you didn't even know this shop existed until I dragged you here."

"I still don't know how you found it."

"I have my sources." Emma's grin was sharp and delighted and full of something that looked a lot like pride. "Now try the wine-red one. And the black bodysuit. And that thing with the thousand hooks—I want to see if you can get into it without Flynn's help, because if you can't, that's not a bug, that's a feature."

Ivy laughed, the snort breaking through before she could stop it, and she didn't try to stop it. She stood in the fitting room with the good lighting and the velvet chaise and the carpet thick enough to sleep on, wearing an emerald chemise that made her feel like someone who deserved a wedding night, and Emma was already pushing more silk through the curtain—the wine-red, the black, something ivory with French seams and a neckline that would plunge to her navel—and the pile on the chaise was growing, and somewhere across town Flynn was probably grading papers or making another spreadsheet or drinking cold coffee and staring at the wall, and he didn't know that in four days she'd be standing in front of him in emerald silk that matched the hour of dusk someone had spun into a dress.

The wine-red piece was a slip dress cut high on the thigh, the silk so thin it felt liquid against her skin. She pulled it over her head and let it slither down her body, the straps settling into the grooves of her shoulders, the hem stopping two inches below the curve of her ass. When she turned in the three-way mirror, the back was a single slash of bare skin from her shoulder blades to the base of her spine, held together by nothing but a delicate chain that glinted under the good lighting.

"Turn again," Emma said, her voice muffled through the curtain. "I need to see if it does the thing."

Ivy turned. The silk moved like it was breathing with her. "What thing?"

"The thing where Flynn forgets his own name." Emma pushed through the curtain without waiting for permission, took one look at the exposed back, and made a sound like she'd been punched. "That's the one. That's the emergency backup in case the emerald doesn't work. You're buying that."

"I haven't even tried the black bodysuit yet."

"Then try it fast, because I'm already budgeting for this one and my willpower has limits."

The black bodysuit had a thousand tiny hooks up the front—French, impossibly small, each one a silver crescent that caught the light—and Ivy couldn't get past the fourth hook without Emma's help. Emma's fingers worked upward from her navel, fastening each hook with the precision of someone who had done this before and would not elaborate on when or why. The bodysuit cupped her breasts like hands, the lace covering exactly enough to be legal and nothing more, and between her thighs the fabric was so insubstantial it might as well have been a dare.

"This is the one you wear when you want him to destroy it," Emma said, stepping back. "He'll try to be careful for about four seconds, and then the hooks will start pinging off and you'll find them behind the nightstand for weeks."

"That's a feature?" Ivy's voice came out higher than she meant it to.

"That's the whole point."

The last piece—the ivory one with French seams and a neckline that plunged to her navel—was elegant in a way that made Ivy feel fraudulent for three seconds before she caught her own reflection and stopped. The silk was heavy, the kind of fabric that moved with authority, and the cut made her waist look defined and her hips look like an invitation. She pulled the messy bun free and shook out her hair, and the woman in the mirror was not someone who apologized for taking up space. She was someone who had been invited.

"That's the morning-of," Emma said, quieter now. "When you're getting your hair done and you're nervous and you need something that makes you feel like you've already won. It's armor, Ivy. Silk armor."

Ivy touched the edge of the neckline where the silk folded back on itself. "I didn't know lingerie could feel like this."

"Most people don't. That's why I have sources."

Then Emma pushed the last piece through the curtain—and Ivy's breath stopped. It was red. Not wine-red, not merlot, not anything tasteful or restrained. It was red like a fire engine, red like a scream, red like the inside of something raw and hungry. The bodysuit was mostly absence, long sleeves and a high neck held together by slashes of negative space: a cutout below her collarbone, a cutout over her sternum, another below her ribs, another low on her belly that dipped so far she wasn't sure the fabric would cover anything at all. The back was entirely open, held by a single strap that bisected her shoulder blades, and the crotch fastened with a single snap that looked like it would give way if she breathed too hard.

"That one," Emma said, "is for the night after the wedding night. When you've already had him and you want him again and you want him to know you came prepared."

"This isn't a bodysuit. This is a dare with sleeves."

"Put it on."

