This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2024 by Ali Hazelwood All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662528392 (digital) Cover design by Hang Le

Cover image: © kosmofish, © Look_Studio, © Miloje, © Veranika Dzik / Shutterstock

CONTENTS

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

- ABOUT THE AUTHOR

- OTHER TITLES BY ALI HAZELWOOD

Chapter One

In an ideal world, Marc Compton would be acting like a total dick.

I’m not asking for much. Some gloating, maybe. Obnoxiously raised eyebrows. A sneered, “Well, well, well. Look who showed up unannounced on Christmas Eve.” I’m not picky: any of the above would make me feel exponentially better about the situation.

But no. Marc opens the front door in a blaze of towering midwestern good looks, and when I look up at his handsome face, all I can detect is genuine surprise to find me standing on his parents’ snow-covered porch.

Surprise that quickly morphs into worry.

It’s like he doesn’t wish me ill. Like he doesn’t even hold a grudge over the terrible things I said to him a few months ago or over my fumbled, insufficient apology.

Then again, holding a grudge would require him to spend time thinking about me, which might be something that no longer occurs.

“Jamie?” he says, voice incongruously warm in the freezing dark. It’s barely six, but the sun sets so early, it might as well be the middle of the night. “What the hell are you doing out in this weather?”

A good question. To which I—a levelheaded professional who keeps her cool under pressure, regularly saves people’s lives, and sometimes even manages to make it through an entire Pilates class without bursting into tears—eloquently reply, “Um, yeah.”

Marc cocks his head.

Frowns at me with something that looks uncomfortably similar to pity.

Repeats, skeptical: “‘Yeah’?”

“Um, yeah.” I’m such an accomplished conversationalist. Maybe they’ll give me an award for that. “As in . . . Yeah. Yes. It is me. Jamie.”

“Glad to know you’re not being deceitfully impersonated by an evil doppelgänger.” He takes a step back and roughly orders, “Come in.”

“No!” I say—way too vehemently, judging from the line that appears on his forehead. I walk that back by adding, “Thank you, but no. I really can’t stay. I should go home before the storm gets bad.”

“It’s late December in Northern Illinois. The storm is already bad.” I don’t have to turn around to know what he sees over my shoulders: long stretches of no visibility interrupted by large, furious snowflakes flurrying like turbines under the streetlights. The soundtrack—occasional creaking of branches, constant hissing of the wind—doesn’t make the scene any better. “You have to come in, Jamie.”

“Actually, my dad sent me here to borrow a copper roasting pan. As soon as you give it to me, I’ll just head back.” I smile, hoping it’ll get Marc to feel some sympathy and speed things up. I am, after all, just a girl. Cast out to the brutal elements by her only parent, all in the name of a treacherous but essential quest: plundering her childhood best friend’s home to procure a magic pan.

I am deserving of compassion.

Especially because the childhood best friend in question didn’t even have the decency to be here. Tabitha is with her parents and husband on a balmy, all-inclusive cruise somewhere in the Caribbean, slurping pure joy out of a coconut. This holiday season, the only Compton in town is Marc. Tabitha’s little brother, who . . .

Well, for one, he’s not little at all. Hasn’t been in a while, really. And he flew in from California a couple of days ago to take care of Sondheim, the Comptons’ geriatric high-maintenance-and-even-higher-misanthropy cat.

I asked Tabitha why they didn’t simply hire a sitter, and her only reply was, “Why would we, when Marc was available?” Apparently, spending Christmas alone with a family pet who daydreams of eating eyeballs right out of their sockets is a totally normal activity for a tech mogul.

And thus, here we are. Out of eight billion people on this floating rock of a planet, Marc is the only one capable of short-circuiting my brain. And he happens to be all that stands between me and my quarry.

“Please tell me you didn’t walk two miles in a blizzard for a copper pot.”

“I did not. Dad’s home is closer than that”—by .3 miles, I estimate—“and what I need is a copper pan.”

“Jesus.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and leans against the door.

“It’s probably in the kitchen. And Dad says it’s necessary to bake the ham. So, if you could go get it . . .”

“Who the hell owns a copper pan?”

“Your mom.” I feel a spark of irritation. “Because they’re great. She wanted it, so Tabitha and I went in together to buy one for her last Christmas.” On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t have told him. Tabitha and I could barely afford the one we bought, but Marc is probably just making a mental note to tell his butler to have a baker’s dozen custom made. Seven for his parents and six for my dad, all gold foiled and emerald encrusted. With their initials embossed on it.

It’s so weird. Marc—Marc the jock, who charmed his way in and out of trouble; Marc of the coasting grades; Marc the college dropout—got filthy rich at twenty-three and paid off his parents’ mortgage after his company’s first liquidity event. He now has a net worth of millions. Billions. Bajillions. I don’t even know; as decent at math as I am, numbers that large always get slithery in my head.

Meanwhile, Tabitha and I—the dutiful, well-behaved, overachieving daughters—can barely afford appliances of the non-bedazzled variety.

I clear my throat. “Anyway, the sooner you bring the pan to me, the—”

“Hey, there! Aren’t you the Malek girl?”

I turn to the neighboring house, where a vaguely familiar elderly head leans out from one of the upstairs windows. It takes me a moment to place it, but when I do, I swallow a sigh. “Um, hi, Mrs. Nos—”

Hang on a minute. Is Mrs. Nosy her real name, or did we just call her that because she’d constantly bribe us with Werther’s Original to find out gossip about our parents?

“Norton,” Marc mutters, reading my mind.

“Hi, Mrs. Norton. Yup, I’m Jamie Malek.”

“You don’t look one day older than when you left for college. It’s been, what, ten years?”

I try to smile, but my zygomaticus major might be frozen. “Sure has. You look great, too, ma’am.” In truth, I can barely see her. The storm is picking up quickly, whiting out anything that’s more than a dozen feet away.

“You’re a lawyer, right? Like your daddy?”

“Jamie’s a physician,” Marc corrects her, a touch impatient. “Finishing up her pediatrics residency.”

“Ah, yes. You’d know, wouldn’t you?” She looks between us, suddenly hawkish and a little prurient. “I forgot that you two both moved out to San Francisco. Bet you see each other all the time, don’t you?”

My stomach tightens. Because now would be a good time for Marc and I to exchange a loaded stare and burst out laughing. Maybe even say, Oh, Mrs. Nosy, if only you knew what happened last time we were together. We should tell you. It’d make your holiday season. You’d dump a whole truckload of hard candy on us.

I stay silent, though. Paralyzed. Which means that Marc is on his own when he says, “Yeah, of course. We practically live together. If you’ll excuse us, I can see a snot icicle forming under Jamie’s nose. Merry Christmas to you and your husband.”

A minute later, I’m in the Comptons’ kitchen, having absolutely no clue how I got there. Marc, whose tolerance for bullshit never managed to grow taller than your average bolete mushroom, must have pulled me inside. He’s currently standing in front of me, unzipping my parka like he would for a toddler who has yet to master the concept of zippers.

“I need to—”

“Go back, yes.” He plucks the beanie off my head, and halts when the mass of blond waves slips out from underneath it.

My residency has been kicking my butt, and I barely have time to eat, let alone go to a salon. My hair is the longest it’s ever been, for the first time in my life—a little past my shoulders—not a bob. Marc must notice, because he picks up the end of a strand and rubs it between his fingers, staring at it in an intense, lingering way that makes me remember something he told me when we were both very young.

You have the prettiest hair in the world. It’s dumb that you don’t grow it longer.

All this attention from him has me feeling overheated. A true feat, in the current weather.

“You’re frozen solid,” he mutters, dropping the lock. “I made a fire in the living room. Go stand in there—”

“But what about the—”

“—while I look for the pan,” he adds, like I’m more predictable than a quarterly tax deadline. “I can’t believe your dad sent you here in a damn snowstorm.”

“I don’t mind,” I say. Minding a little.

A lot.

“You don’t have to say yes to every idiot thing he asks of you. Especially if it’s not safe.” Marc’s full mouth tightens into a thin line—and then curls ever so slightly, a bare hint of humor that is so exquisitely him, my heart loses a handful of beats. “You don’t even fucking like ham, Jamie.”

I huff out a laugh. Of course he’d know. “Dad’s trying a new recipe.”

“Uh-huh.” He unspools the scarf from around my neck. “Unless the new recipe bakes through the ten inches of snow we’re getting tonight, he still shouldn’t have sent you here.”

“Honestly, ten inches is not that much.”

A dark eyebrow lifts.

I realize why after a beat and instantly turn scarlet. “Oh my God.”

“Harsh, Jamie.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“I see.”

“No, really, I meant—of snow, ten inches of—”

My phone rings. I pick up immediately, so grateful for the interruption that I could start a cult based around worshipping broadband cellular networks.

“Hi, Dad . . . Yup, I made it to the Comptons’. Heading back in a minute . . . I will, yes. Of course.” I glance at Marc, whose expression can only be described as displeased. Nope, still not a fan of Dad. “Marc, my father wants me to remind you that you should come over tomorrow for Christmas dinner, and . . . Yes, Dad. I promise I’ll do my best to bring him back. No, I won’t be kidnapping him if he refuses, I . . . Okay, sure. I guarantee that if I can’t convince him, I’ll bodily drag him to our place.” I hang up with an eye roll and set my phone on top of the clothes Marc has piled on the counter. It’ll be a pain to put them back on, but I must admit that it’s nice when my body doesn’t feel like it’s being stabbed with a million little ice picks. “Um, would you like to come over for Christmas dinner?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“Got it.”

He eyes me expectantly.

“What?”

“I’m waiting for the violent abduction I was promised?”

“Oh. Right.” I glance at his height. The way his compression shirt skims his large biceps. The muscular thighs under his jeans. “Let’s say that I tried—but you bravely overpowered me.”

“Was it a close call?”

“Oh, yeah. I had you in a choke hold for a few seconds there.”

“But then you slipped on a banana peel?”

I laugh. Marc’s face seems to light up at the sound, that bright grin that thickens the air around us, and . . .

He doesn’t look away. Continues staring and staring, like he’s ready to swallow me whole with his eyes. He’s always been like this when it comes to things he wants—ravenous. Larger than life. Acquisitive. And that’s why it’s not good for me to be here, with him. Marc makes my heart leap and my body glow and my brain rest, and that’s not something I could bear to have and then let go of. Whenever I’m with him, I become greedy and reckless, and . . .

