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PROLOGUE

SIENNA -- EIGHT YEARS AGO

“You’re going to crack that cup, Songbird.”

I don’t look up. “That’s the idea.”

Grayson Douglas waits to see whether I’ll say anything else. He always does. Then his shoulder brushes mine on his way past, warm through the smoke, then he’s gone into the ring of bodies around the fire, and I’m alone with it again.

In two days I get on a plane to California and become somebody nobody in this town has ever met. Tonight I’m still the girl who has been in love with her best friend’s older brother since the sixth grade and has never once been brave enough to say it out loud, standing on his family’s beach watching her ex-boyfriend put on a show for an audience of one.

Me.

The blonde has her tongue in Radien’s mouth, one leg hiked up around his hip, and the only thing keeping me from throwing my red Solo cup into the fire is the fact that Iris would kill me if I melted plastic on her property. Climate change is one of the three pillars of Iris’s personality. The other two are baking and veganism, but all three are sacred.

I should have known Radien was not ‘the one’, but I was blinded by the sweet things he said and by the fact that he listens to classical over all other music because he cares about the development of his brain. All bullshit now, but a few months ago I was smitten. The first guy I have the head space to like after pining over Iris’s brother for the last six years and of course I pick a complete douche.

I take a long sip of warm beer and try not to stare, but it’s damn near impossible. My eyes keep dragging back to them across the fire pit like there’s a magnet behind Radien Walker’s stupid spiked mohawk haircut.

Radien shifts his hand from her waist down to the back pocket of her cutoff shorts. He squeezes her ass with the same lazy grip he used to use on mine, the one that meant come closer, I want more, and she makes the same little gasp into his mouth that I used to. He keeps his eyes open the whole time. Locked on me, over the curve of her cheek, like he wants to be sure I’m catching every second of it.

You would think that two months down the line, he would’ve outgrown being petty by now, but Radien Walker didn’t seem to get the memo. Radien has been marinating in petty since the night of prom. The night when he tried to take my virginity in the back of a stretch limo, I told him no, and he called me a tease in front of three other couples on the drive home. He has spent every weekend of this summer working overtime to remind me of what I’m missing out on.

I press my fingertips into the side of my Solo cup until it dents. The lie I’ve been feeding myself for sixty-one days, the ‘I don’t care what Radien Walker does’, hasn’t gotten any easier with practice. I do care. I care that he is six feet away from me with his hand down a stranger’s back pocket in a pair of shorts that would suit me better. I care that he picked the one bonfire he knew I would be at on the one stretch of beach he knew Iris’s family owned and brought a girl whose only job tonight is to be half-naked and in my face. I care that an hour ago I rode shotgun in Iris’s Jeep in my favorite white sundress and her grandmother’s gold earrings and told her, with my whole chest, that I didn’t think Radien would even bother showing up.

And I hate that when Iris said mm-hmm after I told her Radien was so not invited, I didn’t catch on. She knew he was going to be here. She has always known.

I should’ve known he wouldn’t miss my last day in Maine before I move to California and start my new Radien-free life at UCLA.

The fire pops between us and another spark drifts up over the ocean. The blonde finally pulls back from Radien’s mouth and whispers something in his ear. He laughs. She tosses her hair over one shoulder and grinds against him in a move I am pretty sure she practiced in a bathroom mirror before she got here. Her lipstick is smeared across his jaw. He doesn’t wipe it off, instead he finds me again over the top of her head, a smug look on his face.

I lift my Solo cup, and salute him with it, before draining the last of the warm beer in one long swallow that burns going down. I smile sweetly at him with all my teeth.

His eyes narrow.

Good. I don’t want him to know he’s getting to me, but the truth is everything is getting to me tonight. The bonfire. The dumb song the JV soccer kids keep screaming. The way the air smells like ocean water, sunscreen, and the end of everything.

In two days, I get on a plane and move to a city where nobody knows I was in marching band for four years, or that my grandmother makes the best pasta in the county, or that I’ve spent every summer of my life on this beach. In two days, I’m supposed to become someone new, and I don’t know how to do that yet. The thought of it has been sitting in the back of my throat for the last month like a fishbone I cannot swallow down or cough up.

I turn on my heel before Radien can decide whether my smile means jealousy or not and push my way through the ring of bodies around the fire toward the cooler at the edge of the sand.

I pass Iris, pinned against a birch tree, her legs wrapped around Marcus Donnelly’s waist. Captain of the football team. A six-foot-two walking Adonis according to Iris. The last thing left on her senior-year bucket list was making out with the captain of the football team, right alongside egging our principal’s house and throwing the best rager of senior year. And when I tell Iris I saw her climbing Marcus like a tree tomorrow over coffee and hangover movies, she is going to lose her shit.

The same way Grayson is going to lose his shit if he sees Marcus basically fingering his little sister against a tree.

I keep walking before that mental image can settle in, kick the cooler open with my flipflop, and dig past the floating ice for a fresh can.

Twist tops. I need a twist top. I lift one bottle. Not twist. I lift another. Not twist. The third one is a Bud Light, nope, and the fourth one is a Heineken, also not twist. Apparently every functional human at this bonfire, except me, has come prepared with their own bottle opener.

“Looking for something, Songbird?” The voice comes from directly behind my left ear, low and smooth like fresh molasses dripping from a bottle, but when he says my nickname every nerve along my spine lights up like somebody flipped a breaker.

I hunch further into the cooler, giving myself a full three seconds to put a face on, because the face I’m currently wearing is Sienna-who-has-been-in-love-with-Grayson-since-sixth-grade, and the only other face I have for him is the cool friend-of-the-family face, which is code for Iris’s best friend. He has been seeing both faces since I was eight. Neither of them is the face I want him to see tonight.

“Got a bottle opener, Gray?” I ask, shaking the Heineken as I turn around.

He is dangerously close to me with his head tipped to the side and his eyes doing a slow sweep down the front of my sundress and back up again, lingering on my mouth for half a second longer than he needs to. He is in a soft-gray Brown University t-shirt that’s a size too tight across the shoulders because he has gotten broader since last August, which I never imagined to be possible. His dark-blond hair has grown out slightly from his signature buzzcut. He smells like the smoke from the fire and a little bit like the whiskey Iris was drinking and the cologne his father wears, which means he stole the cologne from his father, which means he wanted to smell good tonight.

I don’t allow myself to think about who he was trying to smell good for.