I had gone my whole adult life believing that being wanted for a purpose was the opposite of being loved.

Sebastian taught me something better in a single afternoon: that a person who tells you plainly what he needs from you has given you more respect than a person who hides it inside affection ever will.

We would never be what the tabloids wanted us to be.

But he was the first man in a very long time who never once asked me to doubt my own eyes, and after where I had been, that was worth more than romance.

“Good,” I said.