This time it wasn’t.

But I would be in that car with him tonight, driving in the other direction down this road, toward the beach. On three occasions at the beach before, we’d gone all the way. Each time I’d fantasized about the next time, dreaming of how it would be better. He would suddenly become a caring lover. He would make sure I enjoyed it as much as he did. We wouldn’t get into a snarky argument afterward about whether I really deserved an A two points higher than his on our last English paper.

I wasn’t fantasizing about that now. With sudden clarity I saw our half hour together tonight. We would fool around. I would feel like a failure, not heady with love like girls were supposed to feel after they went so far with their committed boyfriends of three years.

A wave of nausea broke over me, and I knew why.

I put my forehead against the steering wheel. “Damn it, Sawyer,” I whispered. It was hard to cast Aidan as my hero after finding out the senior class had chosen Sawyer as my perfect guy. And especially after he’d whispered to me in the student council meeting. The setting hadn’t been sexy, yet he’d set my body on fire. I could only imagine what he would talk me into if he ever got me alone.

The car behind me honked.

I drove on.

As I pulled in to my driveway, I saw Aidan was there ahead of me. In fact, he’d taken my parking space. I continued around to the extra pad near the front door, like a guest. After I stopped, I checked my phone to see if he’d sent me a message. Nothing.

Wary, I climbed the steps to the wide front porch and opened the door. The scent of fresh-baked peanut butter cookies wafted out—my mother’s specialty and Barrett’s favorite. I walked through the marble foyer and the formal living room, into the kitchen.

Aidan sat at the kitchen bar with a plate of the cookies and a glass of milk. “Hello,” he called with no enthusiasm.

“Hi there,” I said with an equal lack of emotion. I rounded the bar to the kitchen side and stopped in front of him. “What’cha doing?”

He nodded toward the door to my mother’s office. “I’ve asked you a couple of times to check on your mom’s recommendation letter for me. You keep forgetting. But you told me she was taking this afternoon off since Barrett’s coming home, and I figured I could catch her. Sometimes when you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

I heard the accusation in his voice. He was angry with me about the student council meeting. I didn’t understand what I hadn’t done right, though. He was the one who’d gotten parliamentary procedure wrong.

I didn’t pursue it. I was more interested in what he was really doing here. “The deadline for early admission to Columbia is a month and a half away,” I pointed out.

“I didn’t want to wait until the last minute. I’m way more responsible than that.”

Again, I knew he was accusing me of something. I just wasn’t sure what. Saving the homecoming dance made me more responsible than him, not less.

I slid my book bag onto the counter to remind him this was my house.

It worked. He sat back on the stool and seemed to really look at me for the first time. “It’s just that I don’t have a ticket to Columbia without this letter.” His tone had changed. Usually he spoke with the bravado of a politician, even when we were alone. But occasionally he dropped the act and let me see the boy underneath.

“I know,” I said quietly, my automatic reaction to Aidan’s half apologies.

“Your ticket to Columbia is living right here in the house with you,” he said. “It makes me nervous that I don’t have a letter in hand.”

I nodded. That I could understand. When I had an English paper due, I didn’t even leave it in my locker in case that part of the school caught on fire. I carted the paper around with me until I handed it in. Academic paranoia was one of the many things that had bonded Aidan and me over the years.

And now that I’d half-accepted his half apology, his attitude was back. He popped a last bite of cookie into his mouth and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Want to go upstairs to your room?”

The last thing I wanted right now was to make out with him. His apology hadn’t been that convincing.

He raised his eyebrows, confident I’d say yes, only impatient for my answer. His calm assurance was exactly what I’d fallen so hard for in ninth grade. Now it grated on my nerves.

But I figured I was only shell shocked from the council meeting, and Ms. Yates’s dismissal of me in the lunchroom, and the false closeness I felt with Sawyer. I would get over my negative feelings about Aidan soon enough. I didn’t want to make things worse between us by telling him the truth.

So I gave him a very good excuse for not taking him upstairs to my bedroom. I looked pointedly at my mother’s office door, then back at him. “Are you crazy?”

“She’s busy.”

“My dad’s probably upstairs.”

“He’ll leave us alone. Your parents love me.” He leaned over the counter and whispered, “I have a condom.”

My jaw dropped. He wanted to have sex? Making out in the middle of our argument might have had some healing properties. Having sex sounded downright repugnant. After all, we’d only done it three times total, on special nights, when we were getting along.

And why take the big risk with my parents home? Now, suddenly? Weird.

“No thanks.” I slid a cookie from one of the cooling racks beside the oven and took a bite.