The gallery is a cathedral of white walls and polished concrete, and Adrian's paintings are the sermon nobody expected to believe in.

I watch from the corner—my corner, the one I've claimed by virtue of being invisible—as collectors circle his work like sharks who've caught the scent of blood in the water. Their mouths make the right shapes. Their hands gesture with practiced appreciation. But their eyes are calculating something Adrian probably doesn't even register: net worth. Investment potential. The kind of beauty that appreciates when you store it in a climate-controlled vault.

Adrian stands near his largest piece—a canvas that looks like someone detonated a sunset inside a fever dream—and he looks like he's being slowly buried alive.

His mother stands beside him in a cream-colored dress that probably costs more than my annual tuition, her posture a masterclass in controlled disapproval. She has Adrian's cheekbones but none of his softness. Where he's all uncertain angles and apologetic hands, she's a blade wrapped in Hermès silk.

"You're doing that thing," Marcus says, materializing beside me with two glasses of champagne I didn't ask for but desperately need. "Where you watch him like you're trying to solve a math equation with your eyes."

"I'm not doing anything."

"Exactly. You're standing in the corner like you're waiting for permission to exist in the same room as him." He hands me a glass. "Which is very on-brand for you, by the way. Very sad and very predictable."

I elbow him hard enough to make him slosh champagne on his vintage Sonic Youth shirt. "You're supposed to be my friend."

"I am your friend. That's why I'm telling you that you look like you're about to either seduce him or commit a crime, and I'm genuinely unsure which one would be worse for your reputation."

The thing about Marcus is that he's not wrong, which is infuriating.

Adrian finally breaks free from a collector's death grip and moves toward the bathroom. I know this because I've been tracking his movements like some kind of obsessed satellite, noting the patterns of his escape routes like they're escape routes from a prison I built myself.

"Don't," Marcus says.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're about to do. It involves following him, and it's going to end with you either confessing your feelings in a bathroom or getting arrested for stalking."

"I'm going to get water."

"There's a water station right there." He points to the refreshment table six feet away.

"I like the bathroom water better. It's more artisanal."

Marcus sighs the sigh of someone who's watched their best friend make questionable decisions for years and has decided to stop intervening. "I'll be here, judging you silently and with great intensity."

The bathroom is empty when I slip inside, which is good because I need approximately forty-five seconds to remember how to breathe normally. The mirror shows me what I already know: I'm wearing the same paint-splattered jeans I always wear, a sweater I borrowed from Adrian last week that I've been too cowardly to return, and the expression of someone attending their own funeral.

The door opens.

Adrian fills the doorway like he's taking up space he didn't know he was allowed to occupy. His eyes are the color of storm clouds, and they're looking at me with something that might be relief or might be panic. Possibly both.

"Hi," he says, like he's surprised to find me here. Like he didn't know I'd follow him into a bathroom at his own gallery opening because that's apparently the kind of person I've become.

"Hi." I turn back to the mirror because looking at him directly is like staring at the sun. You know it's there, you know it's magnificent, and you also know it will burn your retinas clean out of your skull. "Just needed a minute."

He moves closer. I can smell him now—the expensive cologne mixing with linseed oil and something underneath that's just Adrian, something raw and real that the expensive cologne is trying and failing to cover up. My body reacts like it's been trained by some higher power to betray my mind's attempts at dignity.

"Are you okay?" His voice is careful, the way you talk to something fragile.

"I'm fine. Your gallery opening is incredible. Everyone's saying so. The collectors are circling. Your agent looks like she's about to ascend to heaven. This is good. This is all very good."

None of this is what I'm thinking, which is that I watched his mother look at me like I was a stain she needed to schedule a professional cleaning for, and I watched Adrian's shoulders get smaller every time she spoke, and I watched him become someone I don't recognize—someone who's learning how to apologize for existing.

"Vera." He says my name like it's a question he's afraid to ask.

"Your mom seems nice," I lie, and I hate myself for lying but I hate more that he's standing this close and I can't touch him. "Very elegant. Very... present."

He's quiet for a moment, and in that moment I can hear the gallery outside—the murmur of voices, the clink of glasses, the sound of people consuming beauty like it's a commodity. It sounds very far away.

"She doesn't think we should—" Adrian stops. Starts again. "She thinks relationships are distracting. That they interfere with work."

There it is.

The thing I've been dreading since the moment I realized I was falling into him like he's gravity and I'm just a stupid object with no choice in the matter. The real world, intruding on our studio bubble. The people who matter to him, deciding I don't.