It’s too late, anyway. I had my chance and I blew it.

“I need to go,” I say, staring at the tiled floor. “Could you—”

I’m startled by a sudden cracking sound, followed by a metallic thud. I turn in its direction and gasp when I spot what happened through the kitchen window: in the Comptons’ backyard, one of the heavy oak branches snapped and fell on the patio.

It currently lies on top of their furniture, which looks a bit . . . flattened. And maybe broken. In several pieces.

Shit. I need to hurry home before the weather becomes unmanageable. Where the hell is that pan? I glance at Marc, wide eyed, only to realize that he’s reading my mind. Because he seems to know exactly what I’m about to say, and beats me to it.

“Jamie, let me make something clear.” His voice is calm and very, very final. “If you think I won’t tie you up and lock you in my bedroom before I let you step outside in this weather, then you don’t know me at all.”

Chapter Two

The problem is, I do.

Know Marc, that is.

I know him very well since I first met him on the day he was born, in our hometown hospital, which smelled like cough syrup and the municipal pool. In return, he became the shining star of my earliest memory, which included Dad sitting me on a large plush chair and Mrs. Compton handing me a shapeless bundle with the warning, “Be careful, Jamie. Make sure you hold the head—yes, exactly like that.” I was two and a half. Tabitha, who was about six months older than me, had just celebrated her third birthday with a splash-pad party.

Tabitha wasn’t there, though. She was at home with her grandparents, due to what her mom referred to as “a string of attention-seeking tantrums” but what Tabitha would later reframe as “conscientious objection to the imposition of an unnecessary expansion effort.” She had been informed that a new family member would be forthcoming, and was not inclined to share resources that her young mind perceived as finite, such as toys, Frosted Flakes, and parental love.

That’s how I ended up meeting her new sibling before she did, and I was eager to report back that, competition-wise, she had nothing to fear. The red creature squirming in my arms had a scrunched-up face, wrinkly nose, pimply cheeks, folded ears, old-man hair, and was covered in dried crusts. It reminded me of the sugar cookies Dad would bake over the holidays, in particular the ones that didn’t come out of the oven quite right. Unfortunate looking, he’d call them.

The description fit well. The thing in my lap clearly did not have a single ounce of fortune.

“What’s her name?” I asked Mrs. Compton.

“His,” Dad corrected me. “He’s a boy, honey.”

Suddenly, everything made sense. “That’s why he’s so ugly.”

The adults burst into laughter—very mean spirited, I thought, given that the poor baby was already dealing with the adverse condition of not being a girl. I tuned them out until Mr. Compton asked me, “Jamie, do you know what we named him?”

I shook my head.

“Marc. Marc Evan Compton.”

And maybe the baby already recognized his own name, because in that precise moment, he opened his gray eyes and, after a couple of clumsy attempts, gripped my index finger. Hi, his unwavering stare seemed to say.

And: Stay.

And maybe even: I like you.

He was small, but strong. And at once, an overwhelming sense of love and protectiveness swept over me. It’s okay, I swore silently to Marc. I’ll be your friend. I’ll get Tabitha to be your friend, too. And I will love you. Even if you’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.

It was a heartfelt, sincere promise. One that I broke a million times over in the next few years. Because, in a tragic turn of events, Marc Evan Compton turned out to be the absolute worst.

For several highly gullible years, I was a Marc apologist.

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to do that,” I’d tell a seething Tabitha every morning as we walked to school. “Switch out your vitamin gummies with laxatives, that is.”

Or use your favorite shirt to line the hamster’s cage.

Stab you in the eye with a plastic fork.

Lock you in the linen closet.

Convince all the neighborhood kids to call you Dumbitha.

Train the dog to behead your favorite Barbie.

Puke up three servings of mac and cheese right in your lap.

Sneak insects inside your bed.

I made up excuses because with me, Marc was never a terror. Whatever instinctive love I’d felt toward him on the day he was born, it was reciprocated. Dad and Mr. Compton had been best friends since high school, and our families were constantly in each other’s proximity. Mom had left us right after I was born, and Dad, with his very demanding job, appreciated all the childcare the Comptons could offer. Tabitha and I were, of course, inseparable. But I had a special bond with Marc, too.

“I wish you lived with us,” he would tell me sweetly when I’d leave Tabitha’s room after a weekend sleepover.

And: “You’re my favorite person in the whole world.”

And: “When we grow up, I want us to get married.”

No such thing would happen. I already had a husband picked out: Alan Crawford, an older guy from down the street (or, should that fail, Lance Bass from NSYNC). In my eyes, Marc was a little boy. Nevertheless, I found him adorable. I taught him the alphabet and how to tie his shoelaces. In return, he yelled at a kid who shoved me at the playground, and made me valentines every year.

“You’re supposed to be my best friend,” Tabitha reminded me about once a week. “I knew that noobnugget would steal half of everything. I just didn’t think you’d be included.”

But I loved them both. And for years, even as the relationship between Tabitha and Marc began involving allergenic substances slipped into each other’s lunches, sharp pushpins, and constant threats of mutual destruction, I tried not to take sides. “You don’t have to choose between them, honey,” Dad would say. “This is just typical sibling rivalry. A phase they’ll grow out of. Just sit it out.” And I did—until we were twelve, Marc was nine, and the egg incident happened.

To this day, Marc maintains it wasn’t on purpose. That he didn’t know our “unhinged school would engage in as deranged an activity as pretending that an egg is a baby and having students carry it around for a week without cracking it.” But not only did our unhinged school engage in as deranged an activity, it also scored us on it. A whole 30 percent of our final Family Sciences grade depended on that damn egg.

Which is why, when I entered the Comptons’ kitchen and found Marc eating it—fried, on toast, tomatoes on the side—I didn’t stop Tabitha from retaliating. I observed in silence as she ran after him. Said nothing as she tackled her brother, even though he was already taller than both of us. Leaned back against the door and crossed my arms as she pulled his hair. And after their screeches drew Mr. Compton away from his yard work and inside the house, after he separated his children, after he turned to me and asked, “Jamie, what happened?” I spilled my truth.

“Marc started it,” I said.

He was grounded after that, though I can’t recall for how long. What I do remember, with stunning clarity, is his betrayed look, and the instinctive knowledge that this would mark the end of an era.

The following year, instead of valentines, I received embarrassing nicknames, incessant teasing, and a newfound rivalry with my best friend’s little brother.

In hindsight, Marc was less of a “difficult” kid and more of an under-stimulated, high-energy one. Eternally bored, a little too smart for his own good, and definitely too skilled with computers. He was put in every sport under the sun and succeeded at all of them. But there was a restlessness inside him, and the endless pranks and constant mischief helped assuage that.

“Typical gifted child acting out,” one of Dad’s girlfriends once said. She was a psychologist, and I really liked her. In fact, she may have been my favorite out of all the women he’d brought home. For a while I hoped she’d become my stepmom, but none of Dad’s relationships seemed to last more than a couple of years—a problem, since I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from growing very attached to them all. But for one reason or another, his partners always left, and even though Dad recovered quickly, their departure never failed to make me feel alone, abandoned, and maybe a little guilty. Was it my fault? Was I too needy? Should I have made myself scarcer when they came over? Was that why Mom had left me right after I was born?

Or maybe this was just the nature of relationships: Transient. Fragile. Finite. Not worth pursuing.

Over time, I formed my own coping strategies. All I could control was my behavior; I needed to be as considerate and high-achieving as possible, and if I accomplished that, maybe people would contemplate sticking around. And if they didn’t . . . I taught myself to be grateful for what they would leave behind. I’m grateful to Dad’s girlfriends for teaching me how to fish, how to use tampons, how to bake bread. And, of course, that Marc Compton was a bit of a misunderstood genius.

I saw hints of it, too. The speed with which he’d finish his homework if it meant getting out of the house to hang out with his friends. The books he’d read sprawled on the living room couch, all above his age level. The surgical precision of his jabs, as though he knew exactly what to say to annoy the crap out of everyone.

But all in all, once Marc stopped being the boy I adored and became something between a little goblin and a full-blown villain, Tabitha and I began spending more time at my house, and that seemed to suit him just fine. For a few years, he seemed to forget my name and didn’t address me as anything but Four Eyes, Shorty, Nerd, Cheese Grater, and a few other zingers that managed to address whatever physical attribute of mine was most prominent (and most insecurity-yielding) at the time. He eventually settled on Butt Paper, after a mortifying two hours in which I walked around our middle school with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. Marc was the one who told me to get rid of it—Tabitha was at home sick, and I clearly had no other trustworthy friends—but the nickname proved impossible to shed. Then again, since he constantly addressed Tabitha as Her Royal Shittiness, while Tabitha called him Mom and Dad’s Oopsie Baby, things could have been way worse for me.

I pushed back some. Called him Marky, which I knew he hated. He had some funny-looking years, too—he was gangly, tall and skinny to the extreme, his bones too long for his body and too prominently structured for his face. But I still felt protective of him, and deep down I knew the constant badgering was the only way he could relate to us. As we got older, as Marc became busier with his own life, as the teasing morphed into something lazier—something that felt a lot like ignoring us—I almost missed it.

And then he started high school.

“How is my crappy little brother popular, and you and I aren’t?” Tabitha asked me during PE, in the middle of a partner stretch.

“Well, we aren’t unpopular.”

She gave me her best Are you for fucking real? stare, but I didn’t back down.

“Tab, we’re fine. We have friends. Boyfriends. We have each other, and great grades, extracurriculars and band, National Honor Society. We write for the school newspaper, and the other day Mrs. Niles said we’re her favorite students—” I realized how shrill and desperate I was starting to sound, and abruptly shut up.

It was halfway through junior year. Due to the incomprehensible sorcery of the school district’s calculations, Marc was only two grades behind us. And, shockingly, seemed to have the entire school in his thrall.

“Why on earth have three girls—one of whom is a senior—asked me for his number in the last two weeks? Why is half the soccer team hanging out with him at my house?”

I blinked. “Isn’t Marc a freshman?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t share his contact information with a senior, then—”

“I’m not giving out my loser brother’s number to a senior or anyone else, but I need to understand why they want it and why he has a giant friend group who seems to have nothing better to do than coming over at seven a.m. to drive him to school!”

