“Did you know?” he asks.
“About what?”
“About Penn?”
I blink and pull my head back. “Penn?”
“She got in. She’s going.”
“Are you serious?” I ask, heat spreading to my face.
“Yep.”
“She didn’t tell us.” I glance up at the stars. They appeared so quickly, thousands of them up there in a matter of moments, and now they’re so bright they nearly blind me. I’m surprised to find tears filling my eyes.She doesn’t trust me.
“It’s weird, but that makes me feel better.”
“That’s so fucked up,” I say, the words biting as they come out of my mouth.
Ethan’s eyebrows raise. “Damn, Millie.”
I press the heels of my hands into my knees. “Sorry,” I say. “I’mjust…I’m pissed. She should have told me. She should have toldyou.” Ethan nods and lets out a puff of air. Together we’re aligned in a way I never thought we would be. Against Lucy. “Is that why you broke up?”
Ethan shakes his head. “No,” he says. “There were a million reasons.”
I know how to comfort him. I can put my hand on his back and offer him soft words of encouragement, but there’s a tickling in my stomach, a bubbling warning that indicates whatever he’s saying—andnotsaying—is for a reason.
“How did she seem?” Ethan asks.
“She wanted some space, but she’s okay.”
Ethan’s face falls for a moment.
“Should I say she was sobbing and heartbroken?”
He laughs, a small one but still a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, you should.” He shakes his head. “Pathetic, huh? That I want her to be upset? I guess it would prove she actually cared about me.”
“Of course she did. Still does.”
Ethan toes the sand. “Doesn’t feel that way. Doesn’t feel likeanyonecares about me.”
“Hey,” I say. “Don’t say that. So many people do.” My heart thrums, a stampede in my chest gaining steam. I reach for his hand, and when he doesn’t pull away, I hold it between both of mine, enveloping his fingers that flex beneath my grasp. “I care, Ethan. I care about you. A lot.”
A burst of adrenaline rushes through me, but what quickly follows is the realization that I’ve said too much. As I drop his hand, I watch his face take shape in the moonlight, his eyes stopping atmy shoulders, my collarbones, my chin. They move up to my face—stopping at my lips, my nose, and finally, my own eyes, where his gaze holds me.
“I know,” he says softly.
It occurs to me in this moment that I would let this boy do just about anything to me. I would wreck my whole life to feel the palm of his hand sturdy against my neck, his fingers winding through my hair. To experience the graze of his lips on mine, his thumb running over of the curve of my jaw.
Now’s the time to stop. To get up and walk away and laugh this whole thing off and say,Maybe you should talk to Trevor or Alex or literally anyone in the world besides me about this.
But I can’t bear to turn away from him, to do anything else except wait. Wait for the pounding in my heart to slow, wait for him to blink and realize that we’re sitting too close together on the sand, that our thighs shouldn’t be pressed together. Neither of those things happen, and instead Ethan ducks his head toward mine.
“Millie,” he says, my name sounding like a spell cast from his lips. “Do you want me to kiss you?” Ethan asks, his voice a whisper.
Everything in my body aches. Everything I have ever wanted right here in front of me, in this boy who is looking at me like I’m made of stars, of fire, of magic. The answer is obvious. It has been so my whole life.
“Yes,” I say, and as soon as I breathe the word into the air, his mouth is on mine, a shock, a wave of pressure, like being shot out of a cannon or thrown from a horse. One of his hands is on my shoulder, and the other rests in the bend of my neck, and I blink my eyes open to know for certain that this is reallyhim, that this isreally happening, and I have to force myself not to think about anything except the fact thatEthan Silver is kissing me.
