Chapter 5
Cranberries, Confrontations, she’d also be staring at Felix’s forearms.
“So how did you two meet?” she asked a little too sweetly.
Maya panicked. “It’s a, uh, long story.”
“A good one,” Felix added, smooth as polished marble. “Fate, you could say.”
You’re not helping.
You’re not not helping, either.
The fiancée offered Felix a not-entirely-innocent touch on the arm. “You’re lucky,” she said. “He’s handsome.”
Maya’s stomach pulled taut. Every muscle in her jaw locked; she could taste adrenaline like copper.
Felix didn’t flinch. But his voice changed—cooler now, more precise. Ice hiding something molten.
“You should step back.”
The fiancée blinked. “Excuse me?”
He didn’t break eye contact. “If I had Maya, and lost her? I wouldn’t look at anyone else for the rest of my life. Because there’s no one better, and I’d know I didn’t deserve her.”
The silence that followed could’ve sliced through the canned yams.
Her ex’s mouth opened. Closed. He muttered something about needing ice and maneuvered the cart away, as if it might protect his ego.
Maya stood frozen, heart thundering against her ribs, pulse roaring in her ears. The fluorescent lights seemed to buzz louder, the tiled floor too bright, too solid for what had just happened. Felix remained still, unruffled, like he hadn’t just detonated a poetic landmine in Aisle 7.
She caught a glimpse of their reflection in the freezer door—his height, her flushed face, the space between them charged with something that didn’t belong in public.
* * *
They didn’t speak on the way out, not until they reached the car. The walk felt unreal: her feet moved, but she wasn’t sure they touched the ground. Every breath tasted like static.
Maya slammed the door and stared at the dashboard as though it might contain the meaning of life, or at the very least, a warning label. The grocery bag rustled in her lap, the cans clinking, punctuation marks to a story she hadn’t meant to write.
Felix buckled his seatbelt with the care of a man preparing for a rocket launch.
“Was that acceptable?” he asked, tone neutral, as if confirming a reservation. Or a hit.
Maya turned to him slowly, heart pounding with the relentless thump of a bassline caught in her throat. His face was composed, but his knuckles were white where he gripped the seatbelt buckle, as if even he wasn’t immune to the rush of adrenaline.
“Felix,” she said softly.
Then, before she could think, before her brain could calculate the thousand ways this was wrong, she launched herself across the console and kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. It was heat and chaos and years of unmet longing, short-circuiting every reason she’d ever told herself not to want this.
Felix didn’t hesitate. He kissed her with the certainty of a program written for this precise moment, a line of code buried deep in his memory. One hand on her jaw, the other at her waist. Anchoring her.
He moved with quiet intention, no rush, no misstep, as though time bent to him, as though his sole function was to get this right.
Maybe he was.
But it felt real.
When they finally pulled apart, flushed, breathless, Maya stared at him like she was seeing a glitch in the matrix and couldn’t bear to close the window. The air between them crackled. The windshield fogged slightly, their breath the only proof the world hadn’t stopped turning.
“You’re perfect.”
Felix blinked once. “I was designed to be.”
Her smile twitched, faded slightly. Reality threatened to reassert itself. But then he reached out, touched her cheek, soft this time, reverent as if he were trying to memorize her for permanence.
“But I want to be perfect for you, and not because I’m told to, but because I choose to.”
Maya didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
It should’ve felt like a red flag, a programmable promise wrapped in romantic logic.
But her heart, traitorous, stubborn, human, leapt anyway.
And if Blair had been there?
She’d be yelling: That’s the feature test, bitch. He PASSED.