I cocked my head and tried to conjure Marc Compton. He was less childlike than even the year before, for sure. His voice wasn’t as squeaky and prone to cracking. He had a crooked smile and seemed at ease in his body, and if I really applied myself to some method acting, I could maybe figure out what the girls saw in him. “Well, he’s growing into his looks. He’s good at sports. He’s charismatic and probably fun to be around—”

“I once saw him kiss a slug with my own two eyes.”

“Oh, I was there. Those other girls, though? They did not bear witness to that opinion-making event. We know the real Marc, but who else does?”

Tabitha rolled her eyes, muttered something about how humanity was doomed, and went back to stretching her quads.

But things had changed. In the hallways at school, Marc no longer acknowledged me—not even to make fun of me—and that year I exchanged fewer words with him than with the mechanic who fixed my car at the Jiffy Lube. If a vengeful angel were to drop from the skies and chop off three of my fingers, I could still count our interactions on one hand.

The first was in the school cafeteria, after I patted my pockets and realized I must have left my wallet in my locker.

“I’m so sorry,” I told the notoriously ill-tempered lunch lady, mortified. “I’m going to go grab it and run back—”

“I got it, Butt Paper,” a familiar but surprisingly deep voice said from somewhere behind me. A handful of bills appeared on my tray, but when I turned to thank Marc, he was already immersed in conversation with someone else and I was forgotten.

The second was a few months later, when he walked in on me doing my homework in the Comptons’ kitchen. I’d heard someone enter the room but didn’t look up, figuring it was Tabitha. A couple of minutes later, when I lifted my gaze, I found him stopped in his tracks, quietly staring at me with a soft smile on his lips.

Weird.

“Um, Tabitha’s on the phone with CJ,” I explained.

“Ah.” It came out a little raspy, and he cleared his throat. Surprisingly, he didn’t leave. Instead, he said, “Niall Holcomb, huh?”

“What? Oh.” Niall and I dated for my last two years of high school. He was the ideal first boyfriend—always kind, never pushy, busy enough with his own life not to demand too much from someone whose main priority would always be academics. Namely, me. Like Marc, he played basketball. In fact, Marc had basically stolen his spot on the team. “Yeah,” I said. I was surprised he had noticed we were together, since Niall and I kept a pretty low profile.

Marc’s lips flattened. “He treating you well?”

“. . . Yes?”

“Are you answering me or asking me?”

“Yes. He is.” I blinked, confused. “Why? Are you going to tell me a dark secret about him? Is he a sociopath? Does he keep a family of porcelain dolls in his locker? Always carries zip ties with him? Toenail fungus?”

Marc huffed a laugh. “I wish I could. But he’s a really good guy.”

“Then . . . why do you wish you could?”

He shrugged. Did not explain himself. “What are you and Tab up to, by the way?”

“I’m waiting for her to drive to band practice together.”

“Ah.” He nodded and walked past me, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge. He was so tall, I couldn’t believe that he’d once been tiny enough to hold in my arms. The features that had seemed to swallow his face just a couple of years ago had turned into something almost disturbingly attractive, especially in combination with his dark hair and gray eyes. “How’s the trombone going?” he asked, leaning against the counter.

“Poorly.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t play it.”

“Come on, Butt Paper. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

“No, for real, Marky. I play the tuba.”

I watched him bite back a smile. “They’re the same, aren’t they?”

“Nope.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” I took a deep breath. “Don’t be alarmed, but it’s the reason they have different names.”

“That can’t be true.” He shook his head, not bothering to hide his amusement.

“Let’s bet on it.”

His eyebrow rose. “What do you want to bet?”

“If I’m right,” I told him, “you’re mowing my dad’s lawn this summer.” I hated doing that so much. I would barter a million chores to avoid it.

“Seems fair. But if I’m right . . .” He hesitated. That smirky half smile that seemed to permanently reside on his face suddenly faded. For a moment, he looked almost nervous. But also preternaturally determined.

“Yeah?” I prompted, a little breathless.

“If I’m right, then you’ll go on—”

I never got around to hearing his side of the bet because Tabitha walked in and interrupted us. But Marc must have done some independent research and read up on brass instruments, because even though I never saw him at my house, that year I didn’t have to mow the lawn a single time.

As I moved into my senior year, there were big and little moments with him.

When the girl he was seeing called me a bitch for accidentally walking into her, he broke up with her in under ten minutes.

When I spent the night at Tabitha’s and couldn’t go back to sleep after a nightmare, Marc, on his way to get a glass of water, found me huddled on the living room couch, sat next to me for hours, and took my mind off my bad dream by telling me the backstories of every single non-playable character in his favorite video game.

When I got the call that my grandma’s health had taken a turn for the worse, I don’t remember what Dad told me on the phone or how I explained the situation to the Comptons. That day, and the ones that followed, are a blur, and my only memory anchoring me is of Marc breaking the speed limit to get me to the hospital and his hand reaching across the center console, never letting go of mine.

All in all, I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Marc and I were friends during our teenage years. But somehow, when I really needed him, he was always around.

It took me a long, long while to realize that it wasn’t by accident.

Marc came to our senior prom as the date of Maddy Rodgers, a very beautiful, kind, intelligent, popular girl who managed to graduate valedictorian but never to learn that my name was not, in fact, Amy.

Tabitha and I were so focused on what was to come, we barely noticed. I was going to Berkeley. Tabitha and CJ, to Colorado. Niall had a scholarship to Bennington, and neither of us was interested in attempting a long-distance relationship. Still, the end of high school felt like a momentous occasion, and after years of being almost disgustingly good, we decided to live it up a little. Tabitha and I lied to our parents and said we’d sleep over at each other’s places. Then we took our hard-earned Froyo salaries, pooled funds with Niall and CJ, booked two hotel rooms, and—

Got caught.

The moment we walked into the hotel lobby and saw Tabitha’s parents waiting for us will go down as one of the most mortifying in the history of man.

“How did you know where we’d be?” Tabitha asked her mom from the back seat of the car.

“Jamie’s dad called to talk to her. And that’s how your castle of lies unraveled.”

I buried my face in my hands and wished upon a deathly star.

“‘Castle’?” Tabitha snorted. “It’s barely a hut. We just wanted to hang out with our boyfriends for once. For eighteen years we’ve been nothing but angels! We’ve literally never even tried to sneak out—”

“Probably the reason you’re so bad at it,” Mr. Compton pointed out. Fairly.

“How did you know what hotel we’d booked, though?” I asked slowly. In another small act of rebellion, I’d had a tiny bite of CJ’s edible, which made my brain sluggish and my surroundings a bit too thick to wade through.

“We didn’t. But Marc said it was the one where most seniors were planning to go, so we took an educated guess.”

Tabitha said nothing, but even in my half-dazed state I knew to be terrified of the way her entire body stiffened like a hammer. And when her parents drove us back to their house (with the promise that “Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, Jamie’s dad will be here, too, and you two are going to get properly yelled at.”), she didn’t hesitate. Marc was already asleep. But Tabitha, powered by Mike’s Hard Lemonade and the alcohol-metabolizing enzymes she had yet to develop, barged into his room and turned on the light.

“I can’t believe you fucking told them,” she hissed at her brother.

I followed her inside and closed the door behind me, knowing that if the Comptons heard them fight, we’d be in even bigger trouble. When I turned, Marc was sitting on the edge of his bed, bare chested and bleary eyed. He ran his hand through his hair, yawned for twenty leisurely seconds, but didn’t play dumb. “Come on, Tab,” he said.

“‘Come on’? What the fuck is up with you and ruining my life?”

“They found out on their own. And you two were out after curfew and weren’t picking up your phones. They were going to call the police.”

“So you told them about the stupid hotel!”

“I only told them where other seniors were going. I had no idea what you two were up to. But if you’re planning on starting to live your life like normal people and slip out more often, I’m very happy to teach you how not to get caught—”

“You couldn’t let me have this one thing, huh?”

“Tab . . .” He rolled his eyes. “Just go to bed.”

“No! How would you feel if I snitched you out? How would you feel if I told your secrets?”

Marc stood and widened his arms. “You’d be welcome to it, but I don’t have any. Listen, can I go back to sleep? It’s not my fault if you two are still virgins at the ripe old age of—”

Tabitha moved so fast, the glitter of her dress brought to mind a shooting star. I saw her grab the drawer in Marc’s desk, pull out a box, and then throw it on the rug in front of his bed.

The box opened, and a few dozen papers scattered around it.

Pictures. Lots of them. Pictures of . . .

I blinked.

Was that . . . ?

“You asshole,” Tabitha snarled. “Did you have fun telling Mom and Dad my business? I hope you did, because I’m having the time of my life telling my best friend that you’re fucking gone over her. Especially knowing that she thinks you’re just a bratty little piece of shit!”

I owlishly looked up at Marc, expecting him to burst into laughter and deny it. But there was no quick retort, no jab. His jaw clenched as though he was gritting his teeth. He kept his eyes on his sister, and I was briefly afraid that the fight would turn ugly in a way I couldn’t handle. But then he said, “Get the fuck out of my room before I tell Mom and Dad that you’re drunk, too.”

“Asshole,” Tabitha repeated, storming out in a blaze of sequins.

She left me behind, and I bit the inside of my cheek before cautiously asking, “Is that really me? In the pictures?”

Marc did something I hadn’t seen in about a decade: he flushed.

“Jesus, Jamie.” He ran a nervous hand down his face. It was the first time he’d used my real name in . . . forever.

I went down to my knees. The ball gown I’d worn to prom and never taken off pooled around me, a puddle of blue tulle and pearls. Gingerly, I picked up a photo. “I remember this one. It’s from—”

“The spelling bee you won.” He knelt, too. Gently took the picture from my hand. With surprising care, he started stacking them all back into the box, like they were his hoard. His treasure. Not to be gazed upon by mere mortals.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” He stopped to meet my eyes. “Did you really just ask me why? Are you high or something?”

“Actually, yeah. I think I might be.” It was probably the edible, the reason I felt so detached from this moment. As though this was happening to someone else and I was just watching a recording of it. “How serious is this?” I asked academically, pointing at the box.

A single eyebrow crept up. “What do you think?”

Very, my slow brain provided.

“But don’t flatter yourself too much,” he added, a little cold. “I’m probably just stuck at some weird stage of my psychosexual development. I’ll grow out of it.”

