Lahat ng Kabanata ng One Night Stand With My Hubby's Cousin: Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 120

Evelyn's POVAs we moved farther through the store, I grabbed two simple glass cups from a nearby shelf and added them to the cart, thinking they’d at least be useful whenever friends came over and we wanted to drink wine together.The lighting in the kitchen section felt colder than it did near the entrance, bright white against rows of perfectly arranged cookware and knife sets mounted neatly along the wall. I stood there for a while comparing prices I normally never would have paid attention to before eventually choosing a set somewhere in the middle—not cheap enough to feel depressing, but not expensive enough to make my heartbeat spike at checkout either.“So,” Maddie said casually, leaning against the shopping cart like we were discussing the weather instead of my emotional disaster of a life, “are you and Julian actually over?”I kept my eyes on the shelves for a second too long before answering.“Well…” I exhaled quietly. “This probably makes me sound like a terrible person, b

Evelyn's POVThe walk to UCLA isn’t far—about twenty minutes if I take my usual route—and it turns out to be the perfect amount of time to let my brain slowly shift from living mode into work mode.Most of these past few days, I’ve been buried in the veterinary school labs, working alongside their research team on a collaboration project with WHR: behavioral re-adaptation analysis for rehabilitated wildlife before release. And honestly, this kind of work gives me a stronger sense of purpose than any gala dinner or networking event ever could, because data doesn’t lie, and animals don’t pretend to be something they’re not.The best part of this week, though, was finally getting feedback on the samples we’d submitted earlier.“Your samples are way more stable than we expected,” one of the postdocs told me while scrolling through the analysis results on his monitor. “Especially the red-tailed hawk.”I smiled a little at that.“Well, she never liked humans much to begin with,” I said. “Ho

Evelyn's POV“I just moved in,” I said at last, finally forcing myself to speak before the silence turned unbearable, then awkwardly held the pudding out toward him a little more. “I originally made this for… the neighbor across the hall.”The sentence sounded increasingly stupid the longer it hung there between us.Julian lowered his eyes to the glass bowl in my hands before finally taking it from me.“Thank you,” he said calmly. “As it happens, the neighbor across the hall is me.”Only then did he properly look at the pudding itself.A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.“It’s Mickey-shaped,” he observed, lifting his gaze back to me with that familiar hint of amusement hidden in his eyes. “So you still haven’t graduated from Disney?”The embarrassment that had been climbing up my spine instantly turned into indignation.“Disney is a fairytale for adults,” I defended proudly, straightening a little on instinct. “There’s no age limit on emotional happiness.”That finally ma

Evelyn's POVWhether it was the hotel on Lake Como, the luxury apartment in downtown LA, or that sprawling villa outside the city, every place Julian ever stayed in seemed to belong to the highest possible tier of human existence. The kind of places designed for people who never needed to look at price tags or think about utility bills.Which was exactly why I still couldn’t process the fact that he was apparently living here.In an apartment barely bigger than my own.The image felt fundamentally wrong somehow, like seeing a phoenix voluntarily move into a birdhouse.Julian, meanwhile, looked completely unbothered by the contradiction. He picked up the remote with practiced ease, turned on the projector, and a few seconds later the opening screen of Zootopia 2 appeared across the massive wall-sized display.My heart almost cracked a little at the sight of it.God. A proper screen.If there was one thing I unexpectedly missed after moving out, it was the media room. The huge projector

Evelyn's POVRight then, fragments of dialogue from the movie drifted faintly through the bathroom door, softened by distance and the steady sound of running water.Thank God.I desperately needed something to distract me from my own thoughts.So I kept washing my hair while listening to Nick and Judy awkwardly stumbling their way through couples therapy, arguing in that ridiculous, lovable way only they could. Apparently they weren’t the only partner duo in desperate need of psychological intervention either—their coworkers clearly had enough emotional damage to start an entire support group.Somewhere between the ridiculous dialogue and the familiar rhythm of the scenes, I felt my shoulders slowly begin to relax.I seriously loved this movie.I found myself unconsciously mouthing along with certain lines from memory while rinsing the shampoo from my hair, right until that line came through the speakers—“The safe word is coconut.”The sentence arrived slightly muffled through the do