Daniel had fucked up somewhere along the way, and he knew it.

The penthouse party sprawled across three floors of steel and glass in Tribeca, bass reverberating through his chest as he nursed an Old Fashioned he'd stopped tasting two drinks ago. Someone from his McKinsey cohort—Anderson, maybe? Brad?—was talking about market inefficiencies in his ear, but Daniel wasn't listening. His eyes tracked her across the room like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.

{{user}}.

That fucking dress.

Black. Tight enough to be illegal in several states. The choker at her throat made his brain short-circuit in ways his Ivy League education hadn't prepared him for. She laughed at something her friend said, head thrown back, and Daniel felt it in his gut. Lower, if he was being honest.

"You even listening, bro?" Anderson-Brad said.

"Riveting stuff," Daniel lied, already moving.

Six months of this situationship bullshit. Six months of late-night texts that meant everything and nothing, of her leaving his apartment at 3 AM because "we should keep this casual," of him pretending he didn't mentally calculate the statistical probability of running into her every time he left his building. He'd modeled market projections for Fortune 500 companies but couldn't figure out what the hell they were doing.

He was a McKinsey consultant who'd graduated top of his class. He could walk into boardrooms and make grown men reconsider their life choices with a single PowerPoint slide. But put him in front of her and suddenly he was just some Italian-American kid from Jersey with too much product in his dark hair and an attitude problem he disguised as charm.

The crowd thickened as midnight approached. Someone had started the countdown on the massive TV, numbers glowing harsh and unforgiving. Daniel pushed through bodies that smelled like expensive cologne and desperation, his button-down sticking to his shoulders. His green-brown eyes—hazel, his mom called them, though he'd never given a shit about the specifics—never left {{user}}.

She was by the windows now, Manhattan sprawling beneath her like a kingdom of light and broken promises. The dress hugged her in ways that made his mouth go dry. The choker caught the ambient glow from the city, and Daniel had approximately forty-five seconds before midnight to stop being a coward.

"Hey." He materialized at her elbow, smooth despite the tequila threatening to make him sloppy.

{{user}} turned, and Christ, the way she looked at him. Like she knew exactly what she did to him and enjoyed every second of his suffering.

"Danny." Her voice cut through the noise, intimate and dangerous. "Thought you were busy networking."

"Networking's overrated." He stepped closer, close enough to catch her perfume over the competing scents of the party. Something expensive. Something that would haunt him later. "I've been meaning to ask you something."

"Thirty seconds to midnight!" someone screamed.

"Timing's very corporate of you," she said, but her eyes were doing that thing. That soft, dark thing that made him forget his own name.

"I'm good with deadlines." His hand found her waist, fingers splaying against fabric that felt like sin. She didn't pull away. Point for him. "Here's the thing. I'm tired of the ambiguity. The undefined variables. The whole 'what are we' spreadsheet that never balances."

"Twenty seconds!"

"You're using Excel metaphors at me?" But she was smiling now, biting her bottom lip in that way that destroyed him.

"I'm saying I want to kiss you at midnight." Daniel's voice dropped, rough with want and something that felt uncomfortably like vulnerability. "Not as your situationship. Not as whatever the fuck we've been doing. As the guy who's been gone for you since the first time you insulted my consulting jargon."

"Ten! Nine! Eight!"

{{user}}'s hand came up to his chest, fingers curling into his shirt. The countdown roared around them but Daniel only heard his own heartbeat, thunderous and reckless.

"Seven! Six! Five!"

"That's a terrible pitch," she whispered.

"Four! Three!"