Right. Probably. “I—”

“Can you get the hell out of my room, now?” He stood. Carefully put the box back in the drawer. “I was asleep before my psycho sister and her psycho friend barged in.”

“Oh. Yeah, I . . . sorry.” It took me a couple of tries to get to my feet. I started walking out, disoriented.

Stopped when I heard, “Jamie.”

I turned around.

The corners of Marc’s lips twitched. “Since the secret’s out . . .” He grabbed his phone from his nightstand, lifted it, and snapped a single picture.

Of me.

In my prom dress.

“I really didn’t mean to get you and Tab in trouble,” he murmured. “But selfishly, I’m glad you didn’t spend the night with Niall.”

“I . . . Why?”

“Because when I saw you in that dress earlier tonight, I . . .” He exhaled. Shook his head. “He doesn’t deserve you. No one does.”

No one. “What about you?”

“I deserve you least of all. But I want you the most. And I won’t give up. The lengths I’m willing to go to . . . One day, I’ll show you.”

I stood there, mystified, for a long moment.

Until: “You can go now,” he said gently.

And so I left.

To: Marc.Compton@gmail.com

From: Jamie.Malek@gmail.com

Hey Marc,

It’s been such a long time! I didn’t get to see you during your junior year because you were doing that exchange to Singapore, and this year I was too busy with my internships to go back to Illinois for the holidays. Tabitha has been keeping me updated, and I wanted to congratulate you on your college acceptances. You’ll love Boston, I’m sure.

Hugs,

Jamie

From: Marc.Compton@gmail.com

To: Jamie.Malek@gmail.com

Thanks, Butt Paper. Hope you’re doing great.

Sent from my iPhone

The next time I saw Marc, I was twenty-one. It was during the winter holidays, two and a half years after our previous encounter. And I was not ready.

I knew that he’d matured. He was, at last, all grown up, and not just because he was legally an adult.

“CJ and I visited Marc in Boston and it was actually fun. We got to talking about some of the shit he did when we were younger and he apologized like, a million times???” Tabitha had texted me the previous summer. “It kind of worries me. I mean, who even am I, if you take away my hatred for my little brother? What will be the new core of my identity?”

And: “Why is he doing so well in his classes? God, I might be the black sheep of the family after all.”

And: “I had a fight with CJ and Marc offered to beat him up. It’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

When Dad, his current girlfriend, and I walked up the Comptons’ snow-crusted driveway for their holiday party, I braced myself for a new and improved Marc.

I did not expect that my heart would stop and my knees wobble.

Because he was still Marc. Still the boy who used to burp the national anthem and leave toothpaste globs in the sink. But he was also the product of the last few years of his life, years in which I hadn’t seen him. That made him at once the same and different, and . . .

“Hey, Butt Paper,” he said, nothing but fondness in his voice. Then I was in his arms, reaching up, and I couldn’t believe how tall and fully fleshed out he was, the scratch of his stubble against my cheek, his warm, enveloping hug.

“Wow,” I mumbled into his shoulder.

“‘Wow’?” His voice was deep in my ear. I felt him pull me even closer into him.

“Just . . . I think I missed you?”

Soft laughter rolled out of him. It vibrated through my coat, right into my chest. Northern Illinois, in late December, and I was suddenly hot. “Why do you sound so surprised?” He pulled back. He’d never been nervous or insecure, but his new smile seemed so sturdy, so solid and confident, I couldn’t look away.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. Collected myself. “I didn’t think I had it in me to miss someone who programmed my computer to write scrotum every time I typed the word he.”

“Damn, that was such a good macro. I bet I still have it somewhere.” His gaze rested quietly on me. Turned into something a little more . . . avid. “I missed you, too, Jamie.”

“Yeah?”

He hesitated, and by the time he opened his mouth again, Mrs. Compton was there, taking my coat, fussing over me, and I didn’t get another moment with Marc until dinner. It was a nice meal, but the tension in the air was obvious—some ongoing conversation in the Compton family that I wasn’t privy to, and I only started grasping bits and pieces of it toward the end.

“. . . not a good reason to drop out of college,” Mr. Compton was saying when I tuned in to the chatter at his end of the table.

“It is, actually,” Marc countered calmly. “I can always go back to school if I want to. But the angel investors are not going to wait around forever.”

“Could you not do both?” Tabitha asked. “School and the start-up?”

Marc shook his head. “Not if I want to give the company its best shot.”

“But you said the tech is already developed.”

“What’s the tech for?” Dad interjected.

“A file-transfer system. Much quicker and nimbler than what’s currently on the market.” Marc went on to explain the details of it. I could see them fly over the heads of everyone at the table, but I’d taken enough computer science classes in college to be impressed.

“If the tech is as good as you said,” Dad’s girlfriend interrupted him, “have you considered selling it to someone else? That way, you’ll be free to finish school while they bring it to market.”

Mr. Compton lit up. “That’s what we’ve been telling him all weekend. See, she agrees with us!”

Marc sighed and rose to his feet. “I’ll be right back.”

Mrs. Compton frowned. “Where are you going?”

“Cigarette break.”

“But you don’t smoke?”

He grinned wide. For a second, I couldn’t breathe. “Let’s pretend that I do and that I’m not just trying to get away from you.”

I waited for a few minutes before excusing myself, saying I needed to use the restroom. I found Marc on the back porch, head tipped up toward the stars. The air was gelid, so much so that every breath of his turned into a white puff, but he didn’t seem to mind. I wondered if Boston was like California, and the sky there never managed to look as pretty as the one here at home.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

He spared me a brief glance, then returned to the stars. “If you’re here to talk me out of—”

“I’m here to ask if you’d like me to bring you a coat.”

He looked back at me. After a short pause, a slow smile spread on his lips. “Come on,” he said, inviting me to take a seat next to him on the porch swing. Once I was there, close enough to feel his warmth, he unfolded a blanket, covered us both, and we sat in comfortable quiet for a while.

“Are you going to do it?” I asked eventually.

“Do what?”

“Drop out.”

He exhaled deeply. “I don’t know. I want to, but not a single person in the universe thinks that I should, so I’ll probably just sell the tech and—”

“I do.”

He gave me a surprised look. “You do.”

“I think you should leave school, that is.”

“Is that so?”

“Yup.”

“Well, well, well.”

“Why do you look so delighted?”

“Can’t help it.” His smile took my breath away. “Little Jamie Malek—prim and proper, by the book, speeding toward med school since first grade—is now telling me to blow up my whole life. It’s making me feel a certain kind of way.”

I rolled my eyes. “I do think you should massage the plan a bit. You should take a leave of absence and not drop out. Maybe give yourself a deadline—if you can’t bring the tech to market by a reasonable date, you go back to school. But . . . you shouldn’t give up. It sounds like a great idea, a great product. And it’s your tech. You shouldn’t have to sell it if you don’t want to.”

That toothpaste-commercial grin of his again—perfect and happy and hopeful. Boyish. “Yeah?”

I nodded. “Actually, I have some money put away. Mostly what my grandma left me. And it’s just there, collecting dust and being gnawed at by inflation, so—”

“Jamie. No.”

“Yes.”

“I have financial backers. I don’t need—”

“I know you don’t. I’m asking you for the opportunity to invest in equity capital. I’d rather do it to support someone I believe in, someone I know and care about, than—”

“We’ve barely seen each other in the last few years—”

“True, but I know you. I always have. You get it, right?”

He did. I was sure of it. I could practically taste it in the way his body suddenly tensed. “Keep your money,” he said after a long silence, voice pitched low. His hand found my knee under the blanket. Closed around it. Sent hot shivers up my thigh and into my belly. “And let me take you out on a date.”

Without any forethought, my entire body screamed: Yes. I closed my eyes, swallowed the syllable, and forced myself to sound amused. “What’s this? Community service at the senior center?”

“You are two years older than me, Jamie.”

“Twenty-one and nineteen is a big difference.”

“Yeah, of course. You could be my mother. Let me take you out anyway.”

“Marc. You live in Boston,” I said instead of No.

“Not for long. And you’re going to med school at Berkeley—”

“I haven’t been accepted yet.”

“Come on, Jamie. I know you as much as you know me. You’re going to med school at Berkeley, and if I take a leave of absence, I’ll likely move to the West Coast. Bay Area. That’s where everything happens. And that’s where you are.”

He was still so stubborn. Determined. Pure single-mindedness.

It made me want to lean in to him. Ask for a kiss. Kiss him myself. But . . . “I actually have a boyfriend.”

“Nice. He can fuck off.”

“Marc.”

“No, I’m serious. What’s his name?”

“Shane.”

“Shane can fuck right off.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Hated myself quite a bit for it.

“Listen, Jamie, date us both. I can deal with that. And then choose the better guy.”

I huffed. “You seem awfully certain that I’d choose you.”

“Oh, sweetheart. I really am.” He leaned closer and my heart threatened to detonate. I could feel his breath against my cheek. His palm, wide open, climbing up my inner thigh. Heat licking through my spine. “I’d make sure of it.”

“I . . . I can’t, Marc.” I had to physically wrench myself away from him. I scooted to the end of the swing because maybe I couldn’t, but I really, really wanted to.

A long silence. A deep, gathering, frustrated sigh. And then he nodded and said, “It wouldn’t be right, anyway. This wasn’t the plan. I need to stick to it.”

I blinked in confusion. “What plan?”

“The thing is, you’re perfect, Jamie. Absolutely fantastic—always have been. I’ve never been anything but amazed by you. And I don’t think I’m there yet. I want to deserve you.”

“I . . . don’t understand.”

“I’m going to get this right. I’m going to put together this company and successfully bring the tech to market.” His smile was resolute. “And once I’m worthy of it, I’ll ask you for another chance.”

“Marc, I . . . No. I’m not perfect. Not at all.” I shook my head, thinking about the profound depression I’d fallen into during my sophomore year, about how lonely and anxious I felt sometimes, how I constantly questioned whether I was good enough to become a doctor. About how I, after a lifetime of being left behind, found it next to impossible to trust people to stick around. Even Tabitha and I weren’t as close as we used to be, and despite my efforts our bond seemed to be growing weaker by the year. “Your impression of me . . . I’m not really the person you used to . . .” Have a crush on, I didn’t say. But he got it.

And said, “That’s fine, Jamie. Since I’m not the person who spent most of his life in love with you, either.”

