Dad's voice comes from behind me. I turn around.
"You don't have to have it figured out tonight."
I nod and finish stacking the last of the dishes. I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say that wouldn't be a lie or too much of the truth.
Later, in bed, I think about her forehead on mine in the fogged-up car. She's going to leave. But she's here now.
And I have, for the first time in a very long time, stopped pretending that isn't all I can think about. I pick up my phone before I can talk myself out of it.
Me
What's the name of the song?
She hearts my message. Why does that put a smile on my face?
Trouble
Work Song. Hozier.
I heart her message without thinking. I wonder if it made her smile.
I open the app, find the song, add it to favorites, and press play.
19
LILY
The thing about Dean Calloway is that he has a very nice face.
I've been staring at it for forty-five minutes now and I can confirm: objectively, verifiably nice. Good jaw. Eyes that are some kind of hazel, the kind that probably shifts in different light. Candlelight. Morning sun. Whatever.
He's funny in that small-town way, dry and self-deprecating, built from years of having nothing else to do but develop a personality.
He's easy to talk to and he laughs at the right moments and he hasn't once made me feel like I need to perform.
I am also completely, catastrophically unmoved. Which is fine. This is fine.
I take a sip of my drink and remind myself why I'm here. Rome has been slowly losing his mind that I'm spending my gap year on just Harbor Hill. Erin says I'm wasting my summer on being boring. Poppy was more direct.
"You are twenty-two years old and hot, and you are spending your break on old people and not enough sex."
She's not wrong. She's also very wrong. I love every old person in this town, genuinely, without irony, which is maybe its own kind of problem. But I get the point. There's a version of my summer that looks less like a retiree's social calendar, and everyone in my life feels strongly that I should be living it.
So. Date.
Dean is the grandson of somebody in this town. Ruth's neighbor's cousin, maybe. He was sweet when he walked into Erin's shop last week, all easy smile and good manners. His face is, as established, very nice. And when he came back the next day to ask me out, I said yes with a smile and a heart heavy as a stone.
Because here's the thing I'm not thinking about. Callahan and I have gone back to our favorite game since the car. It's called avoidance, and I'm playing it with genuine dedication.
The thing is, I've been kissed before. I have a whole catalogue of kisses. Nice ones. Perfectly fine ones. One very enthusiastic one from a guy at a party sophomore year who clearly thought he'd invented kissing.
Callahan didn't kiss me. He unraveled me. Three days later, I still hadn't recovered.
I am, unexpectedly, a little afraid. Not of him. Never of him. But of the very clear implication that I've been walking around for years thinking I understood something I did not understand at all.
So I'm on a date with Dean Calloway, who has a very nice face.
He picked this restaurant on Fourth because he said the nachos were good, and he wasn't wrong about the nachos. He's asked me actual questions about pre-med and listened to the answers instead of waiting to talk about himself. He's good. He's perfectly good and I'm counting the nachos.