Ivy stepped into it like she was stepping into a question she wasn't sure she could answer. The fabric was spandex and mesh and something that glittered when it caught the light—not sequins, something finer, thread woven with metal that made her skin look dusted in rubies. The long sleeves clung to her arms like a second skin. The high neck framed her throat. The cutouts framed everything else, strategic slashes that showed the swell of her breasts but not her nipples, the soft curve of her belly, the place where her hip became her thigh. The snap between her legs held. Barely.

She turned to the mirror and didn't recognize herself for three full seconds. The woman in the reflection was not the woman who wore oversized sweaters and messy buns and used sarcasm as armor. The woman in the reflection was a weapon. She was exposed and covered in all the wrong places, vulnerable and invincible at the same time, and her dark eyes were wide and raw and full of something that looked a lot like power.

"I don't know if I'm brave enough to wear this," Ivy said, and her voice was barely a whisper.

"You are," Emma said, and her voice was absolutely certain. "You've been brave enough for three years. The bravest thing you can do now is let him see what he's been waiting for."

In the end, Ivy bought the seamless nude thong and the adhesive cups that would disappear under the green silk dress, because Emma was right about bias cut showing everything and the woman at the dress shop had been right about the dress choosing her and the undergarments needed to choose her too. She bought the emerald chemise because it had made her feel like a painting, and she bought the wine-red slip because Emma had made the noise, and she bought the black bodysuit with the thousand hooks because she wanted to hear them ping off behind the nightstand. And she bought the red one—the barely-there, the dare-with-sleeves, the thing that glittered like rubies and left her mostly naked and completely terrifying—because Emma had looked at her with absolute certainty and Ivy had believed her.

The garment bags were the color of dark chocolate and the lingerie boutique's bag was the color of champagne, and Ivy carried all of it three blocks back to Emma's car with her arms full and her heart beating somewhere high in her throat. The cold air bit her cheeks and she didn't care. Her wallet was lighter by an amount she would not think about until next month. She didn't care about that either.

Flynn was waiting in the kitchen when she got home, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee that had probably been hot an hour ago and was now definitely cold. The kitchen smelled like old wood and the faint ghost of sandalwood, and the single bulb over the sink cast shadows that made his jaw look sharper and his green eyes look darker. He straightened when she came through the door, his gaze dropping to the bags, and the question was already forming on his lips.

"Don't," Ivy said. She held the bags behind her back like a shield. "Don't look. Don't ask. You get no information until Saturday."

"That's four days." His voice dropped into the lower register, the one that meant he was already imagining what was in the bags. "You're going to stand in our kitchen, holding evidence, and forbid me from investigating?"

"Yes." She backed toward the stairs, the bags bumping against her calves. "This is my wedding armor. You don't get to see it until I'm wearing it, and I'm not wearing it until I'm walking toward you in a green silk dress, and you're going to stand there and drink your cold coffee and trust me."

He set down the mug. His eyes tracked the bags, then her face, then the bags again, and something flickered in his expression—amusement, hunger, a tenderness so raw it made her chest ache. "I trust you."

"Good." She was already on the third stair, the garment bags trailing behind her. "Then you can wait four days without peeking."

"Ivy."

She stopped. His voice had changed—not the low register, something else. Something steadier.

"Whatever's in those bags," he said, "I already know I'm not ready for it."

She smiled, and it wasn't a sarcastic smile, and it wasn't a shield. It was the smile of a woman who had bought a red bodysuit with strategic cutouts and a black bodysuit with a thousand hooks and an emerald chemise that made her feel like someone who deserved a wedding night. "You have no idea," she said, and carried her armor upstairs.

The morning after the shopping trip, Flynn made omelets while Ivy sat on the counter in his button-down and nothing else, her bare thighs sticking to the cold tile. The radio was playing something with too much saxophone, and the coffee was fresh, and for twenty minutes neither of them mentioned that in four days they'd be married. It was the most ordinary morning Ivy had ever lived, and it felt like stealing something.

"You're staring," she said, and dragged her finger through the condensation on her water glass.

"I'm admiring." He didn't look away. The spatula hung loose in his hand, eggs going cold in the pan. "There's a difference."

"There's burned omelets."

He turned back to the stove too late. The edges had gone brown and crisp, and he scraped the whole thing into the trash with a sound that was more laugh than sigh. "I'll start over."

"You'll burn the second one too, and then we'll eat toast and I'll still marry you." She hopped down from the counter, the hem of his shirt riding high on her thighs, and reached past him for the bread. He caught her wrist before she could open the bag. Not hard. Not demanding. Just—held.