My heart drummed against my rib cage. I watched Marc as he stood. Draped his side of the blanket on my knees. Added in a low whisper, “And for what it’s worth, you’re still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He bent to press a lingering kiss to my flushed cheek, and walked back inside the house.

Four years later, Marc Evan Compton was on the cover of Forbes.

And five years later, everything fell apart.

Chapter Three

Jamie, are you okay?”

I’m hugging my knees on one end of the couch, as far from where Marc sits as I can possibly manage, trying to ignore the howling of the storm that has intensified to a scary volume, the dangerous sounds of the wind beating against the trees.

I distract myself by staring at the beautifully lit Christmas tree, decorated in the same classic style Marc’s mom has favored since we were kids. Then I notice the swirls of snow traveling furiously past the high windows and have to shut my eyes tight.

I’ve always been a bit of a delicate flower. Scared of thunderstorms. The dark. Nightmares. Loud noises. Back when we were younger, Marc used to tease me about it—but then he’d miraculously be around whenever I showed the smallest signs of distress, and stick to my side until I was done panicking.

“Jamie.”

When I open my eyes, Marc is right there, kneeling next to me, the gray of his irises darkened by worry.

Honestly, he was right. Being outside would be dangerous, and staying put is for the best. Even if, for me, being stuck with him is hell, with just a tiny bit of heaven blended in.

Must be just plain hell for him, a needling voice reminds me. Given the way you treated him last time. Given his reaction to your apology—or lack thereof.

“I saw you on TV last month,” I blurt out. A bit out of the blue, but it’s as neutral a topic of conversation as any.

“Yeah?” He smiles, as if relieved that I’m finally talking to him. “Was it Dateline?”

“Of course.”

“Dammit.”

“No, wait . . . To Catch a Predator, I think.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Okay, fine. It was your testimony in front of Congress. That special hearing for all that . . . Silicon Valley stuff?”

“I didn’t take you for the type to binge-watch C-SPAN judiciary-committee content.”

“Excuse me? I live for gavel-to-gavel coverage of the US Congress.”

“Right. How could I forget.” He gives me a long, affectionate look.

I don’t get it.

“Honestly?” I say to interrupt it. “I came across the footage while looking for the Cartoon Network for one of my patients.”

“Ah. Well, that checks out. You are always working.” There is something in his tone—like he’s riding the thin line between laughing with me and at me, daring me to remember our last conversation.

“Are you really too busy, Jamie? Or are you just fucking terrified?”

So much for safe topics. “Was it fun? Giving the testimony?”

“Explaining why crypto is bad to a nonagenarian senator who has no working knowledge of the internet does have its moments.”

I chuckle. “I bet. And how’s the . . .” I wave my hand, vague. “Stocks?”

“Which ones?”

“Um . . . yours?”

He leans back, amused. His face reminds me of that picture of him at some kind of interview or convention, the one I saw online a few months ago. He looked so good, I decided it must have been photoshopped.

Clearly I was wrong.

“Would you like to know what their market value was at last closing?”

“Um, yeah. Sure. Though I’m not certain how stocks work, so a simple good or bad would suffice.”

“Good.” He purses his lips, curious. “You never cashed out, Jamie.”

“Huh?”

“When I first started the company, you insisted on investing in it. And then you never sold your shares, even though they could make you quite a bit.”

“Right.” I shift on the cushion. “I know. I haven’t gotten around to it, but I’ve been thinking about doing that.”

“Have you?”

No. I haven’t—not once. Because even if I messed up, even if I can’t be with Marc, I like the idea of us being tethered by something. And if that something has to be market-traded equity, so be it.

“You don’t look too good, Jamie,” he says after a long pause, so quiet that I almost don’t hear him over the whooshing of the snow.

“Did you just tell me that I look bad? Is this a return to our Butt Paper days?”

“You don’t look bad,” he amends. “I don’t think you’re capable of it. But you do look more tired than I’ve ever seen you. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Marc, I just . . .” I shrug breezily, like nothing really matters. “I mean, it’s hard sometimes. I thought it’d get easier, but the further I get into my residency . . . The hours are long, and my patients are really young, and sometimes they’re not . . . Sometimes I can’t do much for them. And then I go home and am exhausted, but I can’t fall asleep because I can’t think about anything else, and I don’t want to be alone with my spiraling brain, so I go to the gym and by the time I get back, I end up being too tired to sleep and . . .” I shrug again. Overkill, probably. “Wow. Could you please forget everything I just said? Because I’m pretty sure that it makes me sound like a total loser.”

“Not a loser. Just lonely.”

His tone isn’t mocking or accusatory, but I still feel like I should defend myself. Especially after our last conversation. “I’m not, though. I have a roommate I get along with. And lots of friends. And colleagues who—”

“I don’t doubt that. You can still be lonely.”

I glance down at my knees, unwilling to admit how right he is, but he forces me to meet his eyes with a finger under my chin.

“You can always call me, you know? Even if you don’t want to . . .” He takes a deep breath. I want to touch him so bad, my heart could explode. “I know we’ve been over this stuff. But even if you don’t want anything to do with me in that way . . . I’m still your friend, Jamie. You can call me.”

Can I, Marc? Can I call you? “I’m not sure that’s true,” I say, squaring my shoulders.

“It is.” His brow is quizzical. “You can. Anytime.”

“That’s not really my experience, though.” A bubble of resentment pops in my chest. “Not anytime.”

Marc leans forward. “Your experience? What do you—”

And that, of course, is when the whoosh of the storm reaches its all-time loudest, and the lights go out.

Chapter Four

The outage is in the whole neighborhood. They’re working on fixing the power lines.”

Marc tells me this after checking the online app, but I’d already figured that out from Dad’s text.

Dad: “No power! You okay?”

Me: “Yup, safe at Marc’s.”

Dad: “Maybe it’s better if you stay put there for a while.”

I sigh and force myself not to type: “Gee, you really think so, Dad?”

He’s always been a loving father. I know he tried to do his best, and in return I try not to blame him for being a little flaky and self-centered, and for all the times he forgot to pick me up from school or sleepaway camp before I got my license.

“It’s not that bad,” I tell Marc, trying to sound unaffected. Unfortunately, the semi-obscurity is already making me want to hide under the nearest bed and rock myself to sleep. Is it embarrassing for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to be afraid of the dark?

Probably. Maybe. If I try hard enough, I might be able to cringe myself out of this situation.

“At least we have the fire,” I add. “For warmth. And some light.”

“I need to introduce my parents to the concept of generators.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t buy them one.”

“I did,” he grunts. “But they never got around to installing it.”

Crap. “You know what?” I turn on my phone’s flashlight. I can feel a panic episode coming up, and it’s probably better if I am alone for that. “I’m gonna go check on Sondheim and be right back, just to make sure that he’s okay.”

“Sondheim can see in the dark and hates everyone. He’s having the time of his life.”

“Still, just to make sure—”

I try to brush past Marc, but he stops me with a hand on my wrist. “Jamie.”

“I— What?”

“You know I’m not some guy you met on Tinder, right?”

I blink. “I do not have time for a Tinder account, and I’m not sure what you mean by—”

“I know you’re about to have a panic attack,” he says simply. I wish I could read his expression better, but his back is to the fire, and he’s little more than a dark, haloed silhouette.

Also, I wish he wasn’t right. “I’m not—”

“You’re chewing your lip, and you’ve been white-knuckling my mom’s Live, Laugh, Love throw pillow for the last three minutes.”

I look at my hand, and sure enough, I’m clutching the pillow. I toss it back on the couch like it’s covered in spiders and ask, “Can I just go into your room and—”

“Have the panic attack on your own, then come out in fifteen minutes and pretend that nothing happened? Let me think about it.” He pretends to squint into the distance, then looks at me. “No, Jamie.” He pulls me closer, right into him, and I don’t even attempt to hide the relief that comes with having my cheek pressed against his chest and his arms close around me. He’s the warmest thing I’ve ever felt, smells like pine trees and soap, and slowly, gradually, my heart stops racing.

“Marc?”

“Mmm.”

“You can’t just hold me until the power comes back.”

“Why? Is there an anti-hug law in Illinois I don’t know about?”

“No, but . . . you probably have better things to do.”

“Jamie.” He says it like it’s a firm no. Like he really doesn’t. But I push away anyway, and even though he sighs deeply, he lets me. “Come sit by the fire. We can . . . I don’t know. Play a game to pass the time.”

“A game? Like what?”

“I’m sure we’ll find something to take your mind off things.”

My cheeks heat. There is something a little suggestive about the way he said something. An open-ended hint, just a touch filthy.

“We have UNO somewhere in the attic,” he adds, pensive.

I flush even harder, realizing it’s my mind that’s filthy and nothing else. He’s over you, Jamie. You fucked up. He no longer sees you that way. “Not sure it’s the ideal time to go through old boxes.”

“Yup.” He glances around as if the Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit might have materialized on the coffee table in the last few minutes. Then says, “What about Truth or Drink?”

“Oh my God.” Laughter bubbles out of me. “I haven’t thought about that game in years. Since high school.”

“That’s okay. I’m sure we can scrounge up the rules.”

The rules—and I use the term generously—are pretty simple. Players take turns asking questions. The other can choose to either answer truthfully or take a shot. Pretty straightforward, but it was the shit when we were teenagers—mostly at the kind of parties where Marc thrived and I was never invited. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played it.”

“You were way too pure for that in high school.”

“I wasn’t ‘pure,’” I say reflexively. “I was just . . .”

“Shy, and reserved, and focused. A bit of a people pleaser. Afraid that your dad would get mad at you and leave you if you screwed up.” He stares at me like he sees me. Like he has been seeing me all along.

It’s too intense.

“We can play,” I hurry to say. “If you can find something to drink.”

He does—a bottle of tequila, unopened, in the back of a kitchen cupboard. He brings it out on a tray and sets it on the soft rug in front of the fireplace, a shot glass on each end. We sit across from each other, the tray in the middle, as he pours the thick liquid.

I’m not so anxious anymore. It’s warm here. Cozy. I feel safe and cocooned while the storm rages outside. It also feels oddly forbidden, doing something like this in the room where Marc probably learned how to walk, even though we’ve both been adults for quite a few years. “Why do I feel as though your parents could walk in any second and ground us?”

“Because whenever we come back home to visit, we regress back to when we were eighteen?”

