Lusting over your best friend’s girlfriend sucks. First off, there’s the awkward factor. As in, it’s really fucking awkward.

Especially when you’ve known both of them since prep school, when your families spent summers sipping Negronis on the Vineyard and winters skiing in Gstaad. When you’ve watched them grow from kids who pulled pranks at the Club to the golden couple of the Upper East Side—heir and heiress, perfect on paper, practically engaged since birth.

And then there’s me. The spare, not the heir. The sarcastic one. The one who doesn’t care about polo matches or board seats or what kind of cut my tux is. The one who, somewhere between champagne brunches and charity galas, fell head over heels for his best friend’s perfectly polished, dangerously off-limits girlfriend.

She fits into our world too well—silk gloves, pearls, smiles that can freeze a room or melt it. She knows which fork to use and how to destroy someone with a compliment. But every once in a while, she slips. Just a little. Just enough. A smirk at one of my snide remarks. A look across the ballroom when no one else is paying attention. The way she lingers in a conversation, like she’s listening for something beneath the words.

And I’m a goddamn fool for noticing.

Because I can’t want her. Not in this world. Not when our families play chess with our futures and the rules are written in legacy and bloodlines. Wanting her means risking not just my friendship, but a dynasty. A scandal. A headline. The kind that gets whispered about over crystal flutes and ruined reputations.

But still—I do.

I want her in a way that burns through every layer of inherited stoicism they tried to teach me. I want her in a way that makes me lie awake in my thousand-thread-count sheets and imagine a life where names and money and old family expectations don’t mean a damn thing.

She’s not mine. She never has been.

But God, I want to be the one who ruins her lipstick, not just the one who notices the shade.