Elara's POV
I sat back down and looked at him and waited, my hands folded in my lap, my heart considerably louder than I would have liked and my face doing its best to stay neutral about all of it.
Ravin looked back at me for a moment, then leaned forward with his arms resting on his knees and said, "I like you, Elara. Not casually. Not the way I have been pretending this is. I mean it and I think you already know that but I wanted to say it properly."
The garden was very quiet around us.
I held his gaze and felt something inside me let go of whatever it had been carefully holding onto for weeks. "I like you too," I said, my voice quieter than I intended but steady. "I stopped pretending it was casual a long time ago. Probably around the time I started caring what I looked like before