“It’s so true. Last week I had the weird compulsion to leaf through my yearbooks. What is wrong with us?”

“It’s a pretty common condition. Yesterday Maddy texted to ask if I wanted to meet up with her and break into the high school at night.”

“Oh. And what . . . what did you say to her?”

His eyebrow lifts. “What do you think, Jamie?” The shadows play with his cheekbones in a way I can’t compute. Arrestingly handsome, that’s what he is. “You can have the first question.”

“Oh. Um . . . Let’s see.” I look up, studying the projections of the flames onto the ceiling. There are a million things I want to know about Marc, but only about two and a half of them won’t hurt me. Ignorance, sometimes, is bliss. “Why didn’t you go on the cruise with your parents and Tabitha?”

“Shareholders’ meeting. Three days ago.”

“Ah.” I nod. “Um . . . your turn, I guess?”

He doesn’t hesitate. It’s like his question was always there, on the tip of his tongue, ready to be rolled out. “When’s the last time you had sex with someone?”

My stomach drops. For the longest moment, I cannot breathe. “I should have known,” I say, glaring, “that you’d start with a very invasive question.”

He grins. “Meanwhile, I did know that you’d squander yours in the name of peacekeeping. So, last time? When?”

I down my shot exclusively out of spite. The thing is, Marc knows that Shane and I broke up last year, when he proposed and I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to him, because . . . because he’s a great guy, who deserves to be with someone who’s crazy about him. Ideally, somebody who’s not in love with someone else, either.

I have no intention of admitting that there hasn’t been anyone else. “I should ask you when the last time you had sex was, too,” I mutter, the burn of the tequila still trailing fire down my throat. I watch Marc’s strong hands as he pours more, already feeling a little lightheaded.

“Is that your question?”

“No,” I bark. I have subzero interest in finding out how he amused himself after the last time we saw each other. There’s something else I’d rather know. “Dad invited you to spend Christmas with us multiple times. And you kept saying no.”

He stares calmly. “That’s not a question.”

“Why?”

He glances down at his still-full shot glass. I’m convinced he’ll drink it, but his eyes calmly meet mine again. “Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend time with you over the holidays.”

It’s like a knife is planted into my abdomen. I have to clench my fists against the almost-physical pain. “And by you, you mean the singular you—me—or my entire family—”

“No follow-up questions. It’s my turn.” His smile has a crooked, cruel edge. “Are you happy, Jamie?”

“I . . . Right now?”

“In general.”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The one I wanted to ask.” He points at my glass. Tops it off. “Your drink is right here, if there’s something you don’t want to admit to.”

So I do just that. I swallow the alcohol in one big gulp, then set it back on the tray with too much force. “Are you happy, Marc?” I ask, immediately retaliating, daring him to lie to me or drink.

He doesn’t waver. “No, I’m not,” he says simply. “My turn.” He refills my glass again. And asks, “What would make you happy?”

“I— This is way too generic. World peace. Puppies. A magic wand that destroys greenhouse gasses—”

“You’re right,” he concedes. “It was a poorly formulated question. Let me ask you again: Is there anything I could do, right now, that would make you happy?”

On the plus side, my panic is long gone. However, it’s now swallowed by anger—toward none other than Marc. I think I might hate him. Actually, I’m certain of it, as I angrily pick up my glass with trembling fingers, ignoring the liquid sloshing stickily to my fingers. I usually have a pretty high tolerance for alcohol, but the last time I ate was several hours ago, and—

I’m not drunk yet, but a hazy wave of heat and ethanol hits me all at once. It softens my defenses and dissolves all my filters. Fuck it, I think. Right when it’s my turn again.

“Are you angry at me?” I ask. Or maybe the tequila does. “For what I did to you the last time we saw each other?”

His expression hardens. “Yes, Jamie. I am fucking furious with you.”

Chapter Five

It happened four months ago.

On my last birthday.

After the worst week of my career.

It wasn’t the first time I’d lost a patient. It was, however, the most unexpected. I probably should have seen it coming, but I’d been so certain that it would all work out. Then it hadn’t, and even though my attending physician insisted that nothing more could have been done, I wasn’t so sure that I could easily forgive myself. It had been a rough shift in a series of rough shifts, with lots of questioning my life choices and wondering whether I was cut out for keeping alive anything more complex than a San Pedro cactus. But when I stepped out of the hospital, Marc was standing there, tall and handsome and so real, for a second I thought, It’s going to be okay.

I’d seen him several times in the previous five years. Back at home, of course, whenever our visits overlapped, but also here in the Bay Area. We didn’t hang out every week, or even every month. But once in a while he’d contact me, ask how I was doing, and take me out for lunch or dinner.

It was an interesting, meticulously arranged dynamic. Other people were always present—his friends and colleagues, for the most part, who all seemed to already know me and what I did for a living, and probably thought my role in Marc’s life was much larger than it really was. We’d have a nice meal together as a group, laugh for a couple of hours, keep each other updated on what was going on in our lives, and then Marc would make sure I was delivered back home.

We were never alone, not even once. And he’d never brought up any of the things he’d said to me before dropping out of college. He’s changed his mind on me, I thought, and told myself I was too busy with work to be disappointed. He made it big and met new, more successful, more interesting people. Plus, I don’t care. I’m with Shane.

But when Marc showed up for my birthday, Shane and I were no longer together.

And he’d come alone—just him and a bouquet of sunflowers, my favorite.

And my happiness at seeing him was so bright, I felt more unstable than a supernova.

“Happy birthday, Butt Paper.”

I snorted out a laugh, at once wanting to throw myself at him and afraid to overstep. “Thanks, Marky.”

“Glad we got the mandatory insult exchange over already. That way, I can focus on feeding you.”

I didn’t ask why he was there, how long he’d been waiting, how he knew that I was hungry. I just got in his car and let myself be driven to a ramen place a short distance away, one I’d never tried before.

“Remember how last time we met up, you told me that I needed new hobbies?” I asked as we walked up to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

“Yup.”

“Well, my quest in the past few months has been to find the perfect ramen.”

“I know.”

“Oh. How?”

“I follow you on Instagram.”

“You do?” I gave him a puzzled look. “Do I follow you back?”

“Nope. Which is very cruel of you.”

We sat outside, where Marc bought me a lot of food; gently reminded me of every embarrassing thing I’d said, done, and worn in the first sixteen years of my life; and made fun of me for being terrible at using chopsticks—“Thank God you didn’t decide to become a surgeon.”

He was relaxed. And solid. Self-assured. Marc was—and had been, for a while—a man. There were traces of the boy I’d adored (and detested) for years, sure, but I could no longer picture him eating my egg baby or smearing peanut butter under his sister’s pillow. And yet, he knew me. All the little tender bits, the building blocks that added up and made me who I was.

“Did your father remember your birthday?” he asked, like he already knew the answer, and I just shrugged. “Jamie. You should tell him when he fucks up. Otherwise, he’ll never learn.”

“It’s okay. He has a new girlfriend, so he’s been really busy. I just hope it lasts this time.”

He pursed his lips. “You know you deserve better, right?”

I wasn’t so sure. But being alone with Marc was at once soothing and thrilling, and it was all I wanted to focus on. Once I was full and the sun was setting, we went on a walk down the shore, and I asked him how work was going.

“Good.” There was a subtle shift in his presence. “Great, actually.”

I already knew that—everyone in the world knew that. Still, I grinned, proud and happy for him.

“You know . . .” Marc stopped and turned to me. “A while ago—five years, give or take—I gave myself a benchmark.”

“A benchmark for . . . ?”

“Success.”

“Ah. Like . . . a gross profit margin of sixty-five percent?”

“Jamie, do you know what a gross profit margin is?”

“Nope.”

He laughed. “It’s okay. You’re good at other things.”

Am I? I wondered darkly, glancing at my toes in the sand.

“The point is, I did it. I made it. I hit my KPIs. The things I wanted to achieve for the company, for myself . . . I ticked them off.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It is. Not the success, necessarily, but . . . in the past few years, I’ve worked much harder than I thought myself capable of. And all along, I was thinking about you.”

I blinked at him, sure that I had misheard.

“You remember what I told you last time we were alone, don’t you?”

Blinking stars and bitter night air. His kiss on my cheek. That dimpled grin. The outside of his thigh pressed warmly against mine.

Once I’m worthy of it, I’ll ask you for another chance.

He hadn’t been serious, though. Or if he had, those intentions had long dissolved. It was a crush, that’s all. Or the lingering traces of one. But Marc had a whole new life now, a company, girlfriends. “I surprised him at his place and there was a girl, Jamie—a fucking knockout, ”Tabitha had texted me last year. “Nice and smart, too. Forever amazed by the women my baby brother pulls. It’s gotta be the money, right?”

But now he was looking at me, and the things he was saying . . .

“Are you having a slow week?” I asked, forcing out a laugh. It was an unkind thing to say, and I regretted it right away, even as I continued. “Because if you’re just looking to get laid, I’m probably—”

He bent toward me.

Instantly shut me up.

His kiss was sudden, deep and open mouthed, nothing to everything, and in less than a second, I felt lightheaded, vibrating, ready to burst. His hands closed around my waist, pulled me to him, and a wave of simmering heat swept over me. I reached up to hold on to something and found his shoulders and his nape, letting my nails drag through the short hair there. When a deep, guttural moan rose from the back of his throat, I thought, I’m ruined.

Marc kept pressing me into his warm, solid body. He tasted like he smelled, he felt like home, and in that moment I would have done anything for him.

But then he stopped. “Jamie.” After a short hesitation, with some difficulty, he pulled back. “I fucking adore you.” His forehead dipped to lean against mine. “I was in love with you when I was fifteen, and . . . if I’m honest, not much has changed. Just . . . come home with me. Let me take care of you. Let me make you happy. I can tell that you’re lonely, and . . . honestly, so am I. I’ll never not be until we’re together.”

His words hit me like a bucket of ice-cold water. I took a step back, then another when his hands twitched as he instinctively reached to pull me back. “Are you . . . No, Marc. Are you crazy?”

His chest rose and fell rapidly. “Come on, Jamie. This cannot be a surprise. I’ve been in love with you since forever.”

“Puppy love! You had a crush on me when we were teenagers, but that was ages ago. It’s been years, and—”

“It’s been years, and I’ve met a lot of people in the meantime, and not a single one has measured up. There hasn’t been a single person I’ve liked as much as I like you.”

Laughter huffed bitterly out of me. “That’s just because I’m the one who got away, Marc. At this point, you don’t even know how much of a mess I am. I cry all the time. I cried last night, for hours. I’m a . . . a disaster. A doctor who cries when her patients are sick!”

His grin was lopsided. “Well, this changes things. I did not know you were capable of basic empathy for your fellow humans.”

“I’m serious. I thought you were over this. For the last few years you—”

“For the last few years I forced myself to be patient, and since I knew that I’d never be able to keep my promise if you and I ended up alone, I avoided it altogether. But this is it. I’ve done something I can be proud of. I’ve proven to myself that I can be reliable and get shit done. And now I want to prove it to you, too. I can provide for you. I can give you what you need. I can—” His jaw shifted. “I’m not over you. And I never will be.”

“You—you clearly have an idealized concept of me that—”

“Idealized?” He laughed. His hands came up to my cheeks. “Jamie, if anyone is aware of your flaws, it’s me. You have the worst taste in TV shows. When you get angry, you get quiet instead of communicating. You care way too much about pleasing the people around you, especially your dad, who absolutely takes advantage of it. You become sleepy and basically useless past nine thirty at night. You have this odd belief that you cannot tell people how you really feel, or you’ll be saddling them with the weight of the world and they’ll leave you. But it’s okay. I see these things. I’ve always seen them, and I love you because of, not despite, them. Because they’re what makes you you. And I love who you are—I love how thoughtful, and observant, and compassionate you are. I love that you never form an opinion before gathering all the available information. I love that your sense of humor is so dry, I never know if you’re joking. I love how gorgeous you are when you laugh, and I love the way your brain never stops working. I love you.”

I was about to break down in tears. Because, okay—maybe he did know me. Better than most. Better than anyone.

But it still meant nothing. “Marc, I’m basically your older sister.”

“There is absolutely nothing brotherly about the way I feel right now or have ever felt in your presence, ever. I wanted to marry you when I was six, and I wanted to do very, very rude things to you at eighteen.”

“Still! You are rich and handsome—you can do so much better than me!”

His eyes were incredulous. “You are delusional. There is no one better. And if there were, I wouldn’t want them.” His hand tilted my jaw, as if to make sure I was paying attention to him and him only. “Do you think I’m not a mess? Do you think I’m not constantly terrified of letting down the people around me? Of not being enough for you? Do you think ‘rich and handsome’ matters when I feel lost and alone all the fucking time except when I’m with you? Come on, Jamie. You know me. That’s the reason you and I have always understood each other so well—how alike we are. You’ve been with me at my lowest and at my shittiest, and always managed to hold me accountable while never judging me. You’re the only one who saw me not just for who I really was but also for what I could be, and . . . I want you. I want everything with you. I want to go to work in the morning knowing that I’ll see you at home every night. I want to be there when you have a terrible day at the hospital, and be the one who reminds you that you are a fantastic doctor. I want to introduce you to every single person I’ve ever met as my wife. I want to travel back to Illinois with you for the holidays. I want the two of us to be on the same team when we play Pictionary with our families, and—” He pressed a firm kiss against my lips. “I want to give you the world, Jamie. Let me. Just let me, please.”

“No. No, you don’t. Marc, I . . . I’m a mess. I’m too busy for a relationship.”

“Are you really too busy, Jamie? Or are you just fucking terrified?”

“You don’t get it. I honestly . . . At this point, I’m not even sure I can be in a relationship. There is probably something wrong with me, and . . .”

But Marc was already shaking his head, and at that moment it occurred to me: he didn’t get it. He didn’t get how impossible this was. He didn’t get that he needed someone better than me.

He was going to push back, again and again, until my defenses collapsed and I selfishly accepted everything he was offering. I was going to gobble him up, and two, five, ten years from now he was going to tire of me and leave.

Just like so many others had.

So I took a deep breath, briefly closed my eyes, and coldly said what I had to say. “It’s like you once told me: you’re just stuck at some weird stage of development.”

“Oh, come on. I was sixteen and mad at my sister for spilling my secrets. I never really thought—”

“I do, though. Marc, you’re immature, childish, and I’m just . . . I’m not really attracted to you.” I hid my trembling hands behind my back. “I’m sorry, but to me you’ll always be the annoying little boy I had to tolerate because of my best friend.” My heart hurt like it had been punched, but I forced myself to continue. “Romantically, I don’t want anything to do with you. Not now and not ever.”

Chapter Six

I am fucking furious with you,” Marc tells me.

In the firelight, his eyes are silver, as cutting as a blade. They remind me of the way his face hardened four months ago, after I told him all those horrible, false things, after I walked away from him and the shore.

But then his expression shifts to something different. Something wistful. “I’m just not furious for the reasons you think.”

“Yeah?” I ask. I glance briefly at the raging storm, but the tequila makes looking anywhere but at him very difficult. “I was a bitch to you. The things I said were unnecessarily cruel. That has to be the reason.”

“Jamie . . .” He sighs. His anger looks a lot like sadness. “You’re not as unreadable as you think.” I have no clue what he means. Before I can decode it, he asks, “Why are you so sure that it wouldn’t work out between us?”

“Is this your next question?”

“Sure.”

I blink at my empty glass. “I’ll need a refill, then.”

“Too bad. You’re done for tonight.” In a single, firm sweep he moves the bottle out of reach. “And fuck this stupid game. Just tell me why.”

“You’re the one who wanted to play—”

“Just answer my question, Jamie. And I’ll tell you what it is that makes me so angry.”

I shouldn’t. Tell him the innermost workings of my mind, that is. He could use them to hurt you, a voice warns. Does it matter, though, when I’m already so good at hurting myself? “You have no idea how messy the inside of my head really is. In fact, I’m probably like my dad. Impossible to be with. Somehow, sooner or later, everyone I really care about leaves. And I wouldn’t be able to— You’d get bored. I’m not interesting or exciting. I mean, the week after our fight, you were literally dating a model—”

He scoffs.

I am suddenly, irrationally angry. “Well, it’s true. Your sister sent me that picture of you with—”

“Ryan, right?”

I lower my eyes.

“She and I do hang out a lot. She’s great. A fantastic person.”

“I’m glad,” I mutter, and then stand, meaning to . . . go lock myself in the bathroom to escape this conversation. It’s a mistake, because I’m much less steady than I thought I’d be. It gives Marc ample time to rise to his feet.

“She’s really intelligent, too. Ryan, I mean. Went to college for computer science, and is a bit of a cybersecurity genius. And funny.” He stands in front of me, making it impossible for me to look away from his face. “And you know what else she is?”

Jealousy burns against the roof of my mouth. I grit my teeth and shake my head.

“She is not you, Jamie.” Marc enunciates the words slowly, like he wishes he could drill them into my skull. “She and I are working on a coding curriculum for girls, that’s it. She wants to use her platform to get more women interested in comp sci. Although she did ask me out, a little after your birthday. And you know what I told her?”

Another shake of my head.

“I told her that it wouldn’t be fair for me to accept, because any relationship between the two of us would be dead on arrival. I told her that there was someone else. I told her so much about you, she could probably pick you out in a lineup and buy you a Christmas present you’d really enjoy. And when she asked me why you and I weren’t together, I told her that it was because you had rejected me. But I also explained that your attempts at pushing me away were so fucking clumsy, a toddler could have seen through them. ‘She’s afraid,’ I told her. ‘She has lost so much in her life, she can’t imagine a scenario in which a romantic relationship works out. But she’s smart, too. And brave. And once she realizes that she’s lying to herself, she’s going to come back to me.’ I was so sure that you would, Jamie. But you never did. And Ryan noticed. So she asked me out again, but she still wasn’t you.” His voice is getting louder. Or maybe it’s my brain amplifying every word. “And the whole time, I was fucking furious. Want to know why?”

A small nod.

“Because I knew how much the bullshit you were pulling was hurting you, Jamie. I knew that you lied. I knew that you wanted to be with me as much as I wanted you. There will never be anyone but you for me, and I swear, I want you so much, I want to give you so much, I cannot imagine anyone capable of making you happier than I mean to make you. And what drives me out of my mind is that you know it, too. But you’re too much of a coward to admit it even to yourself, and—”

“I did!”

A pause. His breathing is labored. “What?”

“I did admit it,” I nearly yell in his face. “You are the one who never replied.”

Marc’s frown deepens. “Never replied to what?”

“I called you, Marc. I apologized. The day after my birthday—I left a voicemail.”

He physically recoils, as though I just punched him in the stomach. “You left a voicemail.”

“On your phone.”

He blinks. “Who the fuck leaves voicemails?”

“Plenty of people. Doctors’ offices. Me.”

“Shit, Jamie. I haven’t listened to my messages in decades.”

“What?” It’s my turn to blink. But . . . there’s simply no way. “Don’t you have a very important job that requires you to know very important things?”

“I do. And I have a very important phone number associated with that very important job. It’s not—and this will shock you—the same number I used when I was sixteen and made seven dollars an hour delivering for Giuseppe’s Pizza Place. Which is, incidentally, the number you use.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and taps at it a few times.

“I . . . It doesn’t matter, Marc. I can just tell you what I . . .”

I’m interrupted by a metallic voice.

You have one new message. Press one to listen.

“Jamie.” He exhales loudly. I’ve never heard, or seen him, this upset. “What the fuck?”

“You . . . don’t listen to it. It’s been months, and—”

His eyes never leave mine as he presses 1. And I want to die on the spot.

Marc, about yesterday. I . . . I fucked up. I don’t really think you’re immature. And it’s not true that I’ll never be interested in you. I will be. I mean, I am. It’s just that . . . Is it an excuse if I tell you I had a shitty week at work? It made me feel really bad about myself. And then you said all those nice things about me, and I was sure that I’d disappoint you, and I panicked, and . . . The thing is, I think you’re right. I’m really scared. Constantly. To end up like my dad. That the more people know me, the more they’ll want to leave. It’s why I spent years with Shane, because I knew I could handle him leaving me. But you . . . I like you. So, so much. Always have. You and I have always worked, and if we start something and it ends up not working out, it will destroy me. But I’m starting to realize that pretending that I don’t have feelings for you will also destroy me, so . . . If you’d like to go on a date or even . . . even hang out as friends, if that’s all you can accept from me after the things I’ve said, it would really make me . . .

