“Can we talk?”
She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms. “About what?”
“About—uh.” I run a hand through my hair. “About everything. About the birthday. About what Bree said. About the last four days, where you’ve been looking through me like I’m furniture.”
She releases a long, slow exhale. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“We never talked about that night.”
The air in the hallway changes. Her arms tighten across her chest, and her eyes hold mine; she doesn’t pretend not to know which night I mean.
Thenight.
“No,” she says. “We didn’t.”
“Can I come in?”
She steps aside. I walk into the guest room, which smells like her—her shampoo, her lotion, the particular warmth of a roomsomeone has been living in. I sit on the edge of the bed because there’s nowhere else to sit, and she closes the door and leans against it.
We look at each other.
“You go first,” she says.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Try.”
I press my hands together between my knees and stare at the floor. The hardwood has a knot about six inches from my left foot, and I focus on that knot because looking at Sydney right now feels like looking directly into the sun.
“It wasn’t nothing,” I say. “That night.”
“You picked me up for school the next morning and asked about coffee.”
“I know.”
“Like it was a normal Tuesday.”
“I know. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t a normal anything.” I rub the back of my neck. “Syd, you were my first too.”
She goes quiet. I can feel her staring at me, but I keep my eyes on the knot in the floor.
“What?”
“You were my first. I never told you that.”
“Archer.” Her voice is different now—softer, confused. “You said—you told me you’d already—”
“I lied. I was eighteen, and you were asking me to sleep with you. I didn’t want you to think I had no idea what I was doing. Which I didn’t.” I look up at her. “I had no idea what I was doing. With any of it. Not the sex, not the feelings, none of it.”
She’s staring at me like I just told her the earth is flat. “You lied about that?”
“I was a hockey player in high school. I wasn’t going to admit I was still a virgin. And well, you never directly asked…”
“So we were both—”
“Yeah.”
She presses her hand over her mouth, and I can’t tell if she’s about to laugh or cry. Maybe both.