"I want to talk about something," he said, and his voice had dropped into the register that meant he'd been turning the words over in his head for hours. Maybe days.

Ivy set down the bread. "That's never a good opening."

"I've been thinking about Saturday. About the wedding." His thumb traced the inside of her wrist, the blue vein there, the place her pulse beat against his skin. "And I want to wait."

"Wait for what? We're already engaged. We've already set the date. We've already—" She gestured vaguely at the counter where she'd been sitting, where they'd fucked two nights ago when the dishes were still in the sink and neither of them had made it to the bedroom. "We're not exactly practicing restraint."

"That's what I mean." He let go of her wrist and leaned back against the counter, arms crossed over his chest, and for a moment he looked like the professor who'd spent three years maintaining a distance he hated. "I don't want to touch you again until our wedding night."

The words landed in Ivy's chest like a stone dropped into still water. Not the splash—the silence after. She stared at him, at his arms still crossed over his chest, at the careful way he was holding himself against the counter like he needed the support.

"You want to wait." Her voice came out flat. Not angry. Not hurt. Just—flat. "You want to stop touching me until Saturday."

"I want to want you without taking you." He uncrossed his arms, then crossed them again, and the gesture was so un-Flynn-like that she almost laughed. He never fidgeted. He was the man who could stand perfectly still while a lecture hall full of undergrads asked the same question six different ways. "I've been thinking about it since you came home with those bags. About what we've been doing."

"What we've been doing is fucking each other senseless every chance we get, and as far as I can tell, we both like it." She pulled the hem of his shirt down, a reflex, but the shirt was too short and her thighs were too bare and the cold air hit the places he'd kissed two nights ago. "So explain it to me. Why wait?"

"Because I want Saturday to matter." He pushed off the counter and took a step toward her, then stopped, like he'd hit an invisible wall. "Not just the ceremony. Not just the paperwork. I want the first time I touch you as your husband to feel different. I want to earn it."

"You've already earned it. You earned it three years ago when you graded my first paper and wrote 'exceptional' in the margin. You earned it every time you looked at me across the lecture hall and didn't say anything. You earned it the night you dropped to your knees in the library stacks." She stepped toward him now, closing the distance he'd left, her bare feet cold on the tile. "You don't have to earn anything else."

His throat moved. She watched it happen—the swallow, the way his jaw tightened for half a second before he spoke. "Three days," he said. "That's all I'm asking. Three days without my hands on you, without your mouth on me, without us falling into bed before we've finished a conversation. I want to marry you hungry."

She should have argued. She should have told him that hunger wasn't the problem, that they'd been hungry for three years and starving for the last two weeks and the only thing that had changed was that now they got to eat. But she looked at his face—the green eyes she'd dreamed about, the silver at his temples, the exhaustion underneath the wanting—and she realized this wasn't about punishment. It was about ritual. About the thing he did best, the thing he'd built his whole life around: finding meaning in old things, in waiting, in the slow excavation of something precious.

"You're an idiot," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "A romantic, old-fashioned, Egyptologist idiot who wants to pretend we haven't already memorized each other's bodies."

"I'm not pretending." He caught her hand, the one she hadn't realized she'd raised to touch his chest. His fingers closed around hers, and the calluses on his palm scraped her knuckles, and for one long second she thought he was going to kiss her and ruin his own vow before it started. But he didn't. He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles—the same gesture from the rare books room, the night he'd given her the key and shown her the love letter and told her he was desperately, hopelessly in love with her. "Three days, Ivy. Then I'm going to marry you, and I'm going to take you home, and I'm going to unwrap every single thing you bought with Emma."

"You don't even know what I bought."

"I don't need to know." His lips moved against her knuckles, and his breath was warm and his voice was the low register, the one that made her thighs clench. "I just need to know you bought it for me."

She pulled her hand back and pressed it flat against her own chest, over the place where her heart was doing something complicated and painful and so full she couldn't name it. "Three days," she said. "No kissing. No touching. No—"

"No kissing wasn't part of the deal." His boyish grin surfaced, the one that made him look ten years younger. "I said I wouldn't touch you until our wedding night. I didn't say I wouldn't kiss you."

He kissed her then—once, soft, his lips barely brushing hers before he pulled back. It wasn't a kiss that asked for more. It was a kiss that promised more, later, when the waiting was over. And somehow that was worse than hunger. That was starvation with a menu.

