Page 101

“Uh…” The easy smile on my face slips as my eyes dart to Vinny. He’s already looking at me with an expression I can’t read. But there’s no masking my feelings. The weight of my embarrassment is so heavy it crushes me.

“That’s right!” Juliet nudges Vinny as the memory jumps to the front of her mind. “I forgot about that.” Her smile flips to me. “Weren’t you straddling him?”

The last thing I want is to relive the moment, twelve years ago, when my mom caught Vinny and me kissing on my bed. And if we’d just been kissing, maybe—maybe—she wouldn’t have freaked out so much. But it was a definite make-out. Juliet’s memory is incorrect, though. I was not straddling Vinny. He was, however, lying on top of me.

“Emma’s G-rated mom would be the worst person in the world to witness a teenage makeout.” Camila laughs.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’m convinced my parents have never made out in their entire lives. But having my mom find me in a compromising situation like that wasn’t even the worst part.

The disappointment written across her face was what broke me.

BROKE ME.

I was sweet Emma. I didn’t disobey my parents. Everything I did was about making them happy and proud of me.

Until that moment.

“What did your mom do when she found you guys?” Hess asks.

Nate smiles. “Did she give you the front rubs in the back room speech?”

“I don’t really remember the details,” I lie.

“I do,” Camila says.

I’d volunteer to take a bullet right now just to be excused from this conversation.

We do not need to replay all the fights I had with my parents in the days following the incident. Every heated argument started with a lecture that, if Vinny and I kept it up, I’d end up pregnant before I graduated high school—a dramatic assumption, to be sure.

Camila continues, “Her mom forced her to break up with Vinny.”

CAMILA. SHUT. UP.

“That’s right,” Carly adds. “I remember now.”

Where’s a muzzle when you need one, because Camila just keeps going? “Yeah, your parents said you guys were too young and too serious. That you could date seriously when you were a little older. So you broke up with Vinny a few days later just to make them happy.”

“Is that true?” It’s the first reaction Vinny has had during this entire conversation.

My eyes slowly travel to his.

Nobody says anything.

I guess Camila finally found that muzzle.

The growing intensity behind Vinny’s stare actually frightens me.

It’s a yes-or-no question. The easiest kind in the world. And yet, my throat closes around the answer.

Twelve years of history shift between us in a single look, and I sit there, blinking like an idiot, still unable to say all the things that fifteen-year-old me should’ve told him.

But maybe it’s time.

Maybe our history has to be out in the open for me to finally find some closure and move on.

I open my mouth to speak⁠—