I open my mouth to hand him the easy version.
And instead I turn into him.
I don't decide to. That's the thing I'll tell myself later, driving home too fast in the dark. I don't decide a single thing. He's right there, near enough that his scent has already crowded out every thought in my head, banked-fire warm, and my body just tips the last few inches and gets two fistfuls of his shirt, and I kiss him.
For one terrible second he doesn't move, and I think,I've ruined it, I've read it all wrong, I'm going to have to move to a different town.
Then he makes a low sound against my mouth, wrecked, like something giving way under a load it's carried too long, and his hands come up into my hair, and he kisses me back.
And it's nothing like practice. Nothing like the diner, nothing like the for-show hand at the small of my back. It's woodsmoke and clove flooding everything and his mouth gone serious on mine and the whole week of wanting crashing in at once, and for about four seconds I let it. I kiss him back like I mean it, because I do, and that's the entire catastrophe.
Then the panic catches up.
It comes in cold and fast, the sober voice in the back of my head I've been outrunning since noon, and what it says is:this is Finn.Not Hudson, not a kayak, not a deniable laugh on a lakeshore. This is the one who set the conditions. The one who made the rules. The one whose mother is planning a whole future on this exact lie. I just kissed him in his own living room like it was real, which it was, on my end, and I have no idea on earth what to do with a real thing.
So I do the stupidest thing on the menu. I reach for the lie.
I pull back too fast, both of us breathing like we ran here, and I hear myself say, “That was?—”
My voice cracks straight down the middle.
“—practice. That should count as practice. Hudson and I, we've done that, the kissing, for the reunion, so it tracks that you and I should probably be able to. Convincingly. Before Saturday. So.”
It is the worst lie I have told in a month of championship lying, and Finn doesn't say one word. He just looks at me, that flat unreadable look, the one that goes straight through themiddle of me and reads every word I'm refusing to say, and I cannot stand in it for one more second.
“I should go.” I'm already grabbing my keys, already at his door, already halfway gone. “It's late. We're good. We're on schedule. Goodnight, Finn.”
And I leave. I actually leave, out into his dark yard and down to my car and gone, before he can get a single word out, because if he opens his mouth I'll have to hear whatever's in it, and I am nowhere near brave enough for that tonight.
I make it two stop signs before I have to pull over.
I don't cry, exactly. It's more that my whole body finally catches up to the day. I kissed Finn Morrow like I meant it and then I called it a rehearsal and ran, because that is what I do, that is what I have always done. Keep everybody's glass full. Go home to an empty one. Call it the deal.
I don't let myself finish the rest. The part underneath, the part that's true whether I say it in the dark or not.
That it was never practice. That it stopped being practice a while ago, with all three of them, and I'm the only one still holding a stopwatch, pretending it counts.
Chapter 16
Finn
Here's what I know about Sunday dinner at my mother's house. You show up at five. You bring nothing, because she'll be offended, and you bring something, because she'll be offended either way and at least this way you tried. You eat too much. You let her fuss. You go home.
I have done this every Sunday I've been in town for thirty-two years. It has never once made my hands sweat in the truck.
They're sweating now.
Because three days ago Josie Porter turned around in my living room and kissed me, and I let her, and I kissed her back like a man who'd been waiting his whole life for permission. Then she called it practice and left before I could get a word out. And I have not been right since. The wall I spent two months bracing came down in about four seconds, and I have not figured out how to put it back, and I'm starting to think I don't want to.
And now I'm about to watch her sit at my mother's table and pretend.
That's the part. That's the whole problem. The pretending was fine when it was a diner booth and a held hand for an audience. It was a job. I was good at it.
But Thursday wasn't pretend, whatever she called it, and Thursday's still in my mouth. And in about ninety seconds I have to walk into my childhood kitchen and perform a fake relationship with a woman I'm no longer faking anything about, in front of the one person on earth I can't let see the seam.
My mother misses nothing. My mother has been waiting for this exact thing for fifteen years.
I get out of the truck.