"You're going to burn the second omelet," she said against his mouth.

"Let it burn."

The first night, she lasted until two in the morning before she rolled onto her side and stared at his profile in the dark. He was awake. She knew because his breathing had the wrong rhythm, too shallow, too careful, like a man pretending to be asleep while every nerve in his body was tuned to the woman lying six inches away.

"Flynn."

"Mm."

"I can't sleep." She pressed her palm flat against the mattress between them, not touching him, just occupying the space where his body wasn't. "And I know you're not asleep either, so don't pretend."

He turned his head on the pillow. The streetlight through the window caught the green of his eyes, and she watched him give up the pretense with a slow exhale. "What do you need?"

"Your hands." She said it without sarcasm, without the shield. Just the truth, bare and hungry in the dark. "I don't mean sex. I mean—your palm on my hip. Your fingers on my spine. Just. Your hands. Everywhere you're not touching me right now."

His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle jump, the way his throat moved as he swallowed. "Ivy."

"I know. Three days. You made a vow." She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "I'm not asking you to break it. I'm telling you why I can't sleep. There's a difference."

The silence stretched. Then the sheets rustled, and his hand found her hip through the blanket—not skin, not yet, but the weight of his palm settled into the curve of her like an anchor. "Like this?"

"Yes." Her voice came out wrecked. "Exactly like that."

She fell asleep with his hand on her hip, the heat of it bleeding through the cotton, and dreamed of nothing at all.

By the third night, she'd stopped pretending she wasn't testing him. She'd climb into bed in one of his old t-shirts and nothing else, the hem riding high on her thighs, and she'd lie on her side facing him with her dark eyes wide and her mouth soft and the words already forming. "Flynn." A pause. "I need your mouth." And he'd groan, low in his chest, and press his lips to her forehead like a benediction, like a man praying for strength, and she'd feel the tremor in his arms when he pulled back. "You're killing me," he said once, and she heard the laugh caught in his throat and the wanting underneath it, and she almost—almost—told him to break the vow right there. But she didn't. She kissed his jaw instead, the scratch of stubble, the salt of his skin, and pulled away before he could deepen it.

Friday morning, the airport was a chaos of rolling suitcases and bad coffee and announcements that made no sense over the intercom. Ivy sat in the hard plastic chair at gate C-14, her carry-on wedged between her ankles, watching Flynn scan the departure board for the third time. He'd worn the tweed jacket. He always wore the jacket when he was nervous, like armor against the ordinary world.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Doing what?" He didn't look at her.

"Checking the board like the gate's going to change. It's not going to change. We're going to Vegas. You're marrying me tomorrow." She stood up and stepped into his space, close enough that her chest nearly brushed his arm. "And you're still not touching me."

His eyes dropped to her mouth. "That was the deal."

"I know." She went up on her toes, her lips at his ear, her breath warm against the silver at his temple. "But I've been thinking about something. About what happens when we get on that plane." Her voice dropped to a whisper, so low only he could hear it, so filthy she felt her own thighs clench. "About whether you'd fuck me in that tiny bathroom at thirty thousand feet. About whether I could be quiet enough." She paused, let the words land. "About whether you'd even care if I wasn't."

His hand shot out and gripped her hip—hard, the way he'd held her in the library stacks, the way that meant he was two seconds from forgetting every vow he'd made. The tweed of his sleeve scratched her arm. "Ivy." His voice was gravel and smoke. "We are in an airport. There are children."

"Then you'd better behave." She pulled back, met his eyes, and smiled the smile of a woman who had bought a red bodysuit and an emerald chemise and a black thing with a thousand hooks. "For now."

The boarding announcement crackled overhead. Flynn didn't let go of her hip until the second call.

The flight itself was a study in controlled agony. Ivy sat in the window seat with her carry-on wedged beneath the seat in front of her, and Flynn sat in the aisle seat with his tweed jacket folded over his lap like a man who needed something—anything—between his body and the woman beside him. Their knees touched once, when the plane banked over the Rockies, and Flynn pulled back as if she'd burned him.

"Sorry," he muttered.

"Don't be." She didn't move her knee. Left it there, a warm pressure against the wool of his trousers, and watched his jaw tighten in profile. He didn't move away again.

