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The thought hits me like a punch to the gut. No wonder she ran away crying. I fucked her without kissing her, and now I’m telling her friends she’s not important. But what else can I do?

I don’t know. I can’t think.

I want to feel her tongue sliding against mine, I want to bite at her lips, lick at her throat, push hard into her, until she’s so busy screaming my name that she stops looking like I killed her puppy.

“But that’s the thing though.” Scarlett points her fork at me. “If she really were unimportant, you’d tell us who she is. It’s the fact that you’re keeping her secret that makes her so interesting.”

Amelia’s eyes meet mine across the table. There’s a shine to them, like fragile hope.

What does it mean? She cried! Surely, she doesn’t want anything more to do with me.

I avert my gaze in time to catch Bryce frowning at us with suspicion.

Shit.

“Maybe you’re right,” I say, my voice cracking. “But I don’t want to betray her trust, so I’m not saying any more about it.”

Amelia nods slightly, but they all go quiet.

“Can we play the guess-the-drawing game?” Penny asks, breaking the silence.

“If you can convince everyone,” Scarlett says, looking mischievously at each of us.

“Please, please, please!” Penny goes from one person to the next, begging until we’ve all agreed to play, though none of us even know what we’ve agreed to.

We clear up the table after dinner. Amelia and Bryce offer to clean up in the kitchen, but Scarlett throws them out, saying she’ll clean tomorrow and forces everyone back to the dining room.

“It’s easy,” Penny explains. “I pick a word or phrase and write it down. Then I pass it to the person next to me and they have to draw it. Then they pass it to the person next to them who has to guess what they drew until we’ve made it all the way around the table and we find out if the word stayed the same for the whole round or completely changed to something else. It’s soooo FUN!”

Scarlett brings out seven plastic notebooks and markers with erasers on the ends, and hands one to each of us.

“But we have to sit next to the people we don’t know very well so it’s more fun.”

She goes around the table telling people where to sit. I end up with Amelia on my right and Chase on my left. And a lump settles in my throat as I realize that I like sitting there.

In Ethan’s fucking place.

Why?

Have I always been jealous of him and never acknowledged it? Or do I feel responsible for his mistakes and feel the need to make up for it?

I don’t know, but either way, it’s messed up, and I don’t really want to think about it.

“Start,” Penny says. “Everybody write down a word and give it to the person on your right.”

She writes on her notepad, cupping her hand to hide the page from the rest of us. When she’s done, she giggles and hands the notepad to Brody who’s sitting on her right.

“We’ll go this way once, then go the opposite way around the table.”

I write down the word friends. Then I act before doubting myself and add a question mark at the end of the word before passing it to Amelia. She reads it and gives me a side glance. I smile as friendly as I can considering my insides are a jumbled mess. She gives me a small nod.

Chase hands me his notepad, and not surprisingly, it says baseball bat on it.

I draw a bat but then worry it looks too much like a penis. So, I draw hands holding it, which doesn’t make it much better. I draw a ball, just as Scarlett calls out, “Time.”

Our drawings go all around the table until I get my friends back, noticing that Amelia erased the question mark.

One by one we take turns flipping through our pages and showing the rest of the group. For friends, Amelia drew a very detailed drawing of her and Scarlett (based on the clothes they’re wearing) standing next to each other with a circle around them. But Penny didn’t recognize them and guessed women, which caused Brody to draw three stick figures with curves (something I didn’t think would be possible), and Scarlett guessed models, so Bryce drew a pretty face, which had Chase writing down Sophia.