In the background, my voice blabbers on, saying more things about love, and fear, and hope. But I have stopped listening. Because Marc’s phone is now hitting the floor, and he’s pressing me against the wall, hands around my face, tongue in my mouth, body covering mine.

And that’s when the lights come back on.

Chapter Seven

It’s clear that the storm won’t ease up until tomorrow, and I decide to spend the night at Marc’s. The two things are, surprisingly, completely unrelated—even though that’s not the story I spin for Dad when I call to let him know that I won’t be able to make it home.

“As long as when you guys come over tomorrow morning, you bring the pan,” he tells us, a little concerned for the future of his baked ham.

Marc’s eyebrow shoots up, and I end the call before Dad can overhear him say that he should “stop playing fast and loose with my girlfriend’s safety.”

Until an hour ago, I thought he was over me, and now he’s calling me his girlfriend. This relationship has escalated very quickly, and my heart feels like fireworks.

“Marc, in case you are considering buying my dad a whole set of pans—”

“Absolutely not.” He pulls me into him, chin grazing the crown of my hair. The Comptons have never been a particularly affectionate family, but he can’t seem to stop touching me. “Your father’s lack of a copper pan brought you to me and fixed the shittiest misunderstanding of my entire life. I’m going to do my best to make sure that this man spends the rest of his life as pan-less as possible.” I feel his smile. “Also, ham might be my new favorite food.”

“Is this a good time to remind you that you’re a vegetarian?”

“Hush,” he murmurs, and drags me upstairs to his room while outside, the storm still whistles fiercely. It’s been about ten years since I’ve been in it, but it hasn’t changed much. His vinyls and record player are still in what Tabitha named “the hipster corner,” and his high school trophies sit on the bookshelf, a little dusty. The biggest difference, the one that has my breath catching, is in the way he pulls me onto his twin bed with him.

It’s a first. And I should be embarrassed, or nervous, but being here with him feels like the most natural thing in the world. He’s a large man, and it’s a tight fit, one that requires me lying half on top of him, but I don’t mind. I inhale his clean, familiar scent, and I expect—no, I hope, I pray—that the fingers drawing circles on my lower back will get bold and slide under my sweater, but for a long while he doesn’t do much more than stroke my hair.

“What will your sister say?” I ask him after a moment, trying not to feel too impatient.

“About?”

“This. Us. Will she be shocked?”

“Tab?” He snorts. “I doubt it. She’s always known that you and I have a special relationship. She’s the who told you how I felt, remember?”

I do remember. “Is it in there, still?”

“What?”

I point at the desk. “The box. With the pictures.”

“No,” he scoffs.

“Oh.” I’m a little disappointed.

Until he adds, “The box has moved with me, Jamie. To every single address.”

“Oh.” I swallow. “Did you . . . The one you took of me in a prom dress. Did you ever . . .”

“Print it? No. But . . .” With some maneuvering, he slides his phone out of his pocket and unlocks it. The background is . . .

“No.”

“Yup.” His lips press against my temple. “I put it there the second I took it. And then . . . occasionally, I’d switch it out with something else, but after a few months I’d always go back to it. That’s why I never thought of you as the one who got away, Jamie. You said that’s all you were to me, back on your birthday, but that’s just not true. Because for you to get away, I would have needed to let go of you. And I never wanted that.”

My heart beats in my throat. I burrow in closer.

“It’s not puppy love, either. There is nothing innocent about the way I want you. And as soon as the tequila is out of your body, I’ll show you.”

“Marc, I’m not drunk.” It’s the truth. I may not be able to walk a tightrope, but . . . it’s not like I have great balance in the first place. And my judgment is in no way impaired.

“Shh.”

“No, I’m serious. I’m very clear-headed.”

“Maybe tomorrow we can—”

I let my hand slip under his shirt, spread wide against his warm skin. And then I allow it to dip under the waistband of his jeans.

Marc’s breath hitches. “Jamie . . .”

“If you don’t want it,” I say before my courage runs out, “that’s totally fine. I can wait, or . . . we can talk about it. But if all that’s stopping you is that you think I’m not in the position to make a choice, then I need you to know that I’ve never been surer than—”

That’s all the reassurance he must have needed. Because he flips us around, and a second later, Marc Compton is on top of me, dark hair falling on his forehead as he kisses me with his whole heart, my mouth and my neck and my jaw. He says my name a million times, in a million different ways that only mean one single thing. Then he finally does slide that hand under my sweater, and even though the wind whooshes outside, concepts like cold and snow are so removed from me, I cannot remember if I’ve ever experienced anything but this rising, all-consuming heat.

His muscular thigh slides between mine, deliciously invasive. His fingers unclasp my bra, and his rough palms rub across my nipples. I arch, about to fully melt into the pleasure of his touch, but an old calculus textbook catches the corner of my eye, and . . .

“Is this weird?” I ask him.

Marc lifts his head, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, almost out of breath. “Jamie, believe me. Nothing—nothing—in my life has ever felt less weird than staring at your breasts.”

“No, I mean . . . the bed? Doing this in your old room? Are we defiling your wholesome childhood memories or something?”

He mulls it over. Nods. Then says, all business, “You’re right. Let’s move to Tabitha’s room.”

“Oh. Um . . . I’m not sure that . . .”

“You’re right, that’s crazy. My parents’ bed is larger.”

I gasp. And when I realize that he’s messing with me, I pinch his side.

“Jamie,” he tells me between laughter, “pretty unspeakable things have happened in here, and pretty much all of them had something to do with you. The defiling you mentioned has long taken place.” I try to kick him in the shins, but we’re pressed too close, his strong arms gathering me to him, and after a moment he’s once again panting against my neck, and my jaw slackens as he takes off my clothes and kisses me everywhere, chest and belly button and inner thigh, and then, when I’m biting my lower lip so hard that I might draw blood, large sweeps of his tongue on my clit, right where I need him.

I lose all focus. Comb my fingers in his hair to hold on to something and dissolve in a hazy, pleasure-addled kind of state. He makes me come so many times, I lose count. And when I tell him that I can’t take it anymore, he gives me a small break, only long enough for a hushed conversation about birth control and protection, in which we both admit how very little sex we’ve been having—we’ve been interested in having—in the last few months. Or maybe years.

“I was getting so close to having the company right where I wanted it, to be able to come to you, and . . .” His lips slide against mine. “God, Jamie. I couldn’t think of anything but you.”

I’m eager. Impatient. Losing track of time. Once we’re both naked, I want him as close to me as possible and I grab at his sweat-slick skin in a silent plea to hurry, to seal this before it can slip through our fingers once again. It’s not as easy as I hoped, though.

His hands twine with mine on each side of my head, and all I wish for is him, inside me. But even though I’m very wet and he’s very hard, it just doesn’t seem to work. “Come on, Jamie,” he whispers against my jaw after a few blunt, stilted thrusts. “Relax. Let it happen. Didn’t you say that ten inches isn’t that much?”

I laugh. He grins. My entire body glows with love for him, and miraculously we are able to fit.

“Fuck,” he whispers in hushed tones against my throat. “Oh, fuck. Jamie, I knew that you’d . . . but . . . Fuck.”

It’s a little disjointed, the way we grind against each other. At the beginning there is a burn, but it quickly turns into something so good, I have no words to describe it. My constant worry, the fear of being abandoned, the anxiety of not being enough—I’m so full of Marc, there’s just no room for any of that inside me. A large hand wraps around my knee, bringing it up to widen me, and then he rocks so deep, I know I can take everything he wants to give me and more. His control snaps, thrusts that are shallow, then deep, then erratic. Elbows on the mattress, hands cupping my face, I feel the upward spiraling of the toe-curling pleasure, the incipient trembling in my thighs, the pooling tears.

It’s all soft praises. Low words. His mouth, open against mine, deep, new and familiar. Spine-licking shudders and bruising grips. It’s all the best thing I’ve ever felt.

We could have had months of this, I think. Or maybe I say it out loud.

“Jamie.” His voice is rough. “It’s okay. We’re going to have decades of it.”

We come together, and it’s like falling from the tallest building into the deepest sea. I am overwhelmed after, trying to recover, wondering if this is what sex with Marc will always be. Then wondering if it’s just what sex is like when it’s mixed with love. Full of eagerness and desperation and laughter. And long moments later, when the sweat is cooling and our bodies stick together in too many places to count, when we’re safe under the comforter and about to fall asleep, when my nose nuzzles against the skin behind his ear, he speaks to me.

“I’ve already told you I love you,” he says. “Back on your birthday, and . . . I think it was too much, too soon. I know you. I know why you’re scared. So I won’t say it again. I can wait and be patient. But make no mistake, Jamie. Next year, when we fly home for the holidays, we’re going to do it together. We’ll show up at your dad’s at the same time. We’ll sleep in the same room—either here or in yours. Everyone is going to know that you’re mine and I’m yours. And before we fall asleep, you’ll let me say it.”

My tears are so quiet, I doubt he’d know I’m crying if they weren’t falling on his skin. “Marc?” I say against his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Next year, before we fall asleep . . .” I let my fingers slide into the short hair at the back of his head. “I’m going to say it back.”

The grandfather clock downstairs rings midnight.

“Merry Christmas,” I whisper.

Marc says nothing back, but I feel his smile against my cheek.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my fantastic agent, Thao Le; my equally fantastic editors, Maria Gomez and Lindsey Faber; my cover designer, Hang Le; my art director, Kris Beecroft; my copyeditor, Rachel Norfleet; my proofreader, Keri O’Dell; and my cold reader, Stephen Reynolds. Also thanks to marketing managers Chrissy Penido and Rachael Clark, PR manager Ellie Schaffer, production manager Miranda Gardner, and author relations manager Nicole Wagner.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2022 Justin Murphy, Out of the Attic Photography

Ali Hazelwood is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis. She also pursued a PhD in neuroscience. When Ali is not at work, she can be found running, eating cake pops, or watching sci-fi movies with her three cats (and her slightly less-feline husband).

OTHER TITLES BY ALI HAZELWOOD

Not in Love

Bride

Check & Mate

Love, Theoretically

Love on the Brain

Loathe to Love You

Under One Roof

Stuck with You

Below Zero

The Love Hypothesis

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Titles by Ali Hazelwood