The first time she unbuckled her seatbelt and stood, he looked up with the expression of a man who had seen this coming and had no defense against it. She let her hip brush his shoulder as she squeezed past him into the aisle. The contact was brief—denim against tweed, the soft give of her thigh against the hard line of his shoulder—but she felt him go still beneath it. She heard the slow exhale he didn't quite manage to hold back. She walked toward the lavatory at the rear of the plane without looking back, and she felt his eyes on her the whole way.

Inside, she locked the door and pressed her forehead to the cold plastic of the mirror. The bathroom smelled of chemical soap and recycled air. Tiny. Cramped. The kind of place where two bodies would have to press together just to fit, where her back would hit the wall and his chest would pin her there and there would be no room for anything except the heat of him and the sound of her own breathing and the vibration of the engines through the floor. She didn't use the toilet. She stood there for three minutes, counting the thrum of the engines, imagining his hands on her hips and his mouth on her throat and the way he'd have to cover her mouth with his palm to keep her quiet. Then she flushed for appearances and walked back to her seat.

She climbed past him again, slower this time, and let herself fall into the window seat with a sigh. "Cramped in there," she said, and buckled her seatbelt. "Tiny." She pulled the magazine from the seatback pocket and flipped to an article about desert wildflowers. "Lonely."

Flynn made a sound low in his chest. Not quite a word. Something closer to a groan, the kind of noise a man makes when he's been holding something back so long his body has forgotten how to keep quiet.

The second time she stood, he caught her wrist. Not hard. His fingers circled the thin skin above her pulse, and she felt the calluses on his thumb, and she stopped moving. Stood there in the narrow space between their seats, her wrist in his hand, the plane humming around them and the woman across the aisle scrolling through her phone and the child two rows back asking for pretzels and none of it mattering because Flynn Ashworth was touching her for the first time in three days and his grip was exactly as desperate as she'd hoped it would be.

"Ivy." Just her name. Nothing else. But his voice was wrecked, and his thumb was moving in a slow circle against her pulse point, and his green eyes were fixed on her face with the intensity of a man who had spent seventy-two hours memorizing the ceiling and pretending he didn't want to roll over and take her. "You're not going to the bathroom."

"I'm not?"

"You're going to sit back down." He released her wrist. The absence of his grip was its own kind of ache. "And you're going to tell me about the desert wildflowers, or the in-flight safety procedures, or anything else that will keep me from thinking about what you just said. About how lonely it was." His voice cracked on the word lonely. "Please."

She sat down. But she didn't pick up the magazine. She leaned close, her lips near his ear, her voice low enough that only he could hear. "The bathroom," she said, "is very small. The walls are thin plastic. You can hear the engines through the floor, and the whole thing vibrates, and if someone were inside with the door locked and someone else's hand over her mouth—" She watched his knuckles go white on the armrest. "—nobody would know. Nobody would hear anything except the engines. Nobody would knock, because they'd just assume it was occupied and wait." She pulled back, just far enough to meet his eyes. "Three more hours, Flynn. You're doing so well."

He groaned. Full-throated this time, a sound that started in his chest and escaped through his teeth before he could stop it. The woman across the aisle glanced over, then looked away quickly. Some things were too private to witness.

The hotel lobby was all marble and gold leaf, the kind of Vegas opulence that shouted money without saying anything at all. Ivy stood at the check-in counter with her hip pressed against the cool stone, watching Flynn's hands shake as he signed the registration form. His signature looked like a seismograph reading—all jagged lines and desperate pressure. The concierge handed over two key cards with a smile that suggested she'd seen everything and this wasn't even in her top ten.

"The honeymoon suite," Flynn said, and his voice was sandpaper on silk. "I booked it three weeks ago. Before the vow." He didn't look at Ivy when he said it. He was looking at the elevator bank like it was a firing squad and he'd volunteered to go first.

The room was obscene. Rose petals on the king-sized bed, a bottle of champagne sweating in a silver bucket, a bathtub big enough for four people and a view of the Strip that stretched all the way to the desert. Ivy stood in the doorway and felt something crack open in her chest—not desire, not yet, but the sheer overwhelming weight of being wanted this much, this specifically, by a man who had booked a honeymoon suite three weeks before she'd proposed to him.

"You booked this before I asked you to marry me." She said it flat, because if she let any emotion into her voice she was going to start crying and never stop.