"Oh." I turn back to the mirror so I don't have to see his face. "Well, she's probably right. Your work is incredible. You shouldn't let anything compromise that."

"That's not what I'm saying."

"It's what your mother's saying. And she's your mother. She's known you longer than I have. She probably knows what's best for you."

I watch him in the mirror. Watch him try to find the words for something he doesn't have language for. His hand comes up like he's going to touch me and then doesn't, and that almost-touch is somehow worse than if he'd just walked away.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he says quietly. "With you. With any of this. I've never—"

"I know." And I do. I know he's never done relationships because relationships require the kind of small talk and social performance that his brain doesn't have the architecture for. I know he's never had to choose between someone he loves and someone who loves him conditionally. I know he's standing in this bathroom looking like his own internal organs are staging a mutiny.

And I know I'm about to make this easier for him by being the kind of person who doesn't require choosing.

"We should probably just focus on the work," I say, and I hate myself with a purity and intensity that's almost beautiful. "Your mom's right. You're at this incredible point in your career. You don't need the distraction."

"Vera—"

"Go back out there. People paid a lot of money to talk to you about your art. That's what matters." I turn around and I'm smiling, which is a lie my face is telling because my mouth has betrayed my brain's better judgment. "I'm going to head out actually. Early morning tomorrow. Studio stuff."

He looks at me like I've just told him I'm moving to a different country. Like I've just explained that gravity is optional and he's been doing it wrong the whole time.

"You're leaving?"

"Yeah. You should stay. This is your night." I move past him toward the door, and I make sure not to touch him because if I touch him I'll cry and I refuse to cry in the bathroom of an art gallery like some kind of tragic romantic comedy protagonist.

"Wait." His hand catches my arm—actually touches me—and the sensation is so acute I almost stumble. "Don't do this."

"Do what?"

"Disappear. You're doing that thing where you disappear when things get complicated."

He's right, which is worse than if he was wrong. I've spent my entire life becoming invisible when situations threatened to require vulnerability. It's a survival skill. It's also, apparently, a way to ensure I never actually have to feel anything that might hurt too much to survive.

"I'm not disappearing. I'm just giving you space to figure things out."

"I don't want space from you. I want—" He stops. His hand is still on my arm, and his eyes are doing that thing where they catalog me like I'm a painting he's trying to understand. "I want you to stay."

The bathroom is very small. Adrian is very close. My heart is doing things that are probably illegal in several countries.

"Adrian, your mother—"

"I don't care what my mother thinks."

"You do. I watched you care. I watched you get smaller every time she said something about focus and discipline and relationships being a weakness. I watched you become someone who apologizes for existing, and I can't—" My voice does this thing where it breaks, which is a betrayal of epic proportions. "I can't be the thing that makes you have to keep apologizing."

He's quiet for a long moment. Then: "My mother has been disappointed in me my entire life. Nothing I do is ever enough. Nothing I create is ever good enough. And then I met you, and suddenly I understood what people mean when they talk about inspiration. You make me want to create things that matter. You make me want to be someone worth looking at."

"That's not fair," I whisper, because he's saying things that sound like love and my entire nervous system is currently staging a hostile takeover of my rational brain.

"What's not fair?"

"Saying things like that when your mother is here and your agent is here and there are people out there who want to buy your soul and you're standing in a bathroom telling me I inspire you like that's supposed to fix everything."

"It's not supposed to fix everything. It's just supposed to be true."

He's moving closer. I'm not moving away, which is a choice I'm making and will probably regret for the rest of my natural life. His hand is still on my arm and now his other hand is coming up to touch my face, and I can smell him—cologne and linseed oil and the raw underneath smell that's just him—and I'm about to do something very stupid.

Which is to say: I'm about to let him kiss me.

In a bathroom.

At his gallery opening.

While his mother is somewhere in this building, probably judging me for existing.

"This is a terrible idea," I say, and then his mouth is on mine and I don't care anymore about terrible ideas because his mouth tastes like champagne and certainty and the kind of desperation that matches my own.

He kisses like he paints—with complete focus and no regard for whether anyone's watching. His hand moves from my arm to my waist and pulls me closer, and I'm pressed against him in a way that feels both inevitable and impossible. The sweater I borrowed from him is between us, and I want to take it off so there's nothing between us but skin and the kind of honesty that requires vulnerability.

"We can't—" I say against his mouth, and he kisses me again like he's trying to argue with my words.

"I know," he says when he finally pulls away. "But we are."

