I don’t stop.
“Aspen — hey —”
I keep walking. The street’s empty and dark, the party shrunk to a thud of bass behind us, and I am furious in a way that has nowhere to go, so I do the thing you do with fury that has nowhere to go. I turn around and I aim it at him.
“Don’t chase me to my house, Ermington! I’m not one of your fucking jokes!”
He pulls up short on the walk, a few feet off, breathing hard, no coat. “What are you—”
“You kissed me in front of them.” My voice is shaking, and I hate that it’s shaking. “They know, don’t they? All of them. Your roommates, Lucy — I read it the second we stopped kissing. And you kissed me anyway. For a photo. In front of the exact people who you already told this was all made up!” My throat closes, and I shove the rest of it out through the gap. “I have spent my whole life being the thing people are kind to because of who I’m standing next to. The coach’s daughter. The analyst. And you just stood me up in the middle of your own house and made me the punchline in front of your own friends, so — no. I don’t do well being somebody’s joke. And you don’t get to fix your face into something sorry and walk it back.”
I’m out of air. The cold’s gone all the way into my throat.
And Stanley just stands there in the dark and takes it. The whole thing. His jaw is tight. He isn’t reaching for the grin. There is no grin anywhere near him.
When he finally speaks, it’s quiet, and there is nothing like a joke in it.
“You think I kissed you for show.”
“Iknowyou did,” I bite back.
“In front of the four guys who know it’s fake.” He takes a step toward me, and there’s heat coming off him now, not the warm kind. “The exact people there would be zero point performing for. You’re the smartest person I have ever met, Linwood. So run it again. Who was I selling it to?”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
“Nobody,” he says, before I can. “There was nobody to sell it to. Everybody in that room worth fooling already knows.”
“Then why—”
“Because I wanted to.”
He says it plainly. No cushion under it, no joke about it, like a man setting something heavy down on the pavement between us and stepping back so I can see the whole of it.
“You think I kissed you for show? I kissed you because I wanted to, Linwood. I wanted to since Thanksgiving.”
My breath sucks in. He ––what?
The street goes very quiet.
Every argument I built between the kitchen and the curb is gone. Swept off the table. He took the one thing I know how to do — the read, the analysis, the safe high ground six inches above my own life — and he turned it around and pointed it straight back at me. He’s right. If they already know this isn’t real, then there was no one to perform for. But it doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.
“Stanley.” His name comes out of me like a warning as he steps closer. Close enough that I can see his breath fog in the cold between us.
“There’s nobody out here,” he says, lower, all the heat in it banked down into something steadier and worse. “No phone. No chant. No Gianna. Nobody to put on a single thing for, three doors down from your own front door, in the dark, where not one person who knows us will ever see it.”
His large hand grabs the side of my face. His fingers extend to my neck, where my hair is resting. He leans down, searching my face for permission. My heart is like a jackhammer. I don’t know how to react, so I don’t. I let it happen.
Then his lips touch mine, and the shame in my chest explodes into pieces.
There is no performance to blame this time. No excuse stacked and waiting.
There are only his hands framing my face like I’m something he’s allowed to hold now, and the cold, and the dark, and the fact that he’s kissing me again without an audience.
There’s no explanation for this. No shelf I can put it on, no label, nowhere to set it down because a kiss with no witnesses can only be one thing.
The scary thing is I’m already kissing him back. Both of my hands are holding on his arms, hauling him in instead of holding him off. For the second time tonight, the entire world drops away, and there is only him.