"I was hopeful." He was standing by the window, his back to her, his shoulders a rigid line against the neon glow of the Strip. His tweed jacket was still on, and she realized he was using it as armor—the same way he always did, the same way he'd worn it on the plane, the same way he was probably going to wear it to their wedding tomorrow because Flynn Ashworth didn't know how to be vulnerable without something between him and the world. "I'm going to sleep on the couch."

"The hell you are." She crossed the room in four strides, her sneakers silent on the thick carpet, and stopped just behind him. Close enough to feel the heat coming off his body. Close enough to see the tension in his neck, the way his pulse hammered in the hollow of his throat. "Flynn. Turn around."

He didn't turn around. His voice came out low and wrecked, the voice of a man who had been holding himself together with nothing but dental floss and academic pride for seventy-two hours. "I can't sleep next to you tonight. I can't—Ivy, I'm so far gone right now I don't trust myself to lie beside you and not touch you. I don't trust myself not to roll over in my sleep and take what I've been starving for. I've waited three years. I can wait one more night. But I can't—" His voice broke. His hands, at his sides, were shaking. "I can't be in that bed with you. Not tonight. Not and keep my word."

She reached out and put her palm flat against his spine, right between his shoulder blades, right where the tweed was worn soft from years of lectures and library shelves and lonely nights she hadn't been there to fill. He flinched. Then he didn't move at all, just stood there breathing, and she felt the shudder that ran through him like an earthquake he'd been holding back for decades.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was steady. She made it steady, because one of them had to be, and right now it wasn't going to be him. "You take the couch. I'll take the bed. But you have to do one thing for me first."

"Anything." The word came out before she'd finished speaking. Desperate. Immediate. The word of a man who would have given her anything she asked for, anything at all, and meant it with every cell in his body.

"Take off the jacket." She pressed her forehead to the space between his shoulder blades, breathed in the smell of him—old books and sandalwood and the faint salt of sweat from the flight—and let her voice drop to a murmur. "You've been wearing it like armor all day. Take it off. Hang it in the closet. And then you're going to tell me what you need, right now, in this room, that isn't sex. Because I've been torturing you for three days and I'm not going to stop wanting you, but I am going to stop making it harder than it has to be. Tell me what you need."

He turned. Slowly, like a man moving through water, like the air itself had thickened around him and every inch was a battle. His green eyes met hers, and what she saw there wasn't lust—it was deeper than lust, older, something that had been growing in the dark of him long before she'd walked into his lecture hall. "I need you to stop looking at me like that," he said, and his voice cracked on every word. "I need you to stop being in the room with me and smelling like that and breathing like that and making me want to break every promise I've ever made. I need—" He stopped. Swallowed. His hands found her hips, and the grip was exactly as desperate as it had been on the plane, exactly as hungry, exactly as barely-controlled. "I need to sleep on the couch tonight. Alone. And I need you to let me."

She went up on her toes and kissed him—soft, brief, the barest press of her lips to the corner of his mouth—and then pulled back before he could deepen it. "Then sleep on the couch," she said. "But I'm going to be in that bed, thinking about you, and tomorrow morning I'm going to marry you, and tomorrow night I'm going to let you break every promise you ever made about keeping your hands to yourself. Deal?"

His laugh was jagged and surprised, the boyish sound she'd heard in the library stacks and the rare books room and every other time she'd cracked him open. "Deal." He released her hips, and the absence of his grip was a physical ache, but she watched him walk to the closet and hang up his jacket and it felt like a different kind of surrender—not defeat, but trust. He was trusting her to let him keep his word.

She climbed into the king-sized bed alone, surrounded by rose petals and the distant thrum of the Strip and the sound of Flynn settling onto the couch on the other side of the room. The sheets were cool and impossibly soft, and she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and listened to him breathe in the dark. "Flynn?"

"Yeah." His voice was already thick with exhaustion, the kind of bone-deep tired that came from wanting something so badly your body forgot how to rest.

"I love you. That's all. Just—I love you."

A pause. The rustle of blankets on the couch. His voice, when it came, was barely a whisper, but she heard every word. "I love you too. Now go to sleep. We're getting married tomorrow."

She closed her eyes and pressed her palm to the empty space beside her and thought about tomorrow night, when the couch would be empty and the bed would be full and Flynn Ashworth would finally, finally stop holding back. The wanting hadn't lessened. But it had settled into something steadier—not a fire, but a hearth. Something that would still be burning in the morning.