My hands are shaking. My pulse is somewhere in the stratosphere. My entire body is staging a revolt against my brain's insistence that this is complicated and doomed and probably going to end with me hurt in a way I can't survive.

"Your mother—"

"I'm going to tell her that I'm dating you. That I want to keep dating you. That what I do with my time and who I spend it with is my choice, not hers."

"Adrian—"

"And if she doesn't like it, that's her problem to solve, not mine."

He says this like it's simple. Like he hasn't spent his entire life trying to earn her approval. Like his voice doesn't shake slightly when he says it.

I pull back enough to look at him. His eyes are red-rimmed and his hair is more disheveled than usual from running his fingers through it—a nervous habit I've learned to recognize. His mouth is swollen from kissing me, and he looks like someone who's just made a decision that terrifies him.

"You're going to regret this," I say, because I need to give him an out. Because I've been hurt before and I know how to protect myself by hurting first.

"Probably," he agrees. "But not right now. Right now I'm just going to regret not doing this sooner."

He kisses me again, and it's softer this time. Less desperate. More like a promise than a panic attack.

When we finally emerge from the bathroom, his mother is waiting in the hallway like she's been standing there the entire time, cataloging every second we were gone. Her eyes move from Adrian to me to the way his hand is still holding mine, and I watch her recalibrate her assessment of the situation.

"Adrian, darling," she says, and her voice is honey over broken glass. "The Rothstein collectors are asking for you. They're very interested in discussing a private commission."

"I'll be right there," Adrian says, and he doesn't let go of my hand.

She looks at our joined hands like they're something she needs to have professionally cleaned. "Perhaps your... friend... would like to rejoin the main event?"

"Vera stays with me," Adrian says simply.

And just like that, something shifts.

His mother's smile becomes sharper. The temperature in the hallway drops several degrees. She's calculating something now—how to handle this new variable, how to work around this obstacle, how to make sure that her son doesn't make the same mistakes she did by allowing emotion to interfere with ambition.

"Of course," she says, and it sounds like a threat wrapped in silk. "Do introduce her properly to the collectors. I'm sure they'll find her... charming."

She walks away, and I realize with the kind of clarity that comes from pure panic that I've just made an enemy of someone who has years of practice being ruthless.

Adrian's grip on my hand tightens slightly, like he's afraid I'm about to vanish.

"She hates me," I say quietly.

"She doesn't know you."

"She doesn't need to know me. She's already decided I'm a problem."

"Then we'll prove her wrong."

I want to believe him. I want to believe that this is simple—that we can just keep holding hands and kissing in bathrooms and making declarations about choice and autonomy, and that will be enough to survive the weight of his mother's disapproval and the complicated machinery of his career and the fact that I'm still fundamentally convinced that I'm not good enough for any of this.

But I've learned that wanting something and being able to have it are two very different things.

"Come on," Adrian says, pulling me gently back toward the gallery. "Let's go face the collectors."

We walk back into the cathedral of white walls and polished concrete, and I can feel the shift in the room's attention. People are looking at us differently now—at Adrian, and then at me, trying to figure out who I am and why I matter enough for him to hold my hand in public.

Marcus catches my eye from across the room, and he raises his eyebrows in a question I don't have an answer for. I give him a small shrug that means: I don't know, this is happening, please don't judge me too harshly.

He smiles, sad and knowing, and I realize he's known all along that this would happen. That Adrian and I would collide and create something beautiful and complicated and probably doomed.

Adrian's agent appears like she's been summoned by some higher power. "Adrian, darling, the Rothsteins are absolutely enchanted. They want to discuss a series—"

She stops mid-sentence, noticing our joined hands.

"This is Vera," Adrian says, and he says it like I'm someone worth introducing. Like I'm not just a distraction or an obstacle or a temporary complication. "She's an artist."

"How lovely," his agent says, and she's already recalibrating her mental calculations about Adrian's marketability. "Perhaps we should discuss the Rothstein commission. Alone."

Adrian looks at me. I nod, because I know what it means if he doesn't go. I know his career is important. I know that I can't be the person who holds him back, even if his mother's already decided I'm trying to.

He squeezes my hand before letting go, and the loss of contact is almost physical.

I watch him walk away with his agent, and I stand alone in the middle of his triumph feeling like I'm slowly drowning in something I can't name.

This is the problem with letting people matter.

This is the problem with letting yourself believe that love might be enough.

It isn't.

And in about three weeks, when his mother's pressure and his agent's ambitions and his own internalized conviction that relationships are distracting finally become too much, Adrian is going to have to choose.

And I'm terrified that I already know which way he's going to choose.