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“Trust me, he knows where we stand.”

“Your mom thinks you’re back with him. She called you his girlfriend.”

Her grimace couldn’t be any deeper. “I don’t confide in her about my love life. As far as she knows, everything’s the same as it was back in May.”

Neither of us speaks for several minutes.

A firefly floats by us, blinking on and off.

“So why did you break up with him?”

Kota gets a deer-in-headlights look. “What?”

“If you don’t believe he cheated on you, why else would you break up with him?”

“We just… There was a lot of tension between us when I left. The distance made it worse. I wanted to see if…” She shakes out her hair. “I thought the time apart would clear it.”

“Did it?”

Her eyes skirt to the side when she says, “It’s too early to tell.”

I’m not sure I believe that. I’m not even sure she does.

“What was causing the tension to begin with?”

“Behavior…I guess.”

“He is an asshole,” I agree with a nod, more than happy to put the full blame on Guy.

“I meant both of our behavior.”

“What did you do?”

“You know what I did.” She drops her voice even though no one’s around us right now. “What we did.”

“In the kitchen?”

“Yes, and in the pool and in my closet.”

She doesn’t mention the kiss in her bed and neither do I.

“Even… I mean, what we did in the gym… That was wrong.”

Felt right to me. Smelled right, too.

“Did you tell Guy about us?”

“No.”

“So you’re working on things but you’re still keeping secrets from him?” That tension isn’t going anywhere. It’s just getting compounded. If that’s not already obvious, it will be very soon.

“You want me to tell him about us?”

I shrug. I don’t give a fuck. What’s he gonna do? Confront me? That’d make my night, maybe my entire month. August hasn’t been that great so far.

Kota tilts her head as she stares up at me. “And what exactly would I tell him? That my stepbrother is obsessed with trying to fuck me?”

My chuckle’s deep and dark. She’s not far off.