Page 104 of All at Once

I snort. “Yeah. I think they’d never come back here though, but for sure it would have been an experience.”

“This is like a fucking hockey puck. Look.” He clinks the cookie against his phone, now making me laugh.

“Wait,” I say.

“I’m waiting…” Luca is starting to look as delirious as me.

“So a cookie is just a cake that’s hard,” I conclude.

He nods with exaggeration. “I think you’re onto something.” Then gets up and reaches his hand out for me to take. “Let’s go tell the rest of the world. C’mon.”

I roll my eyes as he sits back down. “We both need to go to bed now.” His jaw drops open before he covers his mouth. “Get your mind out of the gutter. You know what I meant.”

He cocks his head skeptically. “How do you know what I know that I think you meant?”

I laugh. “You really are turning into me.”

He feigns a look of fear as his eyes widen. “Told you. It’s scary. You’re scary. This isallvery scary.”

I don’t know if it’s just the sparkly night talking or something much,muchmore than that. Nonetheless, the overwhelmingly blissful feeling in my chest keeps growing as I look at him. “I still can’t believe I didn’t see you in college.”

“Maybe we passed by each other without ever knowing it?” Luca says lightheartedly.

“Impossible. I would have remembered you.”

“Yeah? And why is that?”

“I just would have.” I wonder if he picks up on what I’m really hinting at.

That it’s because he’s beautiful and the epitome of what my crushes would have looked like back then andstill now.

He just laughs to himself, then reveals, “Well technically, we almost did.”

What?

His eyes give away that he wonders if he shouldn’t have just said this, only making my brows furrow even more.

“What do you mean?” I finally ask.

He looks so tired. Even more than last night. “It’s actually a funny story,” he says, while smiling nervously.

Something tells me this is going to be thefurthestthing from funny. But he knows that it’s too late to backtrack and so he takes somewhat of a deep breath, before explaining, “Enrique told me how he wanted to introduce me to his lit tutor right when the semester had started. I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, so I was interested. He brought it up a second time, but then I guess he forgot to actually introduce us. It was a pretty hectic semester for us anyway so even though I remembered, I didn’t really bother to bring it up to him again.”

I’m not just shocked. I almostcan’tbelieve it.

“When did you realize this?” I blurt out.

He replies, “The day after we bumped into each other where Enrique officially introduced us.”

WHAT?

I clench my fingers to my sides, while Luca adds, “I didn’t know your name before that, but I put two and two together as soon as he said that you were his tutor in college. Since he only had one tutor during freshman year.”

I look at him wide-eyed. “So we could have met almost a decade ago?”

What I really want to say is that we could havedatedalmost a decade ago. And that could have changed everything for me.

“Yeah. I guess so,” he says with a timid